Foreword
by David Saccone-Braslow
October 23, 2023
Salar Abdoh and David Saccone-Braslow at the City College of New York, 2023.
Salar Abdoh is a novelist, essayist, and translator born in Tehran, Iran. He attended a boarding school in England before relocating to Los Angeles when his father left Iran for the United States following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Abdoh received his undergraduate degree from U.C. Berkeley and his Master's from the City College of New York, where now teaches creative writing. His novels include The Poet Game (2000), Opium (2004), Tehran at Twilight (2014), and Out of Mesopotamia (2020). As a war correspondent, Abdoh has worked in war zones in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
I sat down with Salar Abdoh in the FICTION office on May 16, 2023 to discuss his process while writing under the duress and extreme conditions of war, his short story, “Borges's Search for Averroes,” recently published in FICTION Number 66, and his forthcoming novel, A Nearby Country Called Love, which is due out in November 2023. In the atmosphere of Jorge Louis Borges, we delved into the metaphysical world, eternity, and the parallelogram of consciousness.
Salar Abdoh
An Interview
with David Saccone-Braslow
at the FICTION office
May 16, 2023
David Saccone-Braslow: Salar, thank you so much for coming and interviewing for FICTION.
In the best of circumstances, life produces extreme conditions that challenge us as writers and our capacity and will to create. As you described in your Guernica article, “Suspended States” in 2022, you were in Ukraine, in the middle of a chaotic war, facing artillery, in close proximity to Russian lines. Can you describe what is happening to the writer in you in that chaos? What does the process look like in those moments?
Salar Abdoh: When I first started doing this sort of thing, being in wars in Syria and Iraq [and] Afghanistan—I feel like the last decade and a half of my life has been nothing but war mostly—I used to think more like, you know, How can I make a narrative out of this? But—you've been a soldier yourself—when you're with guys in these long period stretches of time, something happens and you become part of that narrative. You're no longer separated from it, and at least for me, I stopped being a writer and started having to live wars. It was only later on, after going through many processes, many bouts of anger, and maybe even overdrinking that I went back to being a writer.
But in Ukraine, it wasn't like that. Kabul just had fallen the year before. I was deeply involved in that, and I'd written about the resistant fighters in the Hindu Kush. A few months ago, every last of those guys were killed in a raid. I was thinking, I've been involved in this war and everybody's attention now is on Europe. It's as if twenty years of hell was just forgotten in an instant, and I wanted to understand why this was and what my role, if anything, is in all of that.
That’s when I went to Ukraine. I had a definite game plan, and I was with journalists from France 24, but they were this Spanish crew. Being with journalists, it's a different ball game than like being with Shiite militias in Iraq or Syria, so over in Ukraine I was conscious of my being a writer more, [but] it depends where you are. When you're just a few clicks from the Russians, in this case, the adrenaline, it takes over. You’re not really thinking about being a writer.
David: In the 2018 piece, “The Cleric and I,” you discuss what it's like coming back from Iraq and resuming teaching at that time and you described this multiplicity of worlds and how some people don't come back, they wind up going crazy. You elaborate that it was a parallel existence when you enter a classroom and your students are complaining about the train—it's a double reality. In the Marines, they refer to this look one earns as a thousand-yard-stare. I've been in your class and you've described this feeling of kinda glazing off and you have to take a moment to get yourself back. What are you seeing in these moments?
Salar: I don't want to get too much into that because it's a rabbit hole I don't want to go to, but that article, for instance, it was about a moment when a fella decides that, I would take a bullet for that guy. That's a juncture that most people don't get into in life, but that's why I think my last novel, Out of Mesopotamia… a lot of American veterans, even though they were on the other side of the fight, they really understood it. Like I told you last week, this Marine major wrote me from Japan saying, “I was writing this article, and I was rereading your book the whole time as I was writing it.”
I think that thousand-yard-stare or thousand-mile-stare doesn't happen with everyone. I've seen men who are just like pure brutes, right? Like, nothing fazes them and actually they can be pretty sadistic, right? You've seen them too, but if you have a grain of humanity in you and you see some things and maybe you did some things—maybe you just kicked the body part because you were angry because your friend got killed yesterday— you have to walk around with those things. Maybe you're not a combat soldier, but you're with these guys day in and day out and you relive these things over and over again.
This journal, [The Markaz Review], wanted a story from me called, “The Long Walk of the Martyr.” I was writing a couple of years ago about these guys I've been with and after this last war, they just didn't know what to do with themselves, you know? That's all they do, they're war junkies. So [“The Long Walk of the Martyr"] was about this guy that the narrator helps to go back to the war so he can become a martyr. As I was writing it, a friend of mine called from one of the provinces in Iran and said, “What are you up to these days?” and he was like an old, seasoned vet who’d fought with the Northern Alliance in the ’90s with Ahmad Shah Massoud against everybody: against the Taliban, the Soviets… everybody. I said, Oh, I'm writing this story about guys who come back from wars and they just don't know what to do with themselves. And he said, “Salar, you're writing my story.”
I've repeated this in a couple of other interviews because it really stays with me. It's a really acute thing that happens to certain people. Then, you know, in my life… I mean, I make jokes of it and I try to be an easygoing guy, but it really is a long passage from some of these places to [the City College of New York], right? There are times when I'll be in that seminar room and I just kind of zone out for a minute, but I've learned how to pull myself back from the brink.
David: Now, with that said, would you have any advice for a vet returning or even anyone that would serve in a combat zone?
Salar: Don't drink too much. [Laughs] Seriously—
David: Good advice.
Salar: —don't drink too much ‘cause that's just a bad place to go. And guys—by guys I mean men, mature fucking men—they can help each other the best just talking and being with each other.
The trouble is that the bureaucracy of these systems, whether it's the U.S. or the East… it's good on paper, but they don't really help you. I have a friend [in upstate New York] who's a psychiatrist, and he sees a lot of these vets who are just a mess.
One time I was in Kurdistan, and I was in a refugee camp and this Kurdish lady said to me, you know, like—you know, what do you say to a woman whose husband, brothers, sons got their heads cut off in front of her and her daughters raped? Like how do I… I mean, is there any therapy in the world to… there isn’t. There are brutalities in this world that you just can't do anything about. That's why in Out of Mesopotamia, I have this character, this woman—I saw people like that who just went around chopping off the head of enemy combatants—and because this woman had been so brutalized… I wasn't trying to make that okay, but I was trying to convey that I can see how somebody would get to a point where it would do that.
David: Your novel, Out of Mesopotamia opens up with a quote from the 17th century English poet, Richard Crashaw. He's a very metaphysical poet and the quote is taken from the poem, “Upon the Infant Martyrs:”
To see both blended in one flood,
The mothers’ milk, the children’s blood…
What is that nexus between your work and the metaphysical? Where does that intercede?
Salar: That's a really good question. I picked that poem because just those two lines were really apt.
David: It's from the Book of Matthew about Herod—
Salar: I think so. I'm not sure. You’d know better, but I just always saw that in the Norton Anthology. I thought I want to use that one, I had chosen a poet of the Spanish Civil War, this amazing poem, but I couldn't get the rights for it. One of the main themes of Out of Mesopotamia is about the guys who go into battle fully expecting or wishing to be killed—That's just not a normal thing to do—and transcending because of that.
David: In 2022, we had the “Spotlight: Writers on Iran” series with you and Chris Hedges here at CCNY. Chris speaks about how he became adept in understanding when a guy is ready to leave this world, that you can almost see a halo over his head. What does that phenomenon—it's real in my opinion—tell us about the universe and humanity? And was the character Ali-Akbar based on a specific person?
Salar: He was totally based on a real person, and he was killed in front of me, and I… I was filming— about 85 percent of what's in Out of Mesopotamia comes from my own life—and I knew he was going to get killed before he did. Like, I knew at some point he was going to get killed. He was just at that sweet spot, right? He was like a really great guy but those last days he was specially kind and wonderful. You just wanted to, like, hug the guy. He was ready to go and he went… and that day I realized I was supposed to be with him, I was supposed to go to the front trench with him. I was in the back, putting my lens on [when] these two Persian [snipers] came [to get me]. l wasn’t there, and they said, “Oh, we'll catch him in the afternoon.” So there was guilt and all that, and I went back to the headquarters—my headquarters was with the Arabs, not with the Persian snipers—and I just started rolling my camera and talking about how crappy I felt and all of that.
Yeah, so he was real, and I knew he was going to get killed. When he did, one of the fascinating things to me was how quickly others, his brothers just sort of, accepted it. It was like another day, right? What are you going to do, right? What will you do?
In the book, his best friend, this short guy—snipers, a lot of times, the best are the shorter guys—was good and [and the character] talks about how he took his sleep of a thousand years. I mean, that was real; this guy [I knew] just went to sleep and wouldn't wake up for the longest time.
Marcel Proust, 1895.
David: You’ve spoken about how, when writing Out of Mesopotamia, you wanted to consult notes from a Marcel Proust book that you had left in Tehran. Could you tell us about that? It’s such a great story.
Salar: Yeah, in my twenties was one of the times I was going to Tehran, I took my whole thing of Proust with me and eleven boxes of books. All my life, my books end up in other people's hands. If you go to my apartment, I don't have any books, other people have my books. Reading [Proust] back in those days, it really affected me—just the depth of human psychology that he could muster.
[Years later], I had something in my head, and I was here [in New York], [so] I called my friend, Ali, and I said, You know my Proust is in your house. Can you take it out and, all the places that I underlined in the last book, Time Regained, can you just take photos of them and send it to me in WhatsApp?
And then what's amazing about the talk with Chris Hedges—because he's really a seasoned war reporter—he said “Salar, I was in Sarajevo, and I read all of Proust three times.” Three times he read it because war is like one of the most boring things you can do. Usually you're just sitting around waiting, praying somebody shoots you so you can shoot back. You're bored to death, so you take books, but I'm never successful at reading anything because my eyes are bad, and there’s never good light.
David: Proust speaks a lot about dreams. Are you affected by your dreams or use them in your writing? Do they enter your process at all?
Salar: I have dreams and nightmares, but I try not to go to those places. [Laughs]
David: We're going to get into Borges and the connection to your story, Borges’s Search for Averroes, in FICTION Number 66. Borges was influenced a great deal by Islamic mysticism and Islamic theologians. He was known for quoting the Qur’an in stories like “The Zahir,” “The Mirror of Ink,” “Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv,” “A Double for Mohammed,” and “Averroes's Search,” which your story is based upon. Borges’ perspective on Islam is different in each story. Do you think that, on the whole, Borges’s perspective was a Western perspective in his understanding of Islam?
Salar: No, I never think about these things like the Western eye and all of that. He was just really interested in Islamic thought—not necessarily just mysticism—in the same way he was interested in the northern myths and things of that nature. He read many of the great Arab and Persian poets and writers and theologians and philosophers.
I was interested in the writer Borges thinking about [Averroes]—I'll call him by his Arab name, which is Ibn Rushd—and [I was] thinking about the tragedy and Aristotle and it was an amazing story. The reason I got to it [is that] I've written a novel some years ago that I haven't published yet because it's so different from anything else I've done. It's a historical novel about the original Assassins, a sect who got their start in Persia, and I had a female character who was [a] trained assassin. Anyway, I got lazy in the middle of it and I thought, Okay, I'll just write this short story for the time being about Borges and Ibn Rushd, and I'll revisit the Assassins another time.
David: “Borges’s Search for Averroes,” leaves us off with a lot of questions such as, What if the world is infinite? What matters if infinity is added to infinity? These are questions that Borges tries to confront as well. Aristotle’s discourse, On the Soul, argues that parts of the soul, the intellect, can exist without a body. When Borges closes his eyes and Toledo disappears, it's such a magic moment.
Salar: There's a lot of things involved in those last paragraphs. First of all, the idea of infinity was something that occupied all of these guys. Ibn Rushd [was occupied with] how far back the universe went and certain arguments were seen as being against God, and all of that.
For a long time, Islam was a huge part of Spain. That moment, as the Arabs were starting their long, slow retreat from Spain has always been a really interesting moment in history for me. Also, they left an amazing tradition. I mean, the poetry and the philosophy… and the many of the great Jewish poets and philosophers wrote in Arabic and they came from Córdoba and all of those places You can be go as a tourist and see what they left behind: the architecture and in the language also.
But I thought the combination of Ibn Rushd, the Aristotle, Borges, infinity, Spain, Buenos Aires, all of that was just too good to pass up. I wasn't sure what I was doing. And there were these amazing poetesses in Spain, like Princess Wallada is a real historical character.
David: She sewed the poems into the hem of her dress.
Salar: And there was an amazing love poetry between men and women in the Spain of that time.
David: And it was a major place of translation—
Salar: Yeah, there was a great translation movement.
David: You do quite a bit of translating. Sometimes there's no equivalent when translating, and the translator has to play jazz. What is that like?
Salar: Yeah, I do a lot of translation, more as I grow older because I want to get other people's voices heard in this great ocean that's the English language. You do really have an obligation and responsibility. You sort of play God at the same time because there really are moments where, in order to convey the feeling, you have to actually take a detour. You can't, you know, translate word for word, sometimes not even sentence by sentence. So you're sort of playing God in those moments, and it's debatable whether you should or not. Theories of translation abound.
I think one of the things that in [“Borges’s Search for Averroes”] was acute for me is just Ibn Rushd is accusing our heroine that [she is] kind of playing God. It's another kind of translation, like theater like imitation, right? In history, these are things that have been argued in the West and in the East also, so I was interested in that. I was interested in theater, having my own work in theater with my late brother and all of that. So I just wanted to do something where everything was brought in in four pages and see if I could do it.
David: If I may, it's a good segue into your new book coming out in November, A Nearby Country Called Love. How much of that book is in the memory of your brother?
Salar: A lot of it. I knew I would get to that story one day and in order to do it I spent considerable amounts of time in Iran with the LGBQ community. I took a whole different direction from, you know, being with guys in the frontlines and went this way because I wanted to understand how life is for this segment of society that's ostracized, that’s oppressed—not all the time—and where laws can turn on you in a dime if somebody just decides they don't like you.
More than any of that, the tribe that I come from is very courageous and very violent. They're known for that, and everybody has a gun and manhood has to do with, you know, horseback riding, sharpshooting, and you go to village—
David: Your dad was the head of the the soccer club.
Salar: My old man was a boxer, and he was—
David: Very masculine.
Salar: Yeah, he was [a] very… macho guy, and then his oldest son was gay, right? I grew up with that, I grew up between these two guys who really didn't like each other very much and all of the things that brewed in our culture. I knew one day I would deal with it, I would write about it because I was not satisfied with the things that get written here. In the West we think that everything is fine and dandy now, but 90% of the world is the world I just described. 90% of the world is not New York City, Los Angeles, or Berlin or Paris. There's violence and people are killed for, I don't know, for very simple things. I wanted to write about that from a point of view of a sensitive straight guy, so to speak, because we've kind of gotten a bad rap too, right? We're seen as like we don't understand, we don’t care, but like I care. I care.
I cared about my brother. He was my brother, and I grew up with him. I care about that, and I wanted to write something where the memoir-esque novel is not about coming out, but it's about watching the violence of men, specifically, and how this particular man—who’s very much myself, actually—dealt with the violence around him while trying to protect his brother and understand his brother, in that world. Often times he failed. I failed most of my life, until I didn't fail anymore. It took a while because we're not born wise, right? It takes time for us to become wise human beings. It took me a long time to understand what a person goes [through] who is not quote-unquote part of “the establishment” that that society is and that society’s hypocrisies and everything that exists with it. (How they suffer and how that suffering rebounds on their oppressors as well.)
And so someone like me, who can actually go and hang out with soldiers in front lines, but who has the ability to actually hang out with— Like this trans couple led me into their world. I thanked them in the beginning of the book. They opened the portals into their life. I couldn't have written this book without them and like the minutiae of the things they go through. And I wanted to show that a person, a man is capable of occupying all of these worlds and just because I can do that, it doesn't mean it precludes this. I was trying to create that character.
David: One more question before you go. What would you do if you could just be doing something else and what would that be?
Salar: The character in this book, he grows up doing martial arts. Being from this tribe we came from, we were put into martial arts from a very young age, so all my life I wanted to do nothing but martial arts, and it’s very likely that’s what I would’ve done. At some point, I was doing karate eight hours a day, and I had to decide, Dude, you either stay in college or you do this, you can’t do both. And I put that aside and did this.
David: So if we didn’t have Salar that we know, we may have a UFC fighter, a cage fighter, or you’d be more like the monk in the temple teaching martial arts?
Salar: I’d like to think I could, but my back hurts, my eyes are no good— Like no, I don’t have what it takes, but I would’ve liked that. I was trained to be that, but I don’t think I had it in me.
David: Well, you’re a samurai of sorts, and I thank you so much for your time today.
The audio track was transcribed
by Jessica Earle and Chris Bonfiglio
by Salar Abdoh
AT THE END OF A STORY he wrote about the greatest medieval commentator of Aristotle, Borges noted: The instant I stop believing in him, Averroes disappears.