The first entry in the collection is Iran (1953) and begins with the short story "Runner in White" by Payam Nasser, followed by the Afterword, "Black Gold, Red Fear '' by Olmo GÃ ¶lz. Nasser's story tells of the rise of the populist Mohammad Mosaddeq and the Anglo-American conspiracy to topple his government and restore the Shah to power. That was the plan anyway. "Runner" is told through the eyes of Parsava Amini, a little girl raised among principals involved in the rise and fall of Mosaddeq. Rouzbeh and Mehrangiz, her father and mother, are separated at the time of her birth, as Rouzbeh, a military scribe, is exiled after blowing the whistle on corruption at the academy. Parsava's mother dies after giving birth to her, closing her life out with the words, "It is white everywhere!" This takes on mystical qualities in the story, as Parsava, too, sees Sufi-like visions of white that dervish their way through the tale as a backdrop to the political intrigue afoot.
In exile, Rouzbeh, a lyrically literate man, establishes a correspondence with Mosaddeq, which leads to further troubles with the competing forces of power at the time. He tells seven-year-old Parsava talent is a way of flying, and that people need to put their "talents into use" or they lose them:
He said most people are never allowed to fly, are never allowed to show their abilities. Most people are like hens that only lay eggs for those who wield power, and if they refuse, they get their heads cut off.
Call it a parable. And remember what Dylan said about thought-dreams being seen, and duck.
One day, while she wanders off to find pieces to complete a snowman, she witnesses her Dad, a Tudeh Party (communist) member, being chased by two hostile political agents, and has a collapse:
Parsava fell face-up on the ground. Her eyes half open, she could see the sky and the large snowflakes settling on her face. Then everything went black, and then all white. But this white was not the whiteness of snow. She felt her body floating in the air like a dandelion in a breeze...What she was experiencing dated back to antiquity, an ancient, forgotten reverie. Parsava was drowned in wonder. She looked around. She saw nothing but white.
It's as if she's swooned into a dervish dream. But lest we get caught up in magical swoons, Nasser tells us, "Parsava had an atrial septal defect of the heart that affects the blood flow to the lungs." She takes after her mother, we're told.
After her father gets out of jail and returns home, maimed from interrogations, he continues to write inflammatory prose, including The Midas Syndrome, which Nasser describes as a reverse tale where "Everything he touches turns into faeces." The Shah's henchmen are defensively unamused and he's taken again. In the meantime, "Mosaddeq was gaining more power by the day and gathering his supporters around him from every corner of the country." This spells trouble for the Shah, who is driven out, but then Mosaddeq gets himself in trouble with the Brits when they learn of the possibility that "in less than a year parliament would pass legislation to nationalise the country's oil industry." No way, Jose'. And M's goose is soon cooked. Parsava soon fades to white, like Mom.
In the Afterword, Olmo GÃ ¶lz pretty much expresses it all with his title, "Black Gold, Red Fear" -- oil and communism. Over my dead imperial body, say the Brits. And the CIA (Operation Ajax). Enter the dracon: the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This led to an underreported border incident that Daniel Ellsberg discovers was as consequential as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Carter White House feared that the Soviets might invade Iran. Ellsberg cites an NBC report, which states, in part,
...The case was then, as it is to a large extent now, that if the Soviets decided to move in a major offensive into that region [as the White House feared at that moment, eight months after the Carter doctrine had been announced] then you would probably have to consider the use of nuclear weapons to stop them, Jody Powell, Carter's press secretary at the time, told NBC.
As the editors of the volume suggest, just because the Afghan occupation is over doesn't mean new Hells aren't ahead -- Syria? Iran? Russia? China? Venezuela?
By now the story of how we invaded Iraq is widely disseminated, few seemingly disturbed, that the invasion was criminal in intention, and not at all about freedom fighting. "We" just rubbled Babylon, producing the film Three Kings to snarkily tell us what it was all about. In The American Way, the editors dish up the fictional story, "Babylon" by Hassan Blasim. It's an almost-glib first-person tale of two former prisoners of Abu Ghraib, under different regimes, to compare torture notes. We get a human portrait of the "torture celebrity" Khaled Ali -- you know, the one on the chair with the black hood. Blasim's first-person narrator, Adnan, further describes his poster-boy status:
There was hardly a Western or Arab media organisation that hadn't interviewed this 'torture celebrity' called Khaled Ali. I knew his story by heart. The Americans had chained him to the bars of his cell for days, beaten him, threatened him, humiliated him, stripped him naked, sexually abused him, taken pictures of him, tortured him with music and waterboarding, and terrorised him with dogs. He still had pains in one shoulder, his ribs and his left leg.
Otherwise, as our unnamed narrator tells us, Khaled's a nice guy.
By chance, Adnan, a refugee living in swank and swinging Kreuzberg, Germany, looks up from his laptop in a cafe' and sees his poster hero live and kicking. They hook up in conversation. Adnan introduces himself, Khaled carefully sizing up his merry interloper, and calls him a colleague. Their exchange goes,
'How do you mean? Colleagues? I don't understand,' he said.
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