Pre-war Literature

- By Siamak Vossoughi

Pre-war literature is what you write in hopes that you won't have to write postwar literature. The nice thing about it is that everybody is still alive. The guy who works at the corner store down the street. The guy who works at the corner store down the street in Iran too. Down the street from somebody. They're alive too, and in the evening they walk to the store in the cool air, and you're liable to think that the living don't need stories, at least not with the same urgency as the dead, but they do, every one of them. The bookstores don't have a section of pre-war literature the way they do for the postwar stuff, but they could. If they did have one, I'd read as much from it as I could. It's tough as an Iranian-American writer to figure out what that literature is on my own.

You'd like to think that writing pre-war literature is the same as anything else: start with a character, see what they do. But sometimes I find a character and I think, suppose the war starts tomorrow, would I love him or her as much as I do now? I would certainly try to, but you've only got so much effort when it comes to war. When it's the country you were born in or the country you are living in--and maybe both--you've got to be careful of how you expend that effort.

Still, sometimes you have to say to yourself, well there is no war now, so I am going to write a story about Americans, and if a war starts in the middle of that, I'll try to remember that they are more than war.

You're going to have to remember that anyway if there is a war, so you might as well start beforehand.

It's a nice feeling to start and finish a story about Americans because now you've got some people to point to if there is a war and say, well at least I’ve got them. They must mean something to me because I got a story out of them.

And you know they mean something, you've known that all along, it's just that it gets awfully hard to hold them in the same place if there is a war, because a war gets into everything. You can't not talk about it when it is happening, and you can't not talk about it possibly happening before it is happening. If there is an Iranian character in the story, he is on his toes around Americans. Either he is on his toes or he has been on his toes for so long that he is not on his toes at all. Pre-war literature has to take it all into account. It has to take every possibility into account. When I was a boy of thirteen playing basketball and other sports, it suddenly hit me one day that I loved defense. I loved the ability to react as fast as somebody else could act. I saw that it was actually the most active thing you could do. The offensive player moved first, but once he did, it was all in your hands.

What if I write stories where Americans and Iranians love each other by the end? What if I write stories with so many truces between them that a war becomes unnecessary? It can't be done. A story is going to go where it goes. I have to write it and take that chance. I have to take the chance that it may end up sentimental too. I can't make it without sentiment. I can't make it before, after, or during. I used to go upstairs at Green Apple Books on Clement Street in San Francisco and look at the history books and in the corner there was a section on military history and I always wondered if I would see a man among those books crying. They weren't written in a way that expected such a response, but it always seemed perfectly logical to me.

I guess each military historian would have to hope that they would be the last military historian ever in order to write like that, which is a good thing to remember because it reminds you that writing is a crazy thing. If I can remember that pre-war literature is a crazy thing, I have a shot at writing it. If I can look out the window and think that nobody wants war even though they keep talking about it, that's a start.

You have to laugh if you're going to try to write it. You have to laugh because even though crying is a perfectly logical response, it is easier to write and laugh than it is to write and cry. A man who is crying feels like an artist by himself. He doesn't need to prove it to anyone. A man who is laughing wants to bring others in on the joke.

It is funny how much America is in me when I sit down to write. It is funny how much of that I wonder if I can use. Here's what I know I can't do: I can't make American characters pass a test of being against a war on Iran before I write about them. You start doing that and you're going to get too comfortable carrying around tests with you. People can sniff those out, and pretty soon they'll close up around you and then where will you be? Nowhere, if you're a writer. You've got to let them be who they are and remember that you can always go home and cry if you need to. In the meantime, you can respectfully disagree.

"Ha ha, well, I see your point, but I am of the opinion that the people in Iran are people. I know this because I am a person."

Pre-war literature may end up serving as evidence of your personhood, but it is best not to think of it that way. It is best to think of Americans as knowing all along that an Iranian-American writer had a lot to say to them. It is best to have high expectations of them. The higher your expectations of them, the higher your expectations of your characters. They might end up being the ones to stop a war after all, at least on paper, which is better than nowhere. That's where all pre-war literature is headed anyway. It is hoping very nervously and casually that it is going to end up as just literature. It is acting casual so that you won't see its nerves. Even if it finds out for certain one day that it can just be literature, it's not going to let out all its nerves at once. It's going to wait until it gets home, where nobody can see how much it's been holding in, and it's going to take a long time to sit down and let everything out, tears and laughter and everything else.