Forty Nights by Pirooz Jafari
About the author
Born in Iran, Pirooz Jafari migrated to Australia more than two decades ago as an ambitious photographer. His experience of witnessing violations of human rights of every imaginable kind throughout his childhood, adolescence and young adult life in Iran ignited a passion in him to pursue legal studies and Pirooz graduated as a lawyer in Australia in the summer of 2003. Pirooz has since worked in various community-based organisations and statutory bodies. Forty Nights is his first literary fiction novel.
Review
Declan Fry
Friday 29 July, 2022
Sydney Morning Herald
Pirooz Jafari’s debut novel opens with division: the division of seasons, the division of hemispheres, in the narrator’s experience of summer and winter solstice in his adopted home, Australia. He has come from a place turned upside down, Tehran, to a part of the world where the seasons are literally Antipodean.
Working in Melbourne, as a migration lawyer, the chapters alternate between present-day Australia, Tishtar’s adolescence and young adulthood in Tehran during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and a narrative set in 1300s Gotland during the Battle of Visby.
There is a lovely line, early in the novel, when Tishtar speaks of the “archives of the soul”. Within these archives, there is rootlessness. Migration becomes a point of connection that is also a displacement, a fracture: “The longer you live in your new country, the more the thread stretches, until finally it breaks,” Tishtar reflects. “When you visit your old home you realise that you don’t belong there anymore.”
Yet the old home still belongs in you. Tishtar knows this physically: hearing lightning aboard a train, his mind registers the presence of a bomb, the wave of explosions, calamitous massacres. The present intervenes in the past, but does not displace it; it is that shadow through which the ground remains visible, waiting to break the survivor’s fall.
As a migration lawyer Tishtar is unusually equipped, perhaps, to register the indignation and hurt of Australia’s bureaucracy. He is working to secure migration papers and visas for a client whose nieces are living, at great risk, in Somalia. Faced with the grinding machinations of the system’s requirements and timelines – Tishtar’s client’s nieces are taken by a relative to their case officer appointments in Somalia, forcing him to take time off work and Tishtar’s client to help cover the expense – Tishtar cannot help worrying for them. He works at the coal face of the great Australian talent for inviting people to come help nation-build and then promptly ignoring them.
Jafari’s parallel narrative of Gotland in the 1300s serves as a temporal – and geographical – correspondent to Tishtar’s experiences of a divided Tehran, cleaved between old ways and new. Gretel, caught up in the Battle of Visby, during which the Danish sought to overthrow the Gotlanders, recurs in Tishtar’s dreams and fantasies across all three narratives, beckoning him to engage with memories of longing and failed relationships.
Gretel is a haunting figure, her existence – after all that has sustained her, in war, in loss, having vanished – refusing the same oblivion. Tishtar recalls how, “[i]n her presence, it is as though an invisible wave is vibrating through my soul, a powerful current pulling me in. This is the time, this is the time, says the voice inside my head.” Only it never is. When it comes to time, it is always, for the migrant – a migrant who is, if anything, closer to a kind of refugee – too late.
The story set in Visby serves, too, as a counterpoint to the novel’s recurring engagement with colonialism. As Persian culture finds itself embattled by Arab hegemony (Tishtar’s mother is eager to remind him that “the Arabs invaded the east and north of Africa and that’s why these nations practise Islam now”), the post-Iranian Revolution, and the installation of an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini, so the Scandinavians exemplify a spirituality that lies outside Christian evangelism. Yet, when Tishtar reflects that “[i]t is fascinating how invasion has influenced cultures time and time again”, his migration client replies: “Change in our way of cooking is nothing when our people have been running for safety for decades.”
Forty Nights is written in unadorned prose, leisurely, sometimes ruminative, sometimes whimsical. The Divan-e Hafez, a classic of Persian poetry, is a touchstone, both as a work of imagination and because the act of creation and imagination itself means being able to envisage a way through fear. Tishtar himself is an odd, somewhat callous man – the loner, coldly aloof. His detachment may be assigned to trauma, though there are suggestions that it is simply an aspect of his personality, extending back to his formative years in Tehran.
Following Iran’s acceptance of the 1988 UN ceasefire that formally ended the Iran-Iraq war, Tishtar reflects, “I really don’t know what the end of the war means for us […] It’s hard to imagine what a normal life looks like.” This question of imagination – of how to imagine a normal life into being, both for oneself and others – is writing at degree zero. It is a place where certainties refuse to coalesce, where they refuse closure, refuse narration. It is what gives this novel its existential edge.