The Experience in Grocer Kharsavil - Essay Example

The Experience in Grocer Kharsavil Introduction Nasim Khaksar was born in Southern Iran in 1944. He worked as a teacher in various villages where he came from where he wrote children stories that boosted him to his fame. Based on a story by Shakespeare, Khaksar tried to explain by writing his own version called The Hamlet as a Focal Point of Death. This led to his imprisonment. After his release in three years he was arrested again where he stayed as a prisoner of Shah until the revolution in 1979. His idea of defending democracy was to write articles against the censor of the new regime, but it landed him in prison again. He was then released and became a member of the Association of Iranian Writers. In 1983, most of his friends were killed or imprisoned due to the increase in suppression of intellectuals. He fled the country to seek asylum in Netherlands. He has so far published twenty six books: eleven in Iran and the rest abroad. The Grocer Kharzavil is a collection of stories written by Nasim Khaksar, an Iranian exile leaving in Netherlands. His exiled life gives him the best cosmopolitan that perceives reality to be a processed thing capable of being made and unmade. In his stories the protagonist is suspended in a zone of being and becoming. He has written this book to express the world of a writer in exile, which he expresses as sad and lonely. The world like he demonstrates is one that he does not have a sense of belonging. In the book The Grocer Khazavil he explained that the protagonist of the story feels like the only thing he can talk to is the trees as they resemble the spirits. In the world of exile even the music is that you he sad, Khaksar explains. As a writer who is living in exile the only good thing he thinks of the world of exile is that it is waiting to be discovered; new language and culture and new meaning of the country you live in. However to do the discovery, one requires much energy in order to find the rest and calm that is equivalent to being in ones home. The Grocer Kharzavil Being forced out of ones homeland can leave an individual with a sense of loss, for many writers however, exile is a source of creativity. The act of writing is a way of reconnecting with a life that is so distant. This is the case for Nasim Kharksar .To go by a few stories, this ia a clear picture of the circumstances that refugees deal with. In these stories; The Grocer Kharzavil, A dog under the rain, and the dreamer, the writer is explaining the tragic situation incurred by refugees. They have a deep feeling of loneliness. His characters depict that of an eastern man protected by the living traditions of his culture. Such an individual if taken to a new environment like Netherlands feels more alone than a European under the same circumstances. These stories are trying to help the eastern man to deal with his solitude and stand on his own in a lonely world. The aim of the author is to give the character an element that would shape his lonely life for example, language barrier, homesickness, and different cultures and customs. In the other story, Crow, the author tries to show how refugees are conflicts and contradictions with themselves. They are torn apart yet they can not express their views in another culture. It has been a long period, but not long enough to clear the memory of the refugees who fled Iran without a clear notion of what they were going to face in a foreign land. The memories and anxieties are a clear distraction to them. They grapple with dilemmas about themselves, their actions, and inactions, as well as their obligations towards other comrades in who are still in the homeland. As a result of this self scrutiny, a refugee begins to question their former image, and remembers that they are forgetting their homeland. The protagonist is filled with guilt as there is nothing he can do about the political situation in Iran. In this way, the Crow reflects the ambivalences and uncertainties that preoccupy the exiles. These uncertainties are the ingredients they need to re-evaluate their lives. This is how most of the writers in exile are born. Writing in exile acts as a connection to ones homeland. The Grocery Kharzavil in general, perceives the trials and tribulations of Iranian refugees who left the country immediately after the Islamic republic was established. Since then the refugee has been residing in a foreign country. The protagonist mostly fled the country because the intellectual had placed him on the list of the wanted in the new regime. In their countries, they were members of democratic groups who had served some time in prison and their friends had died in the process. The protagonists, characters used, biography are similar to that of the author. Khaksar had also served prison time in Pahlavi regime and another during the Islamic regime. He escaped to Turkey illegally and travelled on a forged passport to Netherlands. The Grocer Kharzavil was written in 1989. Like Khaksar and many other individuals, the protagonist in these series is an eastern man, a victim of post revolutionary Iran’s cultural campaign whose aim was to crash the opposition and other forces that were a threat to the new regime, the intellectuals. The protagonist is not an immigrant but an exile. His existence in the exile world is is good enough proof of his exclusion from the political discourse of his homeland. In his new home, he is seen as an outcast. His suffering is double exile; he is not accepted at home nor in exile, does he not have a country. Khaksar choice of not giving his characters a true name is an indication of an anonymous identity in exile; they are lost and forgotten. The recollections of life at his homeland fade in oblivion. In these stories and by using an exilic discourse, the writer brings out spatiality and dislocation with the intent of not forgetting. The author uses his characters to show that exile regenerates itself not only on the grounds of territorial transformation but also on the grounds of individual transcendence to represent origin as a symbol of crisis. Khaksar is keen to develop this theme in the ambivalence of the protagonists towards the past and their fear of forgetting the past. In this instance, the depiction of exile is an enormity of personal loss. The protagonists in the stories experience a gradual sinking, not in the new culture, but into oblivion. The author is trying to show the life of an intellectual and a writer in exile through the eyes of the protagonists. He says that the exiles become disillusioned with the past ideological views that were thought to be certain and fixed. His view of life as an exile is one full of dilemmas and questions that can not be resolved. As former revolutionaries, the exiles are left to view themselves in the context of inability to take any action. In his explanation of exile, silence is a part of it. It is a personal element that is too grand and evasive to put into words. In the Grocer Kharzavil, silence is a participant in the acts of the characters to incorporate what is inarticulate. According to the writer, silence creates the prosody of life in exile. It is more of an articulation to the exiles. It also conveys ambivalence that brings the protagonists into action. In his collection of essays Khaksar distinguishes among the voices produced in the now and here of exile. One voice is contending the urgency of having fled the homeland, while the other voice calls forth the plight of those who stayed behind. These voices are not differentiated but operate on the logic of equivalence basis. One of the voices is silent before it responds in an ironic tone saying “we came here to be the voice of our country, the voice of those who remained enchained behind; to declare the suffering of the people of our country to the world” (Khaksar, 2013). These appositional voices are a symbol of the crisis of meaning that the intellectuals contend with in exile. In the Grocer Kharsavil the breakdown of meaning is seen as the crisis of a symbol that was conveniently linked to a signified branded as committed, oppositional and revolutionary. The exile is in a place where instability and ambivalence incorporate both homeland and exile. In this context, ideological chauvinism and nationalism, which are the initiators of exile, have turned into participants paradoxically in a fragmented discourse whose expressions are an assault to claims of certainty. Therefore, exilic ambivalence and limitation consist of contextual fields whose dynamics overpower the imprisonment of definitive meaning. In the stories, customary categories of meaning have lost their quality in the protagonist’s life. Nevertheless, he still has questions regarding social change and commitment that arise from his revolutionary past. The protagonist tries to listen to the questions and articulate himself at the same time; the result is silence. The exile admits loss of meaning in the current dilemma between the past and the present. According to Grocer Kharsavil, neither the past nor the present is capable of consoling the exile. The author explains that exile, which is meant to be a continuation of struggle away from the home country, turns out to be the point where exiles meet with the anti heroes within themselves. Gradually they realize that silence has been the articulation of their being. The author further indicates that the first thing an exile doubts about is themselves; the aspirations and deranged memories. The exile views his image as a symbol of nothing, and the most significant sound in his life becomes that of silence. Arriving at this stance is by means of solitary freedom which can only be found in the limited space between memories of the past and the present life in exile. In exile, as demonstrated by Khaksar in the Grocer Kharsavil, the protagonist is free but his freedom leads to a life full of frustrations in unfamiliar grounds. This is expressed in the story by the different voices that are juxtaposed to convey the reality of exile. That is the new fate that the intellectual has and he is no longer satisfied with defining himself with the past ideologies which are the reason why his present has unheeded uncertainties. Therefore taking a courageous step to face reality is his only way forward, but at the same time a hero in him who was meant to advocate change in his homeland dies. To avoid this, the writer who is also in exile says that they start to put their memories into pen and paper, the writer in exile is always faced with questions of whether they have a memory loss, or whether being in exile has made them lose the heat of writing. On the contrary as Nasim Khaksar depicts through his choice of characters, the memories are the only thing that one has of their homeland, so they have to be highly cherished. As a writer and an exile one is forced to use their imagination since reality is blurred by the ambivalence and uncertainties. People may see the writer as a stranger as depicted by the refugee in the authors stories. This is why most of them chose to write about exile even though some writers like Nasim Khaksar have spent so many years in exile, making their exilic life a part of history. Writers in exile are imposed by fear and the idea of exile thus they try as much to write about the history of their homeland to avoid forgetting. Memory as both forgetting and remembering operates as a tool that is in charge of organizing events in the writers mind. Just like in the Grocer Kharsavil, memory is represented as a voice coming from the homeland. Being an outcast in ones own country makes one feel restless and this is the propelling agent for most writers in exile. Since that have the feeling of being lost and also having a certain absence in their life, memory and literature helps them to retrieve what they have lost. Their aim just like any other exile is to make a presence rather than live with the torture of absence. This way they are able to create a portable world that can not be taken away from them by nature or tyrants. This is a creation of a new world that all people in exile would want, and for many writers it is the safest place to be, bearing in mind that they are strangers in exile and outcasts in their homeland. The anguish and loss that people have undergone can not be taken away. This is demonstrated by the characters in Grocer Kharsavil as they struggle with themselves on a daily basis. However being in exile makes one appreciate the little things that they took for granted in their homeland. The exile home acts as an opening eye for the homeland. An exiled writer as depicted by Nasim Khaksar is treated like an outcast in their own country; he is more of an alien. Even after returning home, it does not feel like home, at least not any more. To a writer this is the most anguished form of exile; being a stranger in your own home. One feels like their individuality and sense of identity has been robbed off them all over again. The Iranian regime for example, confiscates the individual past and present leaving one to feel like an orphan. Being an exile as a writer there opens the mind so that they are able to see things that are not routinely observed. For Nasim, although he misses his local township of Abadan, he can not go back because its still in war with Iraq. He would end up fleeing again or being imprisoned for trying to defend the rights of the people the best way he knows how. In his play, the last letter, Nasim Khaksar, compares the life in exile with that one of being in limbo, between living and dying. This is demonstrated by his character, the man, when he receives an invitation to a birthday party. His happiness is short lived by the fact that he has to give his address and identity to prove his invitation. To his dismay, his invitation only came in place of the dead, some individual who lived in his current address. As earlier discussed in this text, a exile’s fear of losing his identity and past memories into oblivion are put into writing. In writing the memories an exile regenerates a simulated reality that creates his presence. The exilic presence is a communication of the absence of time and space and a lack that nears nihilism with all its chaotic angles. In exile the writer seems to indicate there is no coexistence of reality and shadow because the shadow too is real. The reality is seen as no more than simulations that have no origin. With the homeland becoming a complicated narrative as time goes by, Nasim depicts this as a f good foundation for any writer in exile. it does not just happen, they have to undergo through the dilemmas and tribulations of being away from home in order to put them into writing. A writer just like the characters in his stories writes as a way of perceiving reality. The spatial logic of his created presence is a manifestation of a momentous effect of his previous perceptions of time. Conception of the past as a referral is challenged by the exilic memory’s unbound text. He acquires a certain consciousness that makes him perceive time as a scattered structural design. History, the truth and reality, and ideologies are also transformed into strange characters that shake him out of his oblivion. This is the birth of a writer in exile. Writers in exile are always asks why they left their home country and their credibility is always questioned. These questions are often politically related rather than literary. They are evaluated by where they live and how they do it. The author in Grocer Kharsavil shows how refugees are treated with no respect just because they are strangers. It is difficult for a writer to do a story or a narrative about his homeland and people to appreciate it because they are assumed to have lost the memory of those places. What the critics do not understand is that being away helps them see things that they could not see when they were living in those places. As an intellect and a writer, one is always so angry about the happenings in their country that they are blind to other things of interest. In conclusion, the use of stories in exile by Nasim Khaksar to show his experiences as writer in exile is a great idea. He indicates the memories of his characters not as nostalgic longing for the past, but a trace that is some how convincing for the present. The memories are not here nor there. In this kind of solitude, the characters are able to illuminate and access their most crucial gift, imagination. Writers challenge themselves by writing. It is also a way of mourning the losses they have undergone and coming to terms with the cruel reality in his world. Through literature, what they have lost is retrieved. Wring becomes their world, a portable world that unlike the homeland and the exile, it can not be taken away. For a writer in exile this is a safe place to be; A place where life has meaning. In the end writers in exile should not be evaluated according to how or where they live. This is because his homeland is becomes the language that he writes his literature in and his house is the portable world that he creates through his works, just like a traveller whose homeland is wherever his feet fall. Reference List Khaksar, N., 2013. Shopkeeper from Kharzavil: Baghal-e Kharzavil. s.l.:H&S Media. Read More