Literature and war

Returning to a changed city

Rabihavi recalls living and working in Tehran when the war began, then travelling back towards Abadan with friends. His account follows a difficult journey, a long walk and a final approach by water. Once inside the city, he remembers digging shelters, cooking with food left in abandoned houses and remaining through a period of siege. Source 1

These details put daily work beside catastrophe. The city appears through people preparing food, finding shelter and deciding whether to stay. They help explain why the interview’s discussion of war writing repeatedly returns to ordinary lives rather than a commanding view of the battlefield. Source 1

A life beside the official story

Foumani asks about the early anti-war stories and the enthusiasm for war around them. Rabihavi describes learning from Hemingway how a restrained telling can make a catastrophe more painful. In Memoirs of a Soldier, a soldier can laugh or play without possessing an organised argument against war: the life itself unsettles the heroic account. Source 1

The conversation also follows hostile reception. Rabihavi recalls Reza Rahgozar writing a response to When the Smoke of War Was Seen in the Sky that accused him of misrepresenting the war. His account links that criticism with the pressure to make civilian suffering serve a heroic public story. The interview supplies Rabihavi’s recollection of the response, rather than an inspected copy of Rahgozar’s text. Source 1

When From This Place failed to receive permission, he found other publication settings for individual stories. He recalls The Hole appearing in a collection alongside eight other writers, and In the Plain, Along the Road appearing in Nameh-ye Kanun. His answer does not name the first collection or establish that it was the collective volume titled Eight Stories. Source 1

What happens after a story is printed

Rabihavi says an unauthorised political reprint of The Corpse led to accusations of organisational membership and imprisonment. He describes nine months of detention, interrogation and torture, while denying membership in the organisation. This remains his personal account; the interview does not supply a court record. Source 1

Later questions move from the front to temporary accommodation in Tehran. He connects displaced people he knew with the confined spaces and strained relationships of stories and Maryam’s Smile. War survives in the room, the family and the next unpredictable encounter. Source 1

He remembers his mother moving from the small student house he shared into accommodation for displaced people, where she stayed for several years. Frequent visits brought him close to fellow Abadan residents living with shared bathrooms and uncertain prospects. He connects those rooms with Maryam’s Smile, The Flowerpot and The Wound while leaving the fictional characters their own lives. Source 1

The Wound gives a concrete example of his limited viewpoint. Readers may imagine different explanations for the daughter’s work, but Rabihavi says the story does not settle it: its knowledge stays with the father. Foumani’s fear that the violence will escalate and the author’s account of withholding information show how the same scene can leave different readings open. Source 1

A conversation across time

The publisher dates the conversation to summer 2022 and its publication to 28 July 2023, explaining that publication was delayed. Toward the end, Boys of Love brings the discussion back to revolution and war through an intimate relationship. The interview is both a recollection of earlier events and a later account of how they became literature. Source 1

Before the war books

His rejection of heroic war narratives has an earlier history. As a teenager he followed the Vietnam war, kept images of the Viet Cong in his room and read Oriana Fallaci’s reporting in Ferdowsi. He recalls avoiding Hollywood films that turned war into a reassuring spectacle. These remembered choices precede the war he would later experience in Abadan. Source 1

He names Heinrich Böll beside Hemingway when discussing what war writing could do. He also recalls relatives married across the Iran–Iraq border, with an Iraqi grandmother on one side and an Iranian grandmother on the other. The division between two states did not describe the connections within those families. He questions the opposition between the official language of Sacred Defence and its designated anti-war counterpart. Source 1

Readers and the record of a death

The early readership included schoolteachers who travelled to Tehran to buy copies for their pupils, bringing lists so he could sign the books individually. He remembers reprintings, payment from the publisher and recognition from the Children’s Book Council. These are details of circulation in his retrospective account, separate from the surviving imprints and their edition dates. Source 1

He connects Jasad, indexed in English as The Body or The Corpse, with the death of a former classmate whose body was brought back for burial. In his account, a political organisation later reprinted the story without permission and the authorities treated that circulation as evidence of affiliation. He denies having belonged to the organisation. The story’s remembered origin, the use others made of it and his resulting imprisonment remain distinct parts of the testimony. Source 1

Recalling the bombing of the Kuy-e Zolfaghari neighbourhood, he contrasts civilian deaths he says he saw with a broadcast denying casualties. He remembers the limits of what cameras showed as well as what lay outside their frame. This is his recollection of an encounter with official representation, not a casualty count independently reconstructed by the website. Source 1

Shelter and the lives a novel follows

His account of displacement includes help organised by ordinary people, who found empty buildings for families, including accommodation intended for athletes. The focus falls on the work of making shelter available, as well as the losses that sent people there. He does not describe displacement only through state decisions or military events. Source 1

When the conversation reaches Boys of Love, he says he wanted to write about love, following a relationship through the years before the revolution and into the war. The historical changes belong to the lives of the lovers. His answer resists allowing the surrounding upheaval to replace the relationship at the centre of the novel. Source 1

Sources & credits

1. Aasoo · literature and war

   Maryam Foumani’s Persian interview, published 28 July 2023. The publisher says the conversation took place in summer 2022 and publication was delayed.