The plot explores the myriad adventures and tribulations of a family who moves from Tehran to the countryside in 1979. There, however, their idyllic reality is soon hijacked by a grim set of events that turn the verdant village orchards into a site of strife, bloodshed, and resistance. The parents, Roza and Hushang, eventually lose their three children—Bahar, Shorab, and Beeta—to the vicious regime of the Ayatollah. Combining characters loosely drawn from her own life with a mélange of supernatural elements, Azar achieves a certain magical realist style that is rich without being baroque, amply lush without being weighed down by excess. And despite mythical creatures like djinns being legion, Azar’s novel remains marvelously fantastical without ever seeming self-consciously escapist.
In the family’s new home, long-lost relatives drop in unannounced and disappear into thin air as abruptly as they had arrived, and silkworms are reared in obscure corners. Objects like jajims (patchwork rugs made by sewing together narrow strips of woven carpet), kelims (flat woven carpets or rugs made in Turkey, Kurdistan, and neighboring areas), termite-infested handwritten books, and tars (an Iranian stringed instrument that the father crafts and also loves to play) make up the initial mise en scène. However, we soon discover an uncanny element: Bahar, our intrepid, Argus-eyed primary narrator, is really a ghost who lingers around the lives of her family members. Although the story begins with Sohrab being executed in prison “without trial, and unaware he would be buried en masse with hundreds of other political prisoners,” Bahar has already been killed in a fire two days before the culmination of the Islamic Revolution. The blaze had been started by a mob of villagers-turned-vigilantes who presumably wanted to destroy the musical instruments, recordings of speeches, and books in the house.
As Khomeini’s followers increase, the novel demonstrates how his regime begins to exert a vicelike grip over both the family’s days and the larger cultural life of Iran. These followers start destroying libraries and private book collections across the country with greater frequency, and more than once they attack the family’s books and other possessions, including recorded speeches and music, journals, and valuable paintings. On one occasion, while passing through a neighbourhood in Southern Tehran, Hushang notices a “mountain of cassettes and reels of Iranian and international films” burning on the side of the road.
Some of the most powerful passages recount attempts to destroy cultural artifacts, whether printed or crafted by hand, that have been stowed away in the family’s home. In the descriptions of book burning, by naming works drawn from both Iranian literature and the Western canon, Azar emphasizes all that Khomeini destroyed. The incinerated books were evidence of a secular identification within a certain generation that turned its gaze toward cosmopolitan sensibilities rather than confining itself to a single culture:
And so, with a slow sweep of the arm that remained forever etched in my memory, [the mullah] took out a match, lit it, and tossed it onto the pile of books . . . I vividly remember how . . . the fire spread to the intertwined lovers Pierre and Natasha, . . . Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde . . . Shirin and Farhad, Leyli and Majnun . . . I heard lone Rebecca’s cries and Colonel Buendía’s protests saying to Ursula with disgust, “Even in all of my tyranny, never did I do this.” . . . Animal Farm was burning: the cows, donkeys, pigs, dogs and horses braying and squealing; the odour of their roasting flesh filling all of Razan. But the mullah and his three companions felt nothing.
Censorship of print culture is not a new phenomenon, and Iran set precedents in the early twentieth century when reams of texts in a given language were destroyed by victors looking to make a point. (December 1946, after the Kurdish were defeated, was one example.) In Azar’s novel, there is a passing nod to Stalin’s censorship in the USSR—dealt with in some detail by Milan Kundera in many of his essays and novels—when Kundera’s own The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is hurled into raging flames by armed Revolutionary Guards. Towards the end of the novel, Azar offers a compelling contemplation of these themes, as Hushang reflects on his role as an individual resisting the massive demolition of culture carried out by Khomeini:
Hushang thought it better to take a look inward and ask himself what he had done all these years . . . In moving to Razan then returning to Tehran, hadn’t he just run away from the uncontrollable bitterness of his life? . . . He concluded that if he hadn’t given up and run away to Razan when the Revolution started . . . but instead, had tried to start and guide even a small movement with like-minded people, at least he would have felt better about himself now. Then he thought about Mohammad Mokhtari, Parvaneh and Dariush Fravahar, and Mohammad Puyande . . . executed bloggers and social activists who had just appeared in an article or the news, after years of silence. Despite all the strict censorship implemented by the Ministries of Islamic Guidance and Intelligence, you could still find informed critical commentary about the state of Iranian society in some books, and here and there in literary and social science publications. He thought, It seems society is still alive. It’s breathing.
Amid this presence of censorship and loss, objects—and particularly those related to reading and writing—acquire specific emotional import for the characters who possess them. In her youth, Roza had fallen in love with the poet Sohrab Sepheri on a rain-sprinkled evening inside a café on Nasser Khosro Street. Although they never cross paths again, she keeps The Wayfarer—the book of his that she bought and discussed with him that day—perfectly preserved. In the same way, she never quite surrenders her dreams of becoming a poet herself, despite having given up writing poetry after her marriage. To this end, she continues to sing verses from Persian songs and quotes snippets of poetry to her children. Later, a Parker pen that had been a gift from Sepheri is “capriciously stolen from on top of her desk by a mullah who had come with several Revolutionary Guards to arrest her son, Sohrab.” Her son, who is named after her first love, is connected with a treasured object seized from her by the same people who whisk him away.
Roza’s daughter Beeta is also objectified, but it takes a rather different form as a collective and rabid curiosity is directed at her. Having been blessed with powers of self-transmogrification by the spirit of a Zoroastrian ancestor, the grief of a lover’s desertion catalyzes her decision to transform into a mermaid. In a voyeuristic scrimmage, which quickly escalates into a gruesome murder, Beeta is raped and ripped apart by a large crowd of aggressors who are fascinated by her mythical form. The incredible violence exercised upon her body starkly mirrors the inexorable, heedless brutalities inflicted upon books and objects of art by the protectors of the despotic regime governing the country.
As the omniscient spirit of a deceased female character, Bahar, the other daughter and primary narrator, has well-established precedents in contemporary Iranian literature and film. When Bahar’s ghost says:
[t]here are a lot of good things about dying. You are suddenly light and free and no longer afraid of death, sickness, judgement or religion; you don’t have to grow up and live a repeat of others’ lives on your own behalf . . .
it reminded me of a few lines from Munis, a young woman in Shirin Neshat’s film Women Without Men (2009):
Now I’ll have silence. Silence . . . and nothing. And I thought the only freedom from pain is to be free from the world.
This scene expands on the suicide that occurs in Shahrnush Parsipur’s 1989 novella of the same title. Although it depicts the event through a powerful concatenation of images, the scene does not make room for any kind of interiority on Munis’s part during the fatal freefall from the high terrace of her family’s home. By virtue of being ethereal spirits, both Munis and Bahar gain not only a liberation from the worldly trappings of patriarchy and the authoritarian realpolitik surrounding them, but also a freedom of mobility that allows them to shift their perspective towards whichever spectacle stirs their interests. Just as Munis observes at a remove the men in the street milling around her own dead body, Bahar, too, hovers over her own corpse, watching her mother fainting into the “arms of the very woman who had lit the fire,” her father rushing into the flames to save her, and her shell-shocked siblings screaming and collapsing in the courtyard of their house.
Many peripheral and often picaresque characters share the narrative with the family. In one breathless, circuitous, and circumlocutory sentence that spans a dozen pages, another ghost besides Bahar’s relates its experiences, and there are others whose stories are granted a similar scope. When Beeta decides she would like to hire a gardener and goes into town looking for one, the reader meets Issa, a character whose ancestor had been a prominent midwife for the forest dwellers and who reveals part of the grove’s history in a miniature family saga. Eventually, Beeta is swept up in a whirlwind romance with him before he abandons her for someone else. (The crippling grief of this desertion finally prompts her to metamorphose into a mermaid.) The myriad subplots offered by these and other minor characters comprise the detailed narrative universe of the novel and render legitimate any comparisons with One Thousand and One Nights—a text mentioned in passing more than once, presumably to invite this very assessment. Greengage Tree, particularly in its second half, imitates a diffuse, mise en abyme structure similar to that of Nights. And even though some stories are seemingly unrelated to others, all play a role in effectively conveying the plot in its entirety precisely by making room for digressions.
The novel is also, at some level, a sumptuous meditation on the practice of interpretation. This process of hermeneutics can be directed towards written texts but also towards one’s embodied desires. Roza, for instance, goes on a journey through the forest which lies on the fringes of their village in a rebellious quest for self-discovery. In the sequences that unravel the process of Roza meeting a stranger, falling in love, and yet returning to run the household she had left behind, we find a writer’s deft reckoning with Iranian women’s uneasy relationship between their confinement within the tropes of traditional marriages and their consciousness of their own sexualities. By uncovering her hair and face before running into the heart of the forest, she also unveils the story of her life, her unique powers of expression, and her newfound sense of selfhood. By doing away with boundaries that restrict vision and movement, she not only frees her corporeal body from physical barriers, but also briefly moves towards an emotionally, and consequently sexually, unfettered existence.
For her husband, Hushang, however, interpretation has less to do with bodily desire than with the written word, and it occurs through rote learning and subsequently reproducing this knowledge. After the house’s small private library is seized and destroyed by vicious vigilantes, he asks his children to write down, in a clutch of cheap notebooks that he buys on impulse, all that they remember from those lost books. He asks them, in other words, to read and interpret their memories of those texts. When he is later arrested and asked to record the events of his life, he performs the same process by laboriously fleshing out every incident and crafting a lengthy, elaborate narrative. But the authorities reject this version, and in his rewrite he spins a yarn full of flagrant lies. He hides the story of his life under a patina of fabulism and myth, and it is only this second version that the officials accept as a veritable account. He turns reproduction through writing into an act of protest.
Like his father, Sohrab must face the authorities because of a collection of writings. On the grounds of possessing literature deemed disruptive to the tenets of the regime, he is wrongfully apprehended and taken from their home in handcuffs by the Armed Revolutionary Guards, like so many young people detained on fabricated, unjust charges throughout the history of dictatorships. After Sohrab’s involuntary removal from the house, Roza grows increasingly brooding and eccentric. Eventually, at the exact moment when Sohrab and other unjustly convicted young men are executed, she climbs up the tallest Greengage plum tree in the grove and achieves “enlightenment.” Her hair turns completely white at this moment of enlightenment, and this transformation later even becomes evident in Hushang’s appearance, too. But perhaps the clearest parallel emerges between Roza and mothers around the world whose children were incarcerated without trial or evidence. Her plight recalls the sorrows of mothers elsewhere, including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo depicted in the film The Official Story (1985) where they march on the streets for their lost children—seething, maddened by grief, and united in their resentment of despotic leaders who deprived them of their sons and daughters. When Roza starts walking toward the forest after her enlightenment, there is a profound sense of melancholy as other bereft mothers follow her:
The young Basiji had taken no more than a few steps when he saw one of the orphan mothers take off after Roza . . . They were just leaving the village square when the rest of the orphan mothers, one by one, eagerly followed . . . Their husbands ran after them, hoping to save them from their madness but, without even the faintest of smiles on their lips, the orphan mothers continued in the direction of the deep Mazandaranian forest.
[ . . . ]
The mothers thought, if we die they call our lone, defenceless children orphans, but when our children die, nobody calls us lone, defenceless mothers. It was thus that they began calling themselves “orphan mothers”. Mothers who had been orphaned by their children.
Yet even with so much sorrow, the novel is not without relief. Concealed in its expansive folds is a poetic justice, discernable only if one knows where to look. In an episode set in an alternate reality, Khomeini is visited by a vision about the numerous misdeeds he committed in life, and he dies in undignified agony, trapped in a literal hall of mirrors of his own construction. It is perhaps in this palace full of labyrinths with mysterious passages, winding staircases, and halls of mirrors that the novel first veers away from accurate historical detail. Just as injustices are redressed through Khomeini’s death, breached promises are followed by equally painful curses, as when a line of human women are doomed because their foremother had once mistreated a djinn’s daughter. And although Roza does return to the lonely routine of her old life with Hushang, she does so only after experiencing passionate love with somebody else—a stranger in the depths of the Mazandaranian forest.
Restrained humor surfaces occasionally. In one instance, police discover One Hundred Years of Solitude in Beeta’s bag. The confounded but nevertheless coolly confident “guards” take a whole hour to pass it between themselves and examine its contents before deciding that it is not politically dangerous enough to warrant being seized or its owners being arrested on the spot. That the bristling subversiveness of García Márquez is beyond the ken of these burly aggressors becomes an inside joke between the reader and Azar, who in turn uses the Colombian writer’s characteristic style to enact her own critique.
Although The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree addresses the terrors of living in a political dystopia where democracy has been passed over for a surveillance state run by a religious fanatic and his murderous vigilantes, it is no less a novel about enduring love, familial warmth, and the power of stories to act as talismans in the face of spiritual darkness. The number of massacres recounted in the novel is directly proportional to the amount of exquisite Persian poetry and songs quoted in it; the chapters devoted to describing regularized forms of systemic oppression are zealously rivalled by the mass of pages which describe both the luxuriant pleasures of reading and loving and the vagaries of romantic love between two individuals with their own set of troubles. As a result, one comes away from this novel that mourns Iran’s past with a profound, abiding sense of melancholy that is difficult to shake off.
