Writer and translator poupeh missaghi on challenging received narratives

Your first book, trans(re)lating house one, includes excerpts from critical theory as well as real accounts of state murders in the aftermaths of Iran’s 2009 election, while Sound Museum is narrated by the curator of a fictional museum of audio recordings from Iranian prisons. In this speech, she’s often twisting critical theory to her own ends. How do research and philosophy generally shape your fiction?

I think about research in an expansive way: not just library research, not just academic research, or not even just field research. I was having a conversation with a friend recently, Brandon Shimoda, and he used the term “creative research,” which I’ll use here. For me, research feels like creative work, whether that’s theoretical research or going out in the world and being obsessed with the theme of my book and looking for traces of it outside.

Research starts to tell a story—you begin to do research and then the story gets shaped. For all my projects, research is at the core, and I weave fiction around it, or even nonfiction. I don’t see a separation between the creative and the critical, or between the theoretical and the fictional. For me, they’re just different tools for trying to make meaning and make sense of the world. So whatever tool I need, I’ll just use it.

How do you start a project more generally? It sounds like research is part of that, but how do you know when ideas start to accumulate that they belong in one book?

With trans(re)lating house one, there are several layers to the book and each had a different beginning. One came from missing home and trying to write stories around it. The other one came from wanting to understand these state murders and doing more research about them. The other layers started more with ethical questions, but there was also the theoretical meta layer that was basically academic research.

With Sound Museum, I was actually writing another novella, and then the idea of this character, who pushed me to look more into interrogation and torture, came into that story. Her voice became so central that I felt it would overtake the book. So it became its own project and I put the other manuscript aside to write this one first.

It sounds like in some cases you have different strands that you decide belong together, and in other cases you see they need to be untangled. How do you make the decision about which ideas belong together?

With trans(re)latinghouse one, I came to the understanding that, while the pieces I was working on at the time had different natures, they’re all from the same era—the same emotional, psychological experience of a collective time. I thought, “Oh, I don’t really want them to be separate. I want them to be experienced together.” So I found a way to put them together, interweave them.

With these two novellas that are now separate, again there are similarities, but they each needed their own space. The feeling of them was very different. Intuition played part in making that decision—and thinking about how much space a piece of writing needs and whether it would live better in a shared space or it actually needs its own space.

Do you have any sort of relationship to the term “experimental,” as someone who sees all tools as equally useful in these pursuits of meaning-making?

I would say I’m an experimental artist. The experimentation is what draws me into the work. If I know, for example, this is how the novel is done, these are the rules for the structure, I’m not really drawn to doing it, or maybe I don’t even know how to do writing/creating in that format.

I feel like I don’t know how to work with formulas. I have a resistance against structures. So experimentation is another thing at the heart of my work. And I don’t necessarily think, “I’m going to sit down and create a project that is experimental.” I’m curious about this thing and I’m just going to grab whatever I need. Then you realize like, “Oh, this might not be considered a conventional work.” But I don’t really know how to do this another way, so I’m just going to do it my way.

Do you think that it’s important thematically—to resist structures?

Yeah, definitely. Any form of curated, mass-produced existence is terrifying. We see this all over the world now, including in the U.S.. The moment you disappear into a mass without questioning, without having your individual creative questioning self disrupt these moments and these systems of power, things become terrifying. But there must also be resistance against the self and the ego, because we see how these patterns also recreate themselves within, for example, opposition forces. Being aware, this looking inward while you’re also looking outward, is important, right? Constantly questioning is important. Resisting a fixed narrative, whether it’s your own fixed narrative or someone else’s fixed narrative about themselves, or someone else’s fixed narrative about yourself, is the key for me.

Your two books both address state violence, but from two different sides. How did the drafting process differ looking at the victims versus the perpetrators? Did it pose different obstacles for you as an artist?

With my first book, there was a lot of sympathy with my characters, a lot of sharing the pain. With Sound Museum, there was a lot of frustration and anger, and I was feeling, “I don’t want anything to do with you,” meaning with my protagonist/narrator. But also what was terrifying about it was that the process of research on the book was exciting. So at some point it doesn’t matter that what you’re researching is actually this fucked up, evil psychology. You are still drawn into her orbit. So it was very different from my first book.

It was so hard for me to sit with this character, but at the same time, I wanted to go to the heart of the darkness and to be able to get to the core of who she is and why she’s doing what she’s doing. I had a desire to understand, but there was no sympathy. I wanted to be done with her.

As an author, you can kill your character, but instead you went into the darkness. Both your books have come out with Coffee House, who sells merch with the tagline “Experimental Books About Death”—very tongue-in-cheek. But when you’re writing these books, I can imagine it being quite emotionally draining.

When you’re in the middle of writing, you don’t necessarily understand how emotionally hard it is. I think after finishing Sound Museum, I didn’t realize how horrible the experience had been. Then I began to share it with others and saw other people’s reactions which made me suddenly wonder, “oh, how have I been able to be here for so long?” Maybe it’s because the process of research sometimes allows us a distance that can help.

But I’m also in psychoanalysis, and I think that is an important help. One of the big questions that came up for me while writing Sound Museum that I constantly had to address was, what does it mean that I want to write this character? Is she a part of me? And if she is a part of me, how can I deal with her terrifying presence? And so, there was a lot of psychological exploration of this evil character.

Then there were also breaks. Sometimes, even unconsciously, I realized, “I can’t do this anymore. I need a break.”

In psychoanalysis, did you reach any conclusions about why this voice was one that you felt compelled to let speak through you or to inhabit?

I think one of the main realizations was that all of us can have aspects of this character inside us, that this is possible. Because whenever you see instances of it, in videos or reports, you’re like, “It’s impossible. How could a person be like this?” But then you see so many more examples—and you understand it’s not too far-fetched to want to be like this or to get pulled into situations that make you become like this. Hannah Arendt has talked about this extensively, this banality of evil.

I wrote the book because I needed to understand, and still, I don’t think I fully understand, but spending more time with her, I can see how you can get lost in that path of darkness. One of the reasons for this book was to show how you can use the discourses of academia, the discourses of ethical living and ethical choices and professional life, and still do harm because you have lost your moral compass. Another thing Arendt talks about is how love is so important. Ethics are not just about critical thinking; they’re about love as well.

To move to a different topic—you translate both into and out of Persian. How does translation shape your own writing?

Translation creates a very close relationship with language. And language not just as words on the page or grammar, but also all the other aspects around language: the culture, the background, the different sensitivities. My relationship to language is very much defined by the translation process, especially as someone who writes in my second language. Another layer of this relationship is that I make the concept of translation present in my writing, as part of the content of my writing. I’m not just coming to writing as a translator—I want to explore and investigate this question of existing between languages or with multiple languages in the work I do, because that’s just also my experience in life and in writing.

I also read a lot of work in translation, not just Persian texts, but also from other countries, from other languages. That also informs my literary landscape so it’s not confined to the American or Iranian one. On the one hand, this offers you an expansive possibility of what you can write about, and on the other guide you on how you can write about things.

This book is a novella, a genre that’s famously hard to get published. How do you think about the idea of the market as you write?

When I think about “the market,” I think about the financial aspect of publishing. But, as you know, as an experimental writer, the financial gain is so minimal that it can’t really define your practice. We can also think about the market as social capital or what a book enables one to gain professionally—and this professional aspect is not purely financial.

I don’t think about these when I start working on a project—what it needs to do in the literary market or in the literary landscape. It’s more like, “This is what I’m able to do with this material.” And then, usually when I am within the project, I realize there are other people out there who are my community, doing similar work or interested in similar questions, and then I just hope that the book will find its way to that community. And when my book sits in conversation with some of the artists or some of the styles of work that I have been drawn to, then I feel like I’ve made it.

Always the hope. Now, I’m thinking about your book launch for your first book at Community Bookstore. I really enjoyed hearing that after you’d played with the form so much, you still didn’t love the idea of it being fixed, so you read selections out of order. Do you still feel that way about your work to any extent?

With trans(re)lating, that existence in flux is more with the form and arrangement of the parts of the book. With Sound Museum, the way I’m seeing this fluidity of the project is different. I know the narrative is done. It has a beginning and it has an end, but at the same time, I’m still curious about how this character, or this topic, can exist outside of the text. Right now, I’m in conversation with several artists who are reading the book and “translating” it into their own mediums. So in a way, even though I have finished the book, I still want it to exist outside of the confines of the book—that’s what I’m hoping to do through collaborations with a range of artists.

We met adjuncting in New York, and now you’re an assistant professor. How do you balance the things you do for money with your creative practice?

Still a struggle. Always a struggle. When I’m in teaching mode, it’s very hard to go into my own creative work. One thing I’ve realized is that when we were adjuncting in New York, I didn’t have much time because I was doing so many different jobs, but I had a very strong community and also the larger cultural landscape of the city that was feeding me and sending me into my own creative mode. Now, I have more time and stability, but I don’t necessarily have the other components as strongly. I’m realizing that time and financial stability are not the only factors—community and where I live are as important to me to sustain a creative practice in the long term. I’m finding a new understanding of these different factors for my creative practice that I probably wasn’t as aware of before.

Is there anything that you wish someone had told you when you started to make art?

Yeah, that one’s practice will shape-shift and it’s not always going to be the same, that you need to keep observing yourself–your interests, skills, and processes–in order to find your way around. Probably people told me all that, but I wasn’t aware of how important it was.

I feel like that’s not something people talk about enough. We think, “this novelist writes a first draft buries it in her yard, and then she retypes it from scratch, and that’s her process. This one writes a draft in five weeks.” There’s an idea that if you find your way, then it becomes a reproducible process, but it’s rarely true.

You think if you become a professional writer, then you know how to do it, which is not true. And for me, it wasn’t just a concern of finding the “how to write” for each project. Initially, I was also worried about the “what to write about,” especially thinking that if I were not in Tehran, which is an important compass of my writing, I wouldn’t be able to write at all. And then you realize, oh, you are still alive. And as long as you’re alive and you’re a writer, as long as you’re a creator, you will find new things that you will be drawn to. Being a writer is more of a lifestyle than just sitting at the computer and writing.

poupeh missaghi recommends:

Traces of Enayat, by Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Mog

Keyhan Kalhor, Iranian musician — see a video of his setar solo performance at Abgineh Museum in Tehran

La Piscine/The Swimming Pool, movie directed by Jacques Deray (1969), with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider

Drinking Turkish coffee and reading the cup afterwards (if you could do it in Istanbul, that’s beyond heavenly.)

Making sunny side ups with Sun Ghee’s Aleppo Chili flavor ghee

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rebecca van Laer.

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