trans(re)lating house one

By Poupeh Missaghi

In the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election, a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city’s points of connection—teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars—her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language?

Melding several worlds, perspectives, and narrative styles, trans(re)lating house one translates the various realities of Tehran and its inhabitants into the realm of art, helping us remember them anew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781566895736

Book preview

I want to start in the after: the aftershock, the aftermath, the afterworld. I want to start with the slippery, the intangible. I want to start with the impenetrable, the incomprehensible.

I want to start with the world of dreams.

But I will not reveal it all now. I will not tell the whole now, because the whole only becomes the whole in parts, in conversation with the parts, dispersed in time, in space, arrived at only through passage.

Suffice it to say for now that dreams matter, that they are the heart of the matter translated from one plane to another, one language to another, from the conscious to the unconscious back to the conscious. They remain illegible. They carry the secret.

She does not remember how it all began, why and when.

Perhaps it was during one of the weekly gallery hops or as she followed the news of the statues or on her bus ride the day she went to meet one of the sculptors.

Perhaps it all began long before, on a day her memory doesn’t even hold on to.

I do remember how it all began, why and when, though vaguely. The way I remember the origins of all stories, all books. It always begins with a search. A search, in this case, for the meanings of what came before the dreams.

It also started with an obsession with Roberto Bolaño and The Part about the Crimes in 2666. It started in Selah Saterstrom’s hermeneutics class in the winter of 2012, in which I drew a tarot card, a Ten of Wands, which served as a prompt for writing. I remember that image not as a man holding sprouting sticks and reaping his rewards, but as a man carrying pointed burdens on his back.

Outside the window the city moves. She is on a bus. In the women-only section. She knows the city, and she doesn’t know the city. She sees the city outside the bus windows, and she reads the city in the newspaper on her lap. The city is disappearing. Dying. The city is resisting. Being born. It dies every second. It comes back to life every second after. The city keeps reappearing. The city is gaining more presence. Inside her. A very loud silence. The city is disintegrating. Outside her. Noises. A map. Create a map before the city falls apart. She hears a ghostly voice and turns around. Nobody is saying anything.

I desire for her to create a map that can reinvent itself every time the city does. A secret map, a personal map, an internal map, a map in words, a map in tongues. Today the city is not what it was yesterday. Tomorrow it won’t be what it is today. The map needs to be continuously rebirthed. New places. New names. New roads. New lines. Like cells. Like veins. Of her body. Of my body. Of the bodies of the women and men on the bus. Of the bodies of the women and men outside the bus. Of the bodies in the city, making the text. The map of the city is to be drawn with words. The map is the text. The text is the map. The text is the city. But even that will not remain stable. Even that will be forever changing. The text breathes. The text grows. The text decomposes. The city grows and dies and dies and grows. The city decomposes. The city breathes.

She turns around. Everyone is looking outside. Everyone is looking inside. Nobody is saying anything.

The city is losing its statues. I read about this online. It feels surreal, as if nonfiction is already fiction. I want her to map the city, to follow the trail of the lost statues. The statues disappear. The public spaces once dedicated to their bodies remain void. The city has more space, less space. I want her to find the bronze bodies. Find the bodies. But no one can find the bodies. Once they disappear, they are gone. No matter how fast I search, she searches, no matter how hard, the city will remain one step ahead.

But what if we’re looking in the wrong city? On the wrong map? I desire for her to draw a map of the city that is a womb, that is a breath, that is a world, that is nothing, that is everything: a map not to show us the path but to lead us away from the path, a map of the city that is a body, a body sexing, defecating, coughing, biting, spitting, suffocating, caressing, listening, hearing, speaking, a map of the city that is, the city that is not.

What if we’re looking for the monuments on the wrong map? What if we looked for the lost bodies on a different map instead? I want us to draw the map that … draw the map that … the map that …

Traffic has come to a halt. The bus is stuck. Not moving. Idling. Outside, people have gathered. Are waiting. She looks out to see. Other women too. Someone calls out to the bus driver to open the doors. He does. Some leave. Out the front door. Out the back door. She cranes her neck.

A cow is slaughtered in the middle of the square. She sees a big banner covering several store signs. We welcome a new police mission for social order, it says. We are the store owners. We are they. They welcome the new mission. They welcome the order. They have the cow killed. They have the cow sacrificed. A sacrifice for gratitude, for thankfulness. The city will be cleansed of addicts, vagrants, beggars, peddlers, of the vicious and immoral. Traffic laws will be better implemented. The new mission will improve the lives of the citizens and the city. Better days will come. The city will become pure.

Sacrifice for purity.

Sacrifice of one body for another. One of flesh. The other of brick and cement and asphalt and glass, of gray and gray and green and red and orange and green and gray and gray and black.

Sacrifice as ritual.

Rituals need to be carried out in open spaces. Rituals define public identities. Rituals need to have witnesses. They are symbolic, deliver a message. To the gods. To the people.

What does it mean to sacrifice bodies for a greater cause? To perform rituals to create meaning? To symbolize life? Or death?

The cow is sacrificed in the middle of the day, in the middle of the square. The cars and human beings come to a halt to watch the cow die, to welcome a new era of social order. Bus passengers stare. People gather on the green patch in the middle of the square and stare. The cow lies in the middle of the road. The cow bleeds. The cow breathes. The cow is a corpse. The corpse is too heavy. Shopkeepers cannot move it into a van. Onlookers join to help. Shopkeepers and onlookers cannot move the cow that is now the corpse into a van. They gather. They touch, each a corner of the body. They try. They hold on to. They hold their breath. They push. The corpse remains on the road. In the middle of the square, a fountain continues to breathe water into the air. Water rises up and drops down. A tow truck is called. Life comes to a halt before the corpse of the cow. The sacrifice. The ritual. The cow. The people. The cars. Together. Entangled. The narrow path around the body, kept open to traffic, is now a knot of cars and buses and motorbikes and people.

The sound of horns. The murmurs and shouts of humans. The silence of the animal. The silence of the trees and the crows standing watch. The knot cannot be untied until the corpse is moved away. The passersby pause for a moment then move on, or they pause for a moment and stay for another, or they move to the center to see, to understand, and then try to find a way out or decide to stay a bit longer before moving on. The cow corpse begins to rot on the asphalt in the square.

An hour later the tow truck arrives, and the driver and the shopkeepers and the men get together and, with the help of a metal chain, move the corpse from the pavement up behind the truck. Traffic officers open a path through the crowd. The truck moves slowly away. The water continues to flow from the fountain. The cow is gone. The blood of the cow dries on the asphalt under the sun. The crows sing and fly away. The trees continue to stand still.

Missing Statue (13): The Calf

Location: The calf, along with the parent cow, had lived in front of the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Tehran since the day the school opened.

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

The cow remains standing.

"Works of public art involve preparation, realisation, potential evaluation and the everyday reality thereof. Apart from public space, it is therefore important to acknowledge that public art also involves public time. Both the artwork and the space are [moreover] in interplay with the art engager (i.e. the subject), and hence there is a subject-object-space-time nexus. This nexus implies that elements of subject, object, space and time exist by the grace of each other. Such a nexus is thus more-than-just-human, although it rests in the eye of the art engager" (Zebracki 2015).

Missing Statue (12): The Foal

Location: The foal, along with the parent horse, had lived in front of the school of veterinary medicine at the University of Tehran.

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

The horse remains standing.

Missing Statue (11): The Wagtail Gives Life to Seven Babies, One Is a Nightingale

Abstract

Location: Esteghlal Park

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Public art may be seen as an intermediating agency in social culture and thus as a powerful yet elusive player in spatial politics (Deutsche 1996; Kester 1998). Its existence is often linked to institutional and policy contexts (Zebracki 2015).

What holds true about the existence of public art holds true for its annihilation as well.

Missing Statue (10): Bust

Abstract

Location: Artists Park

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Missing Statue (9): Life

Abstract

Location: Artists Park

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

The work, the ideal, dreamt work, does not exist without its stage, its support, its subjectile, its earth. The ‘stage’ of the visual work of art is double: 1) the work (painting, photo, installation, sculpture, etc.) is born in a genealogy, in a vast time, a sort of library-landscape which remembers-and-forgets, which keeps and brings back to life all the previous works. 2) The other stage is its genetic geography, its spatial context, its urban, political site (Cixous 2006).

Missing Statue (8): Avicenna

World-famous Persian polymath

Date of Birth: 980

Date of Death: 1037

Location: Behjat Abad Park

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Missing Statue (7): Sattar Khan

Also known as the National Commander, one of the two leaders of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution

Date of Birth: 1866

Date of Death: 1914

Location: Sattar Khan Street

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Missing Statue (6): Bagher Khan

Also known as the National Chief, one of the two leaders of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution

Date of Birth: 1861

Date of Death: 1916

Location: Shahr Ara Street

Date Gone Missing: Around the same time as Sattar Khan, spring 2010

What are the ethical implications of raising monuments for a movement’s dead? Of creating celebrities of them?

Who decides who should become a celebrity in death?

Isn’t it disrespectful even to use the word celebrity for the dead of a movement?

Missing Statue (5): Mohammad Sanie Khatam

Master inlay artist

Date of Birth: 1891

Date of Death: Unknown

Location: Mellat Park

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Missing Statue (4): Shahriar

Poet who wrote poems in Persian and Azeri. The date of his death is commemorated as the National Day of Persian Poetry and Literature in Iran.

Date of Birth: 1906

Date of Death: 1988

Location: The statue had primarily lived in front of Vahdat Hall, on Shahriar Boulevard, but was moved to its location in front of Shahr Theater a year before its disappearance.

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Missing Statue (3): Mohammad Mo’in

Professor of Persian literature and compiler of the Mo’in Encyclopedia

Date of Birth: 1918

Date of Death: 1971

Location: Ostad Mo’in Boulevard

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Missing Statue (2): Ali Shariati

Sociologist, historian, theologist, political activist, and author

Date of Birth: 1933

Date of Death: 1977

Location: Shariati Park

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

Why this persistence in commemorating? In remembering? In fighting forgetfulness?

Is selectivity the enemy of remembrance or is it the very definition of remembrance?

Can we remember what we once forgot?

Can we forget what we once remembered? What we once memorized? What we once knew? What we once experienced? How much can we forget?

How much is enough?

When should we stop? Commemorating? Remembering? Reminding? Blaming? Missing? Mourning? Forgetting? Inviting to forget? Inviting to forgive? Forgiving?

Who should decide?

How can we free ourselves from the past while honoring it?

Missing Statue (1): Mother and Child

Location: San’at Square

Date Gone Missing: Spring 2010

The statues went missing from public spaces in Tehran in the spring of 2010, in the aftermath of the events.

The visibility of the statues—in plain sight—suggests