Exilic Blindness: The Unwritten Autobiography of a Dramatist in Paris Posthumously Dictated to A Friend

Exilic Blindness: The Unwritten Autobiography of a Dramatist in Paris Posthumously Dictated to A Friend REZA BARAHENI or the presence of the Soviet occupation of my hometown, Tabriz, during the Second World War, two images come immediately to my mind, both of them reflected on a white wall from a tube of light coming from an army truck parked in the comer by the neighbourhood mosque. We were six or seven years old and had just snuck out ofthe mosque to watch shapes moving on the wall. The first was a ridiculous combination of a hat, a bow lie, a pair of jumping-up-anddown eyes, a tiny but agile moustache, and a kind of walk that I mimicked for the rest of my life. At the time I did not know his name. The second was a moving giant of a man, utterly hysterical, with a wild mixture of Khazar and Russian eyes, who dashed from one castle room to the other. People kept falling at his feet terribly - that expression "terribly" will come in handy when twenty-two years later those spasmodic gestures reappeared in my pantomimes. and later in the plays I wrote. The shapes on the wall, the mosque, the army truck, fathers praying in the mosque, veiled women and open-mouthed children and men watching and laughing, the combination of war, occupation. silence, and foreign languages became permanent presences in my mind and my theatre. 1saw the shapes of those two men and many other men and women on the wall of the square. The Soviet army showed them every Friday night. Whenever 1see silent movies, I am reminded of those films. When we were first shown those films, we did not even know that there was something called cinema in the world. Many years later, those two shapes, imprinted in my memory so long ago, found their names: Chaplin and Ivan the Terrible. That is how drama became my first nature, my second one being the nature I was born with. The nature a person acquires in theatre is more essential than the one he is given by his parents, biology, or God. I say "essential," and by that I mean that the essence everybody talks about does not exist. It is only by moving in the body of the Other, and through the Other, that people realize there is an essence, or that there is going to be an essence, and even then it is tcmpoModern Drama, 46: I (Spring 2003) I 13 "4 REZA BARAHENI rary. I began pUlling essences on the stage, and then swept them out with the broom of a finale. I was born into an Azeri-speaking family and society, city, and province where for only one year - from December '945 to December '946 - were we allowed to read and write in that mother tongue. When the democratically elected local government was overthrown by the central government, Persian was declared the official language. I walked like Chaplin when, accompanied by teachers and students all speaking Azeri Turkish, I carried school books written in my mother tongue and seL fire to them in the city's biggest square, the site for many months of book burning and of public hanging of those who had supported an autonomous government. For the next fourteen years, until I became a physician and later a psychiatrist, Istudied everything in Persian but spoke Azeri Turkish. In fact, without ever learning to write in my mother tongue, I learned four languages from three major linguistic roots: my own oral, Altaic-UraIic language; Arabic, a Semitic language; and two Indo-European languages, some English and my formal, wrillen language, Persian. Linguistically , I was always on stage and acting, performing the languages I knew in my mind. This was a horrible, but fascinating experience. I lived in a potentially balkanized country, with linguistic borders creating the gaps. In my mind these languages fought with each other, while I kept silent, or paid my compliments to others, living always in the inferno of languages. I was dismembered and gave back what I had received. I was a hybrid, moving from the threshold of one language to another. Moving...