Partisan of Dreams: Reading Poupeh Missaghi's trans(re)lating house one
Cover art by Sara Dolatabati. Image description: Dark lines streak horizontally across a whitish background. Some are thicker or seem to be comprised of multiple wires or fibres. In the upper half, what appear to be four photos are collaged together. Their content is obscure but vertical bars, tree branches, and curtains can be made out. In large letters in a red handwriting-esque font, the title is written above the collage, “trans(re)lating house one.” Bellow the collage in black, “a novel” and then again in red, “poupeh missaghi”
In Poupeh Missaghi’s trans(re)lating house one (Coffee House Press 2020), Missaghi is a student of doubles: art and activism, author and character, dreams and waking life, English and Persian. She conjures an open text which is self-reflexive without being performatively meta-, whose ongoing (auto)interrogativity invites readers into a generative space of question. trans(re)lating house one could be called a testimonial fiction, in conversation with the tradition of investigative poetics. Missaghi invokes Bolaño’s 2666, particularly its parade of dead, and Maggie Nelson’s Jane: a Murder graces the bibliography, but I was reminded also of Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers in that both authors project testimony through a fictive gel. Truths arrive smuggled in, as contraband, that might otherwise be stopped at the border, had they been sent as truth.
Or perhaps, as in the prophetic tradition, truth arrives in a dream. After all, Missaghi is a partisan of dreams. I write these words quite deliberately. Partisan: trans(re)lating is written in the long wake of Iran’s Green Movement, the pro-democratic civil rights movement that erupted in 2009 in response to the officially declared victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad[i]. From a distance, Missaghi painstakingly excavates the movement’s double dead: double because their physical deaths were often followed with official disavowals. As such, the dossiers Missaghi compiles—labelled “Corpse” followed by a number—also serve as a gesture of giving the dead back their particular death. This gesture not only serves as literary memorial, but is also a laying of stones to shore up the crumbling edifice of public truth. Dreams: trans(re)lating consists of several different forms, braided together, but it begins with dreams:
I want to start in the after: the aftershock, the aftermath, the afterworld. I want to start with the slippery, the intangible. I want to start with the impenetrable, the incomprehensible.
I want to start with the world of dreams.
But I will not reveal it all now. I will not tell the whole now, because the whole only becomes the whole in parts, in conversation with the parts, dispersed in time, in space, arrived at only through passage. Suffice to say for now that dreams matter, that they are the heart of the matter translated from one plane to another, from the conscious to the unconscious back to the conscious. They remain illegible. They carry the secret. (1)
Towards the end of the book, Missaghi reveals the secret power she finds in dreams:
Dreams belong to a world still immune. A world that the men in power, those who surveil and censor, cannot yet touch, understand, control. A reminder that despite everything, there are still parts of ourselves that they cannot regulate or redact.
Voluntarily sharing this last private space, allowing entry into the mystery that is still inaccessible even to scientists, even to myself, makes me vulnerable, but could it also, paradoxically, make me powerful? With this gesture, I show that I am not afraid to bare what is most intimate, what is most private, what even I myself fail to understand.
Dreams must be spoken and included in these (hi)stories—of mine, of ours, of hers, of theirs—because they are our most autonomous creation. A reminder that no matter how hard they try, and no matter how hard we try, we will continue to translate and write our lives, in languages neither they nor we can fully understand. This is our power. Our dreams are a “theatre in which the dreamer himself is the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic” (Jung 2010). It is not even the conscious I, but the ancient, unknowable, unconscious one, who, in conversation with the totality of my being, is the sole creator of my dreams. Whatever happens out there, she is still directing the dreams, dreams that do not just recite pasts but also prophesize futures. Dreams are maps that forever write and translate themselves, guiding us into and away from ourselves. (262-263)
The prefigurative quality of dreams in Missaghi’s characterization gives them their political strength, just as their protean nature (a dream is a map, a theatre, a translation…) safeguards them from destruction. I am reminded of José Esteban Muñoz’s mobilization of Ernst Bloch’s treatment of hope, of Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality—of everything that has faith in the futurity and continuity of social movements where cynics perceive only failure and disruption.
There is no abstract reader; we always read through our own lives and bibliographies. As such, my reading of trans(re)lating house one is colored by having lived in Oakland during the Occupy Movement, which I think of as the US manifestation of an international wave of uprisings which included the Arab Spring. In her acknowledgments, Missaghi writes:
I take the timing of the universe reminding me why I’ve been working on this book for the past seven years. As Mousavi once said, ‘Hope is the seed of our identity.’ This book is my share of the collective attempt to care for that seed, the seed that keeps growing in and with the body of Iran, even if I am far away from it. (277)
The seed that was awakened in me during Occupy Oakland is something that I have held within myself the past nine years, and it is something that has been reawakened by this sustained monument of mass political resistance to anti-Black police violence within the US.
Police violence is only the most visible and egregious manifestation of an entrenched culture of racism which relies for its continued existence on the manipulation of public truth, public memory in which lynchings are officially designated as suicides and statues of confederate soldiers dot the country. Oppression is two-fold: it happens on the level of repression and on the level of representation. This is one of the doubles that Missaghi treats. Her protagonist, never named, becomes aware that statues have begun to disappear all around Tehran, and one of the threads of the book is the narrative in which she travels around Tehran searching for clues to the disappeared statues.
And yet, from almost the very beginning, Missaghi gives readers to understand that her protagonist might be searching for the wrong bodies. Or perhaps this is too simplistic. It’s not that it is wrong for her to search for the missing statues, but that it would be wrong for her search to end with the statues. As the protagonist searches and compiles her own dossiers of missing statues, she also follows a mysterious figure (another double?) who she feels would be able to give her a clue. She is correct in that, as the book closes, the mysterious figure gives her the other dossiers that Missaghi’s readers have been privy to throughout the book: those of people killed in the repression of the Green Movement. As such, her search ends by beginning again—shifting from representational violence to literal violence.
This shift is not a linear progression but the tracing of attention along a Möbius strip: the symbolic and the embodied are continuous with each other, and to follow one is always to end up at the other.
Through the particularity of my reading, I can’t help but think of the removal of public moments to defenders of slavery by protestors in the US.[ii] In a sort of inversion of Missaghi’s narrative, protestors seek to safeguard public memory not by finding lost statues but by removing statues in order to reject a misremembering of history incommensurable with Black life and liberty.
I am also reading through my own bibliography, as I mentioned. My most recently read book before this was Renee Gladman’s 2003 The Activist, which turns on disputed public memory and the phenomenological experience of protest, published as it was in the wake of 9/11, as the Bush regime launched the war against Iraq on the fabricated pretext of the presence of ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ causing an incredible surge of anti-war protest. Gladman is also the author of the idea, from an interview in 2011[iii] (significantly, Occupy’s heyday) of adjacent alterities. In reference to her Ravicka series, Gladman writes:
I wrote the first two books of the series without ever having left the North American continent. At the time of the writing, I experienced a kind of paradox. It had something to do with the filmmaker Béla Tarr. I’m not sure how to explain this. Seeing his work, in particular the 7.5-hour Satantango—as well as the work of the Polish filmmaker Kieślowski, and the Russians Tarkovsky and Sokurov—created in me some instinct of belonging. It made no sense, but at a gut level I felt that those dreary, silent, beautiful landscapes, that sense of exhaustion and isolation, were my own. I wanted to place a narrative within a possibility or convergence of those spaces. I also—and I don’t have a rational explanation for this—wanted to push it farther east. A desire began to form for places like Latvia, Croatia, Slovenia. I dropped Ravicka down, perhaps in pieces, over this entire region. Though, at the same time, not really. Something entirely different had happened. I had wanted to escape my monolinguism, so (and you can find seeds of this in The Activist) I began to make up a language that I spoke with my lover on the streets of San Francisco. I would say some words of this language and she would respond with other words, apparently also of this language. Within that exchange was the space of the city, questions of the built environment, of community, occupancy. You think long enough about something and it comes to life in some alterity adjacent to your own. Those alterities have been my fictions.
I read trans(re)lating house one informed by the adjacency that Gladman describes. Though the connection might at times be slant, dreamlike, Missaghi’s Tehran has something to say to the US city dweller.
And to read into this connection, this adjacency, is to read against monolingualism, thus intervening on the constraints to the imagination produced by English in its guise as the language of US exceptionalism. Missaghi’s text is translational, comprised of events experienced in Persian, but written in English. Missaghi:
Re: the right alignment of the text, if you’re curious.
This is foreign territory. Its map needs to be foreign. I want it to make you stumble. I want you to be disrupted when you arrive here, feel some discomfort, feel out of place.
The language of the city is Persian. My first language is Persian.
Persian is written from right to left. I want to hold onto its
presence. Even if only as a ghost.
I want to acknowledge the Otherness of both the territory and the
language for the readers, make them visible, and celebrate them as
I translate the city and its people into this other language of mine. (35)
At other points throughout the text, Missaghi grapples with the implications of writing at a linguistic and a spatial remove from the contexts which produce it. Returning to the passage from Gladman’s interview, I note that she attends to public space and the way that the built environment shapes and is shaped by communal concerns. For Missaghi, too, the city is the stage of protest, inquiry, and intimacy, and as such this situates trans(re)lating house one within a tradition of the feminist flâneuse as exemplified by texts like Gail Scott’s My Paris.
I mentioned at the begin of this review that Missaghi is a writer of doubles, but it feels important to mention also that there is an ineffable remainder that necessarily escapes, saving the reader from any too neat symmetry. Or perhaps not a remainder, but gaps, points of ingress and egress for the reader. This is because Missaghi has created a paradigmatically open text, in the sense sketched out by Lyn Hejinian in her essay, “The Rejection of Closure”[iv]:
The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification. As Luce Irigaray says, positing this tendency within a feminine sphere of discourse, “It is really a question of another economy which diverts the linearity of a project, undermines the target-object of a desire, explodes the polarization of desire on only one pleasure, and disconcerts fidelity to only one discourse.” (4)
Hejinian quotes Irigaray, who situates the characteristics of open texts as “within a feminine sphere of discourse,” or in Cixous’s coinage: écriture feminine. Cixous is one of Missaghi’s guides, as she braids lists of questions with testimony with narrative with meditations on dreaming. Missaghi is not merely a practitioner of écriture feminine and the open text on a formal level, though.
At a narrative level, Missaghi’s protagonist’s explorations take her into the women’s section of the bus, a private showing of feminist art, a fashionable café with an art-collecting banker, and many other spaces—always attuned to the gender dynamics of public and private space, and the liminal zone between the two. The protagonist finally arrives at a teahouse which is in practice, if not officially, a men-only space. Here she must insist on her continued presence in order to make her rendezvous with an informant. This informant slips her a dossier, not on the missing statues but on the missing bodies. This is a microcosm of her experience in pursuit of truth and justice: both as a citizen who seeks to reveal what the government would conceal and as woman whose search takes her outside the roles and realms that society has marked off for her.
For this and many other reasons, trans(re)lating house one is timeless and timely. For other US-based readers it will have a special resonance with the present insurrectionary moment and its focus on Iran will prompt those same readers learn more about the Green Movement, internationalizing their perspectives. Missaghi’s dual attention to art and activism intervenes meaningfully on the ongoing conversation about the role of art in/as politics. And trans(re)lating house one is a great book for teaching, for the reasons listed above, as well as for the formal range it models.
trans(re)lating house one page at Coffee House Press
[i] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/201351661225981675.html
[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/16/us/confederate-monuments-removed.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=537CE97C2F3D3F9F410449685A081C71&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL
[iii] https://bombmagazine.org/articles/language-and-landscape-renee-gladman/
[iv] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of-closure
Some of the linked books go to my Bookshop.org storefront, and I get a percentage if you buy from there, but don’t forget about the library! I anticipate meeting you in the future where we don’t have to monetize everything to keep body and soul together!