From Isfahan to Ménilmontant: The Journey of Ali Erfan
Translated from French
The Orient, with its mysteries and torments, has always nourished the Western imagination. But what do we really know about contemporary Persia, about this land of poetry that became the theater of a revolution that disrupted the world order? It is a window onto this Iran, steeped in contradictions, that the work of Ali Erfan opens for us—writer and filmmaker1Filmmaker: An episode illustrates the direct threats that weighed on the artist and precipitated his exile. When his second film was screened in Iran, the Minister of Culture, present in the room, declared at the end: “The only white wall on which the blood of the impure has not yet been shed is the cinema screen. If we execute this traitor and this screen becomes red, all filmmakers will understand that one cannot play with the interests of the Muslim people.” born in Isfahan in 1946, and forced into exile in France since 1981. His work, written in a French language he has made his own, is a poignant testimony of rare finesse about the tragedy of a people and the condition of exile.
Writing as Resistance
In his art of probing souls tormented by tyranny and the absurdity of fanaticism, many see in Ali Erfan the worthy heir of the great Sadegh Hedayat2Sadegh Hedayat: Father of modern Iranian letters, buried at Père-Lachaise, in Paris.. His writing, of implacable rawness, plunges us into a dark and oppressive universe, almost Kafkaesque—that of a society delivered to the terror established by the “hallucinatory philosophy of the imams”: whether it be the persecuted women of Ma femme est une sainte (My Wife Is a Saint), the oppressed artists of Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), or the cursed figures of Les Damnées du paradis (The Damned of Paradise). The death that permeates these stories is not that of violence alone, but of the totalitarian State that engenders it, this edifice that, to erect itself, needs a cement of bodies. It is this same cement that we find in Sans ombre (Without Shadow), a powerful testimony about the Iran-Iraq War, this “appalling charnel house,” comparable to the trench battles of the Great War, which drank the blood of hundreds of thousands of men:
“There were also volunteers who, with the idea of dying, excavated the ground to make holes like graves, which they called ’bridal chamber for the lovers of God.’
But it mattered little what meaning each gave to his temporary dwelling; he had to dig his hole in the direction of Mecca and not in relation to the enemy who was facing him.”
Erfan, Ali. Sans ombre (Without Shadow), La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “Regards croisés,” 2017.
If Ali Erfan does not have the joy of believing, that is his defect, or rather his misfortune. But this misfortune stems from a very grave cause, I mean the crimes he has seen committed in the name of a religion whose precepts have been distorted and diverted from their true meaning, faith becoming madness:
“He opened one of the thick files without haste, removed a sheet, examined it, and suddenly cried out:
—Lock this woman in a burlap sack, and throw stones at her until she dies like a dog. […]
And he continued, repeating the same gesture, tossing aside the writing of one who had traveled to God, seizing another […]. He suddenly stood up, standing on the table, and cried like a madman:
—Let the father strangle his son with his own hands…”
Erfan, Ali. Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), trans. from Persian by the author and Michèle Cristofari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “L’Aube poche,” 1990.
Of Exile and Memory
Exile is a wound that never quite closes. In Adieu Ménilmontant (Farewell Ménilmontant), Ali Erfan leaves his native Persia for a time to speak to us of France, his land of refuge. The novel is a tribute to the rue de Ménilmontant, that cosmopolitan quarter of Paris where he lived and worked as a photographer. It is a tender and sometimes cruel chronicle of the life of the “lost souls of the world,” those pariahs of life who, like him, have washed up in this refuge. However, even in France, Iran is never far away. The smells, the sounds, the faces, everything recalls the lost Orient. A memory that, to fight against oblivion, selects from the past the most salient features.
Each time he undertakes to write, Ali Erfan seeks the time of his early youth. He tastes the ecstasy of recollection, the pleasure of finding lost and forgotten things in his native language. And, as this recovered memory does not faithfully recount what happened, it is the true writer; and Ali Erfan is its first reader:
“Now, I know its language [French]. But I don’t want to speak. […] Madame says: ’My dear, say: jasmine.’ I don’t want to. I want to pronounce the name of the flower that was in our house. What was it called? Why don’t I remember? That large flower that grew in the corner of the courtyard. That climbed, that turned. It climbed over the door of our house, and it fell into the street. […] What was it called? It smelled good. Madame says again: ’Say, my dear.’ I cry, I cry…”
Erfan, Ali. Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), trans. from Persian by the author and Michèle Cristofari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “L’Aube poche,” 1990.
The work of Ali Erfan, at once singular and universal, plunges us into an oppressive Orient, where the leaden cloak of a tentacular theocracy weighs heavy. Certainly, one might fear that the writer of exile serves, despite himself, only to feed the clichés of “Western Islamophobia” — a thesis at the heart of “Is Exile Literature a Minor Literature?” by Hessam Noghrehchi. But whoever saw only this side of things would miss the essential point; for Persian culture has always made separation and exile the source of its purest song. Such is the lesson of Rûmî’s flute, whose sublime music is born from its stem torn from its native reed bed: “Listen to the reed flute tell a story; it laments the separation: ’Since I was cut from the reed bed, my complaint makes man and woman groan’”. The voice of Ali Erfan, like that of this flute, is thus born not despite the crack, but indeed through it, transmuting the brutality of reality into a poignant melody.
To Go Further
About Adieu Ménilmontant (Farewell Ménilmontant)
Quotations
“[…] I love this street. It is the jugular vein of a neighborhood that remains the refuge of all the lost souls of the world. For generations, pariahs of life have washed up in this place, like me, familiar with these surroundings and yet more foreign than ever.
Let’s not complicate things! Having gradually lost all nostalgia for my country and not desiring, moreover, to belong to this city, I feel from nowhere. I feel free!”
Erfan, Ali. Adieu Ménilmontant (Farewell Ménilmontant), La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “Regards croisés,” 2005.
Downloads
Sound Recordings
- Ali Erfan about Adieu Ménilmontant (Farewell Ménilmontant). (France Télévisions).
About La 602e nuit (The 602nd Night)
Quotations
“I straightened up to open the curtain. A mixture of cold, lunar clarity and warm light diffused by the street lamps poured into the room. She was dressed in black from head to toe, even to the gloves. She had put so much exaggeration into it that her face seemed quite foreign to me, framed by the scarf. But as soon as she had removed it, I discovered her long hair, waving more than ever down to her waist. And I recognized her. She also held a bouquet of flowers in her hand. I smiled:
—You see me confused.
—Don’t joke, it’s not for you.”
Erfan, Ali. La 602e nuit (The 602nd Night), trans. from Persian by Anita Niknam and Jean-Luc Moreau, La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “Regards croisés,” 2000.
About La Route des infidèles (The Road of the Infidels)
Quotations
“For an hour, I had lost Ostâd in the crowd. I was trying to listen to the pilgrims’ conversations under the dome. But I heard nothing but vague and confused sounds. I was getting lost, more and more. In a corner, an old man was saying his prayer. He was of perfect nobility. From afar, it seemed to me that he was cut off from the world and that he had eternity before him. He attracted me. As soon as I was near him, against the wall, I saw that his lips were moving.”
Erfan, Ali. La Route des infidèles (The Road of the Infidels), La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “Regards croisés,” 1991.
About Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World)
Quotations
“My tale will be swift like the angel of death when he appears through the window or through the crack under the door, seizes the soul of the worst of tyrants and disappears immediately by the same path, carrying away the soul of a poet.”
Erfan, Ali. Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), trans. from Persian by the author and Michèle Cristofari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “L’Aube poche,” 1990.
About Les Damnées du paradis (The Damned of Paradise)
Quotations
“I did not write this story. I received it by mail. On the envelope, someone had stuck a label and typed in small characters my name and my address in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris. I opened the package and discovered sheets blackened with bad handwriting, by a hasty hand. They were dirty and of disparate size. Each could have belonged to a different century. One of them seemed torn from the river, so soaked was it. Someone had dried it and, on the stains, had reconstructed certain words dissolved by the water, which could still be guessed. At first examination, obviously, I did not notice this detail, just as I did not think that tears rather than river water could have washed away the lines to the point of making them invisible.”
Erfan, Ali. Les Damnées du paradis (The Damned of Paradise), trans. from Persian by the author and Michèle Cristofari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1996 (reissued 2017).
About Ma femme est une sainte (My Wife Is a Saint)
Quotations
“I don’t remember when and where I read this story3This story is that of the founding of the city of Zobeide, taken from the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.; but I am aware that my dreams of the past, I had constructed them after reading this short story.
The story told that men, living in regions distant from one another, had suddenly begun to have the same dream: a moonlight appeared at night, in a deserted, unknown city. A naked woman ran through the alleys, she had long hair, one only saw her from behind. Each dreamer pursued her through the city, but suddenly, the woman disappeared around the corner of a street, and the dreamer could no longer reach her…”
Erfan, Ali. Ma femme est une sainte (My Wife Is a Saint), La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “Regards croisés,” 2002.
About Sans ombre (Without Shadow)
Quotations
“Hundreds of young people were trampling in the courtyard. As one approached the recruiters’ offices, there was growing agitation. In the corridor, several groups were arguing loudly. It was chaos: no one to inform or guide the new volunteers, not even the bearded men with armbands who ran in all directions. Hundreds of students clogged the corridor; they pushed […], joked, applauded, but few were those who protested. One didn’t have the impression that they were leaving for the front, but rather for a picnic by the Caspian Sea. The war was far away, death was absent.”
Erfan, Ali. Sans ombre (Without Shadow), La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, coll. “Regards croisés,” 2017.
Bibliography
- Daneshvar, Esfaindyar. La Littérature transculturelle franco-persane: Une évolution littéraire depuis les années 80 (Franco-Persian Transcultural Literature: A Literary Evolution Since the 1980s), Leiden: Brill, coll. “Francopolyphonies,” 2018.
- Kieffer, Anne. “Le cinéma de la révolution islamique” (The Cinema of the Islamic Revolution), Jeune Cinéma, no. 134, April 1981, p. 28-30.
- Lindon, Mathieu. “L’Enfer paradisiaque d’Ali Erfan” (The Paradisiacal Hell of Ali Erfan), Libération, November 14, 1996. (Journal Libération).
- Lindon, Mathieu. “Nous avons tous tué Hedayat” (We Have All Killed Hedayat) [Interview with Ali Erfan], Libération, October 3, 1996. (Journal Libération).
- Martin, Patrice and Drevet, Christophe (eds.). La Langue française vue d’ailleurs: 100 entretiens (The French Language Seen from Elsewhere: 100 Interviews), Casablanca: Tarik Éditions, 2001.
- Noghrehchi, Hessam. “La littérature d’exil est-elle une littérature mineure?” (Is Exile Literature a Minor Literature?), Folia litteraria romanica, no. 9, 2014, p. 87-95. (Hyper articles en ligne (HAL)).
- Terradillos, Jean-Luc. “Exil chez les modernes” (Exile Among the Moderns) [Interview with Ali Erfan], L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes, no. 18, 1992, p. 40-41. (L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes).
- Terradillos, Jean-Luc. “Le temps de l’écriture est un exil” (The Time of Writing Is an Exile) [Interview with Ali Erfan], L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes, no. 53, 2001, p. 94-95. (L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes).
