You’re No Stranger, {Hushang Moradi-Kermani},
The following review appeared in Jahan-e Ketab literary magazine, No 197, September 2005.
Childhood is an important part of our lives and play is one of its determining qualities. When we grow older we play with each other. But the child within the narrator of this book is something else. He is so alive that he preserves the art of playing. He hasn’t become so conservative as not to reveals his inner feelings. Because of this, he is amiable and friendly. The setting of the story is painted with such dexterity that as readers we feel the narrator must still be sitting in his birthplace, along the edge of the desert and the SIRCH Mountain Range, watching the green village with a river sneaking through it and feeling the blazing sun that irks the farmer at harvest time.
This narrator is HOSHO, within the same desert, with the same anxiety – that the stars above him may fall down anytime – to him they are so close by. The magic of the desert is everywhere: The cypress tree that according to the locals sheds blood when its branches are cut off; the echo of the wail of a woman heard in a vale near the village that is believed to be due to a past wrongdoing; the man who is supposedly a benefactor, taking care of orphans, turns into a huge and ugly bird that can only fly at nights, going from one branch to another and hollering cuckoos; or the story of marriages taking place under the sweetbrier tree…. All these help us see the childish world of Hosho living next to his father and stepmother.
In the light of a lantern a young man is standing with bulging eyes. He pushes the blanket aside and kisses Hosho. This is the image of the first encounter of the narrator with his father. This is an image that, notwithstanding later sad developments, where the father removes the hat from his head and puts it on Hosho’s, makes us feel the intimacy of their relationship. When the narrator is with his father, he is a little-big-man with an influence over him. The world has turned upside-down; he is now to guide his father. He must take the lead so that his father doesn’t go off on the way home. He is KAZIM’s son, and “it is hard to be Kazem’s son.” (p 65) when he reaches SHAHDAD, which is his motherland, he thinks that the palm tree is his never-seen mother; because when he used to eat dates they would tell him that these were his mother’s dates. He hugs the tree tightly and kisses its coarse skin. He thinks that the dried branches of the tree are his mother’s hair dancing in the wind. Even the nightingales singing on its branches are speaking in his mother’s tongue.
You’re No Stranger is a biographical novel, in a way. Elements of the story are truly alive. Events, characters, and adventures taking place in this book are living. Changing the tense of verbs and writing pieces in the form of school compositions or letter-writing, is one of the expressive techniques of this autobiography. For example, in a letter that Hosho writes to AMU GASEM, and is supposed coming from the stepmother, events taking place is Sirch are described in great detail, and of course in between these descriptions we find little requests, that we read in numerous other letters of Hosho – a pair of shoes, a foreign-made jean with a belt. As such, these letters serve to explain the transitory state of family live.
The book is subdivided into 78 chapters, each of which are relatively independent and independently readable. On the other hand, because the chapters of short, it is easy to follow them. The important and valuable characteristic of the book, beside its vivid description of the geographical, ethnic, and social setting, is its satirical language, which make the events bearable despite their bitterness. Hosho is branded as “foreboding” and “ominous” and most deaths are attributed to him. He has an interesting story in this vein: in Kerman, when he sits next to his uncle’s wife and father at a restaurant, he is forced to eat the eye of the sheep, because his uncle’s wife thinks that doing so will ward off the evil eye, and since Hosho feels compassionate towards his uncle and his young children, he swallows the eye: “MASH ROBABEH is simple and kind woman. She gets along with everyone and everything so that her daughter may not be hassled. As such, he gives us eyes and brains to eat for her children to stay out of harm’s way.” (p 225)
For Hosho,
Even though the author avoids dark spaces related to the past and uses satire to keep readers at a distance, some parts of the life of the narrator is painful and makes us think. At the boarding school, he has nightmares in which a snake slithers over his body or where he finds himself in a deep well and no matter how much he tries he doesn’t reach the top. The author tells us in the beginning of the book that even today when he has nightmares he sees a snake. The boarding school days pass, with all the yearnings for dear ones, with the furtive look at street and the desire for the outside, and the sad air of New Year days when most children leave for their parents’ while he has to stay behind. He finds a job after a hard search in a bookshop. On a piece of cloth he writes BOOKS and MAGAZINES for sale by the weight.
- How much are these books?
- I’ll weigh them. They are 10 tomans per kilo.
- Give me half a kilo’s worth of Les Miserable, with a bit more of Jean Valjean.”
- Who do you take me to be – a green grocer? Don’t be a clown. (p 271)
the final chapter of the book, much like the story of the stepmother, is the story of life. This is not like a movie where at the end everything becomes more or less clear. The main part of the author’s life is shaped by Tehran; Tehran, the sleepless city, the city of countless accidents and events, events that no doubt are wondrous and incredible much like the stories of the author’s childhood, and this time, we are the ones who write the ending of the story; with our minds, with our spirits, and with our essence, which is full of emotions for Hosho.