msabaye

War literature

I have been visiting Khorramshahr and Abadan since 2007 and its sad and yet inspiring at the same time. People are jsut as they were when I was growing up, hospitable, warm and kind and yet, nothing hass been done to improve their lives. They have to buy water. I loved fasih's Winter of 62 and Story of Javid which deals with a child who has lost her mother during teh war. Its heartbreaking. The real book about war is Da by Zahra Hosseini. I had such a tough time reading it, one night  reading the scene of bombing Chelmetri Ave (where our house was), I had to go out on my balcony and touch plants to realize that I was in America and the war was over. Tehre is a new book which my family has purchase for me and I am certian is good. Its called Jaye Amne golooleha and is written by a resident of Khorramsahr who was present during the war.

I'd like to visit Khuzestan one day too.

Hopefully one of these years I can go and visit Khuzestan as well.  As far as war being incorporated in movies and such, many of Iranians movies always have a middle aged man with stories about war or acting a certain way, usually a good character with patience, faith and such.

In fact Bashu The Little Stranger (1989) is one of the best movies about war that I've seen. You can get it on Netflix here or a little trailer here.

Like everything else the cinema is under the censorship and only so much you can say and do.  Hopefully one day when the brutality of this regime is gone and there is freedom people will be able to freely express their stories and put them in movies or literature.  There are so many stories. 

Everything is sacred

.....

Your point on 'those kids' reminded me of the poem, they, by Wilfred Sassoon:

 

The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
'In a just cause: they lead the last attack
'On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
'New right to breed an honourable race,
'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'

'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.
' And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!'

.............

 And those wounds will never heal never .

Be it for the local khuzestanis or the far left expats the one that lost members of their family ,their childhood house,the tales will be told some day to the future kids of FREE IRAN in their story books.

 Maziar

عقرب روی پله­های راه­آهن اندیمشک یا از این قطار خون می­چکه قربان

This is the name of  an amazing war novel by Mr. Hossain Mortezaeian Abkenar. I've begun to translate it to English. If you could order it from Iran, do so by all means. It's just amazing.

On the 'classics" side we have "Soraya in Coma" and "Winter of 62" by the late Esmail Fasih. At some point these novels were national bestseller:

//www.iranicaonline.org/articles/fasih-esmail

"Of Fasih’s twenty-one published novels, two in particular have received comparatively wide and serious critical attention: Ṯorayyā dar eḡmāʾ (1984; translated into English by author as Sorayya in a Coma, London, 1985; and into Arabic by Muhammad ʿAlāʾal-Din Manṣur as Thorayya fi ghaybuba, Cairo, 1999), and Zemestān-e 62 (translated into German by Mohammad H. Allafi and Sabine Allafi as Winter 83: Roman (Frankfurt, 1998); and into Arabic by Muhammad ʿAlāʾal-Din Manṣur as Šitāʾ 84, Cairo, 2000).

The events in both novels happen during, or
shortly after, the traumatic years of Iraq’s invasion of Iran. In the
first, while Iran is suffering the wounds of war, Arian is forced to go
on a futile trip to Paris to attend to his comatose niece Ṯorayyā, and
while tending to her conditions, finds himself among a motley crew of
Iran’s expatriates, who cut off from the objective realities of Iran in
the first years of the Islamic Revolution, live in the remote island of
their isolation in Paris (Navvabpour, 427-28; Kalāntari, pp. 283-93;
Šāyesta, pp. 269-82). Zemestān -e 62 takes place in Iran,
almost entirely in the war torn areas of the country’s southwest that
took the brunt of Iraq’s devastating invasion. Although consisting of
multiple plot strands, this novel is ultimately about two young men,
Edris Āl-e Maṭrud, an Iranian Arab who has vanished in the war front,
and Manṣur Farjām, a US-educated Iranian computer scientists, and an
avatar of Fasih, who returns to Iran to mystically in effect annihilate
himself into its soil by going to the front to a certain death
(Mirzabenevis).

Although neither of these two novels could fully be regarded as
novels of war, ..

On the Surreal side we have "Shabmalakh" The Locust, by Mr. Javad Modjabi.

And probabaly the most famous Iranian War movie:

//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_of_the_B...

Have a feeling there are probably many more novels and movies on the War than meets the eyes.

Last but not least, perhaps one reason residents of Khuzistan have such a hard time forgetting the damn war is that the entire province hasn't yet been reconstructed from the war time, and to a large extent it stil lives with those destructions and wounds in its landscape.

........

At the time, during the war, there was this documentary "Ravayat-e- Fath " which used to make me extremely sad and depressed.  The voice who narrated the stories is still in my head and I do not know why but  I hate it so much....  We lost all those innocent kids and they celebrated their deaths . How they even dared to do so?  Martyrdom is a concept that I have hard time dealing with it now.  Let us not even go there.  One thing for sure is that we owe every inch of that land to those kids .... 

But as you correctly pointed out not much is going on the cinema. Unfortunately, the Iranian cinema despite all its achievements and international recognitions never really emphasized on the subject of the war. There are, however, a few films on that topic but none is really worth seeing.   

آنتراکت...

جنگ تحمیلی، لابد ادبیات تحمیلی را میطلبد.....بنده چون ادبیاتم زیاد
خوب نیست، بین هالیوود و جنگ دوم فقط میتوانم مخرج مشترک بگیرم که میشود :
"جوییش فرند".........