On Wednesday night, Amir Moosavi, assistant professor of comparative literature at Rutgers University-Newark, came to give a talk on his first single-authored book, “Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War.”
The book is a comparative study of the literature that came out of both countries during and after the Iran-Iraq War, the longest two-state war of the 20th century.
Eric Calderwood, professor in LAS and director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, gave brief remarks and a land acknowledgment statement before passing the attention over to Moosavi.
Before beginning the presentation, Moosavi acknowledged the current conflict in the Middle East.
“It would be remiss if I didn’t make a brief aside to discuss the Iran war now,” Moosavi said to the audience. “My book is not divorced from the war we are facing today.”
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Calderwood highlighted a plan by the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies to have talks and activities relevant to the current war.
“We’re trying to provide a variety of perspectives for people in the community who are interested in having a richer historical background for understanding (of) what’s happening in the region today,” Calderwood said.
Moosavi began his talk by outlining what he would discuss, emphasizing a focus on the content of his last chapter. Giving a brief account of the Iran-Iraq War, Moosavi geographically and historically centers the audience in the 1980s in the marshlands that run along the Iran-Iraq border.
He illustrated how Ba’athist Iraq and a theocratic Islamic Iran came to clash, and how, after eight years of fighting, the war ended with no clear winner or territorial change.
In an interview after the release of his book, Moosavi discussed how the war and the literature that came from it gave him questions he needed to answer.
“I wanted to write a book about something I kept seeing in Iranian and Iraqi fiction: writers returning to this war and the effects it had on their countries,” Moosavi said. “It seemed to me that the ways each government tightly controlled the war narrative during the war years foisted a responsibility upon writers from both countries to write the story of this war anew, outside the terms of the two ‘official’ literatures that were produced abundantly during the 1980s.”
Moosavi then highlighted the goals he had for his first book. He wanted to introduce English readers to the Iran-Iraq War’s impact on the region’s literature, highlight the contemporary fiction that promoted robust social and political debates and propose the war as a tool for studying Persian and Arabic literature comparatively.
Sami Suhwail, graduate student studying Middle Eastern studies, was one student present at the event.
“I found out about the topic earlier today, and I am interested in that area of the Middle East, so I thought it would be something interesting to hear his thoughts and hear about the comparisons,” Suhwail said. “It was a lot of information, a lot to take in.”
Moosavi highlighted key passages from the works he’s studied that talk about the legacy of the war. He read two passages from a collection of short stories, “No Windmills in Basra” by Iraqi author Diaa Jubaili, whose stories include elements of magical realism.
Moosavi ended with a quote from writer Viet Thanh Nguyen: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
Calderwood said that while many students study Arabic and Persian, very few students study them together.
“The speaker was encouraging students to treat Arabic and Persian literatures in conversation with each other,” Calderwood said. “And actually, that’s quite rare.”
Following a few questions, the event wrapped up with closing remarks and applause from the audience.
