Against the dictatorship of the Iranian regime which hanged young people for demanding freedom, against the barbarism of the Taliban, what can literature do? Admittedly, very little. Fortunately, however, voices are raised and denounce the intolerable at the risk of their lives.
Aliyeh Ataei is an Iranian writer, born forty years ago on the border between Iran and Afghanistan. We are not responsible for where we are born, she might say. His literature comes from this crack, this flaw that will mark the family, the father in particular, throughout life.
Living with rats, big rats that bite you in your sleep. Rats who become the masters of the little house where this poor family lives. Are they from Afghanistan or Iran? The rats are there, become the characters of a daily story where war rages on both sides of the border.
The narrator was six years old when she first saw a body riddled with bullets. His uncle explains to him what the Communists are doing; she listens to him, then she remarks to him, “They confiscate our land and give it to others and then they kill everyone.” »
In the evening, everyone gathered around the television which transmitted horror images sometimes of the Iran-Iraq war, sometimes of the war against the Communists in Afghanistan.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and stayed there until 1989. Children play scorpion hunts. A dangerous game. The parents start hunting scorpions considered as enemies from abroad. “For Afghans, attachment to place doesn’t matter. What matters is the warrior soul,” writes Aliyeh Ataei.
So the mujahideen who kill communists become the Taliban who kill everyone. It is in this setting of chaos and mourning that love turns everything upside down in the narrator’s life. She lives in Iran, her sweetheart in Afghanistan. He wrote to her: “In the sole of my heart, tyranny will soon be defeated. She is dying, powerless against the advance of the people…”
These stories tell what international press reports cannot. It is from the inside, from the intimacy of a young girl, that the era of the war in Iran is recounted.
For her, “whether we are Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian or Pakistani, our blood has the same color and the one who dies on a gallows in Lahore, the one who loses his leg in Iraq, the one who dies in Aleppo, the one that a bomb shreds in the streets of Kabul, all are my brothers and my sisters even if no genetic test can prove it. »
With The Frontier of the Forgotten (translated from Persian by Sabrina Nouri and prefaced by Atiq Rahimi)*, Aliyeh Ataei, a famous novelist in her country, gives us news from her native land and reminds us how quickly the victims of barbarism are forgotten.
The war is relentless on these peoples who have had the misfortune to be led by incompetents and especially obscurantists. From that pain came these beautifully written stories. At least there, words are stronger than fear.
*Gallimard.
