Review · Radio Zamaneh · later republished by Baang
Exile before the border
Jourkesh reads displacement as both a political condition and an injury to intimate relations.
- Credited to
- Rouzbeh Jourkesh
- Publication
- Radio Zamaneh · later republished by Baang
- Source date
- 10 September 2020 · Baang republication 18 April 2023
- Published language
- Persian
- This page
- English source guide
Works discussed
Original English editorial guide to the attributed Persian-language source. The critic’s interpretations remain theirs; the full source stays with its publisher.
A place within a place
Jourkesh starts from the idea that people may become displaced within their own society. His essay follows the movement from an external emergency to an internal condition of exclusion, asking how Rabihavi’s characters come to inhabit displacement emotionally as well as geographically. Source 1
In the Plain along the Way provides one example. A family fleeing Abadan crosses a bare landscape after losing its material world. Jourkesh reads the child’s final uncertainty about which side they occupy as more than a question of location: the catastrophe has disturbed the coordinates by which a life is understood. Source 1
The room that cannot become a home
The Flowerpot shifts his attention to temporary accommodation and a relationship unable to find an independent room. Jourkesh connects the breakdown of intimacy with the conditions of displacement. A shelter can provide a place to survive while obstructing the possibility of another kind of life. Source 1
His essay recognises changes in Rabihavi’s narrative forms while identifying wandering and estrangement across them. The 2020 article and its 2023 Baang republication constitute one critical reading. Related story guides keep the literary publications separate from this later interpretation. Source 1
An object that resists forgetting
Jourkesh follows the bottle that becomes the flowerpot back to the couple’s earlier life. The object carries a memory that the pressures of flight have not erased. Reading it alongside Maurice Blanchot’s discussion of forgetting, he treats its survival and return as a connection between the lost home and the hoped-for independent room. At the ending, its smell provokes Ziba’s vomiting before she turns to the red and white flowers and smiles. Source 1 · Source 2
A separate comparison with Bakhtiyar Ali’s Creative Fear asks why leaving a dangerous place may not end fear. Jourkesh argues that remembered and imagined danger can persist inside a new shelter, frustrating intimacy and the ability to choose a future. The essay thus distinguishes geographical escape from the harder task of recovering a life after displacement. Source 1 · Source 2
Sources & credits
- Rouzbeh Jourkesh · living within catastrophe
Persian essay published 10 September 2020. Baang republishes it on 18 April 2023; that is a later appearance of the same critical argument.
- Rouzbeh Jourkesh · displacement, memory and fear
Baang republication, 18 April 2023, of the 10 September 2020 Radio Zamaneh essay. The complete original body develops The Flowerpot through the retained bottle, memory and Bakhtiyar Ali’s account of fear. These are the critic’s readings, not a new story or a second independent critical contribution.