The voices of Abadan

More than one language at home

Rabihavi describes a childhood lived between Persian and Arabic. Persian was prominent at home with his mother, while the extended paternal family and neighbouring communities spoke Arabic. His account moves between family life, local speech, radio and television rather than treating a region as a single cultural voice. Source 1

The interviewer asks how that world appears in his fiction. The answer is attentive to the people who speak, the circumstances in which they speak and the stories a dominant language may fail to hear. Language belongs to a life, not simply to a label placed on a character. Source 1

A story in the lamplight

His mother’s reading is one of the interview’s most vivid memories. On the rooftop at night, she read and told stories by lamplight. Amir Arsalan appears in this recollection alongside a household in which books and spoken stories were part of everyday experience. Source 1

He also remembers life among palm groves and visits to surrounding villages. The interview brings local poems, musicians and stories into the account of his formation. These are particular recollections, rather than an attempt to make every childhood scene into a direct model for a later fictional episode. Source 1

He tells how seasonal birds acquired stories of missing children and how fishermen’s long absences became tales of a mermaid and time lost beneath the water. Wedding musicians sang of people who had gone away. In these memories, oral storytelling gives absence a form that a community can recognise and pass on. Source 1

School and the oil city

Rabihavi remembers Arabic-speaking classmates struggling when lessons began in Persian, and Arabic-speaking teachers who were not permitted to teach in their own language. He also recalls pupils from outlying districts doing particularly well later. The interview follows language through a classroom’s daily work and relationships. Source 1

Family employment brings another part of Abadan into view. His father made doors and windows for oil-company housing before buying a palm grove; an older brother’s company job later took the family into staff housing. He distinguishes those jobs from the ninety-day contracts repeatedly offered to other labourers, connecting remembered prosperity with differences in security and benefits. Source 1

A remembered life enters fiction

Discussing A Ballad of Love, he says his grandmother from Basra gave him the starting point for a story about a young woman transferred into marriage as part of a settlement after a killing. He also credits a partner’s criticism of the treatment of women in Iranian writing with influencing the work. The recollection explains an imaginative beginning without turning the finished story into a literal family history. Source 1

The interview returns to other people whose work he wanted fiction to notice: villagers cycling at night to carry tea, sugar and cigarettes for small profits, children at brick kilns, and families displaced by war. He says he asks how those people would tell their own stories and what they would begin with. The concern is with recovering a person’s way of speaking as well as the conditions of a life. Source 1

Work, reporting and performance

Foumani’s questions follow the working lives recorded in the stories. Rabihavi recalls reporting on child labour with photographer Manouchehr Deghati and writing Mordad, at the Foot of the Kilns of the South during that period. Reporting and fiction meet here, but a fictional child is not identified as a particular person interviewed for the report. Source 1

The conversation also reaches school theatre and the Abadan television theatre group he joined at sixteen. This places performance within his early formation, before the later London plays. He remembers a collective practice involving classmates, local actors and the director Ali Sayyadi, whom he says died on the first day Abadan was bombed. Source 1

His family history reaches further back than his own childhood: he traces a branch of his father’s family from Syria through Shadegan to Abadan’s refinery world. He says his parents separated when he was eleven, and describes subsequently living with his brother and sister-in-law in oil-company housing. The interview follows those changes as remembered family circumstances, rather than supplying an independently verified genealogy. Source 1

Later visits bring a different Abadan into view. He remembers post-war journeys through the city, Susangerd, Ahvaz and neighbouring villages, finding continued devastation and families who had not returned from displacement. He acknowledges that the places and lives he writes about belong to the experience of decades earlier: he has not been there to observe every subsequent change. Source 1

The distance of memory

Near the end, Rabihavi stresses that the lives he has described belong to more than four decades earlier. He has not remained there to observe every subsequent change. That qualification gives the interview its scale: a writer recovering the world he knew, while recognising the distance between remembered life and the present. Source 1

Words heard and words written

The sounds of childhood included Persian radio and, later, television received from Basra, Baghdad and Kuwait. These broadcasts placed the household in a cultural world that extended across the border. They add another route by which voices entered his early life, alongside his mother’s storytelling and the Arabic of his father’s extended family. Source 1

He distinguishes speaking Arabic from reading and writing it. In the generation and neighbourhoods he remembers, spoken fluency did not automatically bring literacy in Arabic; formal study made a difference. This is a description of the people he knew, rather than a statement about every Arabic-speaking community in Abadan. Source 1

The wedding songs he remembers had performers and instruments: violin, percussion and a male performer in women’s clothes. Songs spoke of absent men and sailors who had gone away, sometimes of letters received from them. The account gives performance, longing and correspondence a place within the oral traditions that reached him. Source 1

The distance to school and cinema

Oil-company employment changed the family’s circumstances. He recalls an older brother receiving training after primary school and later gaining promotion and company housing. In contrast, other labourers remained on short contracts with fewer benefits. Employment status helped determine where a family lived and what it could reach in the city. Source 1

For families in outlying villages, even reaching a road could require a two-hour walk before the journey into town began. School and cinema were therefore not equally accessible to everyone. He also remembers Kurdish seasonal workers arriving for the date harvest. The Abadan of the conversation includes industrial, agricultural and temporary labour, with different distances between daily life and the city’s opportunities. Source 1

The palm grove also has a later history in his account. He says his brother tried to restore it after the war but was pressured to sell the land cheaply for boat parking by a naval section of the Revolutionary Guard. That allegation is his family recollection; the interview does not supply land documents or an independently verified account of the transaction. Source 1

A voice as a starting point

Asked about Arab identity in southern fiction, he discusses Ahmad Mahmoud and Adnan Gharifi, while remaining wary of sentimentality and Arabic vocabulary used chiefly to announce authenticity. He recalls neither pride nor humiliation in an Arab label during childhood. His account of language is tied to particular people and forms of expression, rather than a single literary identity. Source 1

The creative question he returns to is how a person without a public voice might tell their own story. Loneliness, the imagined voice and the pressures of a working life can become starting points. His example of smuggling tea, sugar and cigarettes on bicycles connects Palm Tree and Gunpowder with dangerous work undertaken for a livelihood. Source 1

At the end he places a limit around his own authority: these are lives remembered from decades earlier, and he has not returned to observe present-day Iran. The conversation preserves an intimate knowledge of the past alongside his refusal to claim knowledge of how all those places are now. Source 1

Sources & credits

1. Aasoo · the stories of people without a voice

   Persian conversation with Maryam Foumani, published 10 December 2024. Childhood, regional language, labour, theatre and the distance of memory.