In Case of Emergency, our Book Club selection for December, is a novel that does not stand still. Led by the frenetic pace of its narrator, Shadi, it journeys across disaster-ridden Tehran in an unrelenting, electric surge. Mahsa Mohebali’s prose, gritted in satire, unwaveringly paints a linguistic celebration of Iranian vernacular, as well as a transgressive portrait of feminine anti-heroism. For the arrival of this world in English, we have to thank the brilliant work of Mariam Rahmani, to whom Assistant Editor Lindsay Semel spoke with in live dialogue, discussing the translation of humour, the transgression of Shadi, and the many voices that live inside a single individual.
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Lindsay Semel (LS): In choosing to translate this title, you’ve talked about some of your motives being political, and about how radical of a character Shadi is. Now that the book is out of your hands and into the world, you’re receiving a lot of media attention regarding that thread of the book. Now that the conversation has become public, how do you feel about the politicization of the text and the discourse around it?
Mariam Rahmani (MR): In Case of Emergency is a political novel, so in that sense, the reception hasn’t politicized it. However, I really believe that [the political] is only one level on which the novel is operating in its original context—another level being that of craft. From what I have seen of the conversation that has ensued since the novel’s publication, however, I think it’s been pretty well understood and well interpreted; it hasn’t struck me as moving in any wrong direction.
I think the novel speaks substantially to politics that really resonate with contemporary readers outside of Iran—particularly regarding gender and sexual issues. They perhaps figure more quietly here than we might expect in a contemporary Anglophone novel, but are quite present and resonant in certain ways. All of that is familiar in one sense, but nevertheless it establishes the presence of a contributing voice, intersecting in an ongoing conversation readers are already having outside of translated literature.
LS: Is Shadi’s subversiveness the main thing that you want readers to engage with?
MR: As a translator, I don’t think that it’s my place to tell people how to relate to the text or how to relate to Shadi; my goal is to present what I think is a faithful rendition of the landscape that the novel presents in Farsi. Shadi speaks for herself, and various readers will relate to her in different ways. Maybe some readers will connect with the crassness or jocularity of the voice. Other readers might be more attuned to her crossdressing or the flirtations she has throughout the novel. Or they could identify with the general dissatisfaction Shadi has with the world around her, complicated by the respectability politics she encounters throughout the text, whether at home with her family or [on the street]. All these elements are there, and the world is full enough that different readers will connect to different aspects of her character, as well as to the critique she is waging.
LS: It’s really easy to get bogged down in the numerous serious, grave things going on in the book, but it’s so funny in certain parts. The scene in Ashkan’s apartment, for example: Ashkan’s mother is absent when her son is going through this crisis of self-harm—possibly even providing the mechanism of the crisis—but in the same space is another woman’s baby who wants nothing to do with their mother, and Shadi in turn acts as a horrible stand-in. The joke seems to be on motherhood itself. At the risk of committing the error of taking the funny completely out of the humor by explaining it, what would you say the punchline is in this scene?
MR: I actually really like your reading of it. There’s a lot going on here in terms of jokes on motherhood. To me, the biggest joke of the novel, in a certain way, is Shadi’s mother as a character. She is such a ridiculous clown. Her movements about the house and all of her yelling are described as operatic, characterized with a real sense that she’s lost her center. There is some reference to a past in which she was more actively engaged in politics and activism was at her core, but all that has now given way to consumerism and melodrama. By the time we get to the scene with Ashkan, [the descriptions of Shadi’s mother are all] behind us, and we are left with Shadi’s quite scathing opinion and portrayal of her. The picture formed, then, is one where the mothers are never doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Parvin herself is a drug user, and that is enabling her son’s addiction and, in this particular scene, his ninth suicide attempt. It’s dark humor.
I think that the joke is just a very wry take on life. It’s almost one of those moments where you step back and say, “The joke’s on me.” I get the sense that this satire ultimately defines Shadi’s relationship to her own life. One of her strengths as a narrator is the distance maintained between her and the events she’s experiencing. As she lives and moves throughout the day, she can, at the same time, present its occurrences to a reader in a way that’s both cutting and endearing. The humor throughout the novel operates in the same way.
You’re right to point to the humor as being situational. As a translator, humor is one of the most difficult things to work with. I struggled so much with particular lines, but much of the novel actually thrives on this situational humor, and equips the reader to take the extra step of making the joke themselves.
LS: Do any of those really agonizing lines come to mind?
MR: There is a line towards the end of the book that gave me a lot of trouble. The voice of Arash—Shadi’s younger brother—was very difficult to pin down. He reappears at the end of the novel, and he’s talking about taking over this fish shop as his office. He says:
“I’m redoing the walls. Plus I found this fine specimen of a chaise. Putting it right here, baby, then I’m rolling up the gate and—lookout deluxe!”
“Here? Rotten fish smells good to you?”
“Focus. A decent coat of this sick color on the tiles over here, set the sofa over there . . .”
“Right.”
“What you get is the view, windows on all four sides.”
“What’re you trying to do exactly?”
“Shit! Welcome to my new office. The view is everything.”
“Right. And what business will you be conducting in this fine business establishment?”
“Good one. Well, I just stretch out on this here chaise—”
He saunters over, stretches out on the ratty green leather chaise, crosses his ankles, and folds his arms over his chest.
“—and watch the people go by.”
It’s this repartee between the two of them. They’re coming up with these pithy, but natural, jabs at each other. Some of it functions on turns of phrase that are quite close pivots, or puns, in Farsi. The difficulty was getting the rhythm of the exchange to actually work while maintaining some of those turns. When Shadi says, “And what business will you be conducting in this fine business establishment?”—there were other options that were closer to the Farsi, but they sounded too formal. For example, “and what office will you be conducting in this fine office?” It’s a pun on the types of nouns related to this place being an office—what offices are you fulfilling? It’s not necessarily the kind of joke that’s going to make you laugh out loud, but it did take a certain finessing to even get any of the wordplay in there at all.
Arash says, “I found this fine specimen of chaise. Putting it right here,” and then the line ends “lookout deluxe!” using the French. Later he says: “The view is everything.” In the original, “view” was actually in English. It’s not a cognate in Farsi; it was just transliterated into Farsi as a play on real estate language, upselling something by appropriating a culture associated with money or global luxury, much in the same way that French functions in an English context.
It’s quite a detailed example, but the takeaway is that a lot of the difficulty in translating this text and getting any of the comedy to work was not just in particular lines, but in constructing these mechanisms by which it could all work together. Because so much of the book is in conversation, it’s about the rhythm and the banter between these various young characters.
LS: That leads nicely into another example of humor, regarding the mechanisms that tie this universe together: Shadi’s rewriting of Newton’s laws. She develops her own iteration, and they’re different every time she talks about them. That’s funny in itself, but it’s also an especially appropriate metonym for her, because inertia and momentum are such a big part of her characterization. One moment, she’s running or throwing herself into a crowd, seemingly unstoppable, and the next she’s stuck to the ground, seemingly immovable. So, digging into her as a character, what do you think propels her and what do you think impedes her?
MR: That’s a good question. Structurally, in terms of motives, the most basic is that she’s in withdrawal. There is this core force, this quest, moving her through the day. In that sense, it is this Odyssean journey. But in terms of what motivates her in a psychological or social context, we do get a great amount of ambivalence. I don’t think it’s so clear to her.
For example, Ashkan’s character comes up first through these text messages that she receives all too late. He’s threatening suicide, and we’re not surprised when she actually goes looking for him. We assume that there’s some sort of fabric of care here, that she’s looking after her friend. Eventually, she does save him; she gets him to vomit. I think the implication is that the OD might have actually done him in this time around if she had not gotten there, because there’s no sign of any of the people who usually help him.
But then, by the time we get to the end of the novel, she has a really poignant moment of self-reckoning. She’s going through this roster of events, punishing herself for having run all around town instead of going to the right people who could have given her something useful earlier on. It’s quite contradictory. On the one hand, she’s upset with herself for not having just gone for the high, that she failed to prioritize herself. On the other hand, she also reveals that she went to Ashkan’s thinking that she might have been able to get something out of him. It wasn’t all selfless and caring; at the very least, it was doubly motivated—some version of self-care mixed with the sociality of wanting to keep her friend alive. It’s complicated. Her motives seem double edged throughout, and that’s where we’re left. That interior monologue also comes right up against the end of the novel, so it makes no attempts at resolution one way or another.
However, I don’t think that this novel is a critique of Shadi’s psychology as a character. It sees her as symptomatic of a sick society—society defined quite largely. Mohebali is not only talking about Iran, but also about global markets and this consumer-driven, capitalist logic—all these things that we’re used to talking about alongside globalization or contemporary concerns. So, Shadi’s personal stake is quite unclear, but maybe the muddled nature of her intentions come from the fact that it’s braided. It’s difficult to disentangle, for us readers and for herself, the extent of her self-absorption, her compassion, her larger social critiques, or simply her individual exhaustion.
LS: A striking point you brought up in your Granta essay is how there isn’t just one voice of the novel—how “Shadi swings, from sarcasm, to lyricism,” and how, as Western readers, we’re not necessarily used to making that jump within one text. One of the passages that really embodies that duality is when she’s sitting on a fountain, looking out over everything, and then the earthquake starts and she falls:
I fall straight on my ass, feet up. I stretch out. Open my arms. The sky sways back and forth and I’m lying on the ground nailed to the cross. The earth shudders and the shudders ripple through my body. They start at my fingertips and run through my shoulders and groin and damn! Let the Bandari begin. Mother Earth must be down there shimmying her big meaty breasts. The tremors speak to me. Speak to me. Speak to me. I feel like it’s my first time ever lying on the grass. I suckle at its scent. The earth settles down, a pause in a long sentence. I close my eyes, walk my fingers through the grass. Smells like rain. The smell of wetness, the smell of trees. I wish I could sink, pour into the earth and dance with her. Let the tremors crawl through my body. I don’t want them to stop. I want to lie right here on this grass forever sucking on its wetness. I want my breasts to shiver with her shivers and make waves.
She’s experiencing this tremor, physically connecting with the earth as a woman and as a mother. It brings out intimate, vulnerable aspects of her personality that I don’t really see anywhere else in the book. I’m wondering what you make of that passage—how it fleshes out Shadi’s character and her relationship with the world, and how you feel it expresses the multi-tracked voice of the text.
MR: Referring back to the number of failed mothers in this book, here we see the opposite. [This passage] is almost balancing that out. With the earth as mother, even her failures are celebrated by Shadi. I think that that’s where this is going. [Shadi forgives even] something as punishing as an earthquake, the destructive powers of which are immense—and known in Iran. Disaster makes up the historical context of the novel, which imagines the earthquakes that had just flattened the ancient city of Bam ending up in Tehran, because Tehran is also on a fault line. Shadi has more sympathy for this mother—an earth mother, who is almost like a replacement for the failed, human mothers we see throughout the text.
Or maybe there’s a more generous reading in which she might be able to map some of that sympathy onto her own mother, or onto the baby’s mother in Ashkan’s building, or onto Parvin. She does have a lot of space for that in this particular scene, which is a singular, much softer point in the text. We see the reference to her breasts and the earth’s breasts. There’s a kind of femininity that Shadi taps into here that doesn’t really interest her in the rest of the novel.
So, it’s a moment of balance, and also of quietude and contemplation, giving us some sense of her pain. It’s often the case that sarcasm comes off as a type of arrogance, whether in real life or in narration, and I think that this text does risk that. But in moments like these, we get to see where that’s coming from. There’s actually a lot of pain behind Shadi’s abrasiveness, and behind her neglect of other people and herself.
LS: You’ve been pretty open about coming to translation rather reluctantly, that you used to think of it as “unsexy.” Do you still?
MR: I think that word is destined to haunt me. It’s actually not my word; it was an edit when I wrote that article, but the point stands. There is a burden of assumptions for a bilingual person who’s interested in literature. It seems to be a natural question—why don’t you translate? The path seems so readily accessible from the outside, but it’s not actually true to the experience of growing up bilingual. You would code switch to talk about various topics; you wouldn’t actually be translating between the languages for each individual matter.
I had never been interested in translation theory, and I had never been interested in trying the practice. I of course benefitted from translators, having grown up loving novels like Anna Karenina—I respected them, but I had never been interested in actually doing it. I came to the text quite organically, from a results-based perspective. I was interested in the final result, which would be that readers of English could read this novel. In that sense, it was a decision based in some idea of community, as an avid reader and lover of literature.
Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast; her translations in n+1, Columbia Journal, and After Cinema: Fictions from a Collective Memory; and her nonfiction in Granta, BOMB magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Rumpus. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature and is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant as well as a U.S. Fulbright Research Award. She is currently working on a debut novel.
Lindsay Semel is an assistant managing editor at Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
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