LIFE

I am uninterested in writing a book that introduces Iranians to Western audiences, because I think the need is greater for Western audiences to be introduced to themselves. This is not as offensive a statement as it might seem. Any writer has to be interested in introducing his or her readers to themselves. It is supposed to be an intimate relationship, not one in which a shared intellectual interest is the thing keeping it going. I would rather that Western audiences and I have all kinds of trouble, the kind in which I am saying that I know what is really going on inside them and they are saying that they know what is really going on inside me. As long as they know that I am an Iranian who has grown up in the West, so it is fair to say that I have been paying more attention to them than they have to me.

The one thing I can promise is that I will always do it in a story. I will always do it in a way that everybody in the story has a story. It is the only way a story can be any good. If there is sunlight in a story, then that sunlight falls on Iranians and Westerners alike. That is the starting point. It is also why there is no need for introductions, at least on my part. I do not want to pretend that any deficit that has created the need for those introductions has any legitimacy to it. It is a deficit of knowing oneself that necessitates others being introduced. I want to tell them, you know me. You knew me before you ever read a word I wrote. I was doing the same thing you were doing, wasn't I? I was walking up and down the same Western streets, wasn't I? If you were paying attention to yourself, you would've been paying attention to me. If you were looking to understand yourself, you would've looked up and seen me and seen in my face that there was a place for me in your self-understanding, and that would've been the best introduction we could've had.

The good thing is that it's not too late for that, but what it's going to take is an awareness that a lot of the past introductions to Western audiences, of Iranians and just about everybody else, were false ones. They were false because an introduction is not a one-way street. I can't write a book introducing Iranians to Western audiences because Iranians became acquainted with Western audiences a long time ago. If Western audiences weren't paying close attention to those introductions, that's no reason why Iranians should go through the trouble of being introduced again.

I am interested in a book which suggests to Western audiences that they could have been knowing Iranians all along. They just had to look in a different direction than they had been. They did not have to look to the east to see them. What I have to say goes back to before there was a West and an East. It goes back to before the world knew of a West and an East, and before a single member of Western audiences knew of them. The hardest direction to travel in is not east or west or north or south. It is inward. But it can be the most beautiful as well.

There is nothing I could say to Western audiences about Iranians that is as great as what they know when they travel in that direction: That they are born and they die and in between they look all over for whatever is supposed to go between birth and death. They don't know as much as any people doesn't know. And they make all kinds of claims of knowing as much as any people makes those claims. And they're about half-right just like any people generally is.

But I can see how their being half-right might come as a surprise to Western audiences who don't know how much they've only been half-right all along. I can see how their being even a little right might come as a surprise to audiences who believe that right was born in the West. And I can't help it if that's an incidental by-product of a book I am writing. I am not setting out to write a book that says that right was not born in the West. I am not setting out to write a book in order to not do anything. I am setting out to write a book that opens up like a flower, but like a flower opens up to the world it has grown up in, I have to let in every part of the world I've been given, and that includes everything I haven't been given, like the chance to say to Western audiences as much as they have said to me.

If a book is introducing its people to its audience as though for the first time, it will be a bad book. If its people live and die as though such living and dying is new, if their humanity is an end of the book and not a beginning, and if a book is asking its audience to look downward in order to see its people, it will be a bad book. And if a book is written by an Iranian to the West since that is whom he has grown up among, and if there is a single moment when the life of its people is being written about in a way to say "Please don't bomb us," if it is saying for even a single moment "Look at how we live and die, just like you..", then it is failing to live up to the standard of a book, because a book is saying "Of course you shouldn't bomb us," before anything has even happened yet, before even the first word. It is saying that just by existing, by saying that what I have to give you is stories instead. And those stories are written with a belief that what you have to give me is stories instead. And everybody in all those stories is already a human being, before any audience comes along, before they even sit down in their favorite chair and get ready to audienciate.