Dear Reader, Readers worldwide turn to literature to decode the complexities of the West Asia conflict
Three hours after we take off from London, the plane begins to lurch. At first, I don’t notice; I am half asleep. Then the seat belt sign flashes on.
I look around at the darkened cabin and am seized with a sudden dread—are we flying over Iran? This war feels as if it is closing in, everything from gas shortages to scary stories from people close to the hostilities, like a colleague from Dubai telling us about the fighter planes that escorted his commercial aircraft out of the airport, or another showing us pictures of drone battles shot with his phone.
All day I have been reading Black Wave, a history of the West Asia since 1979. At 35,000 feet, somewhere over the region it describes, it stops feeling like history and starts feeling like the present tense. Ghattas moves between power and people—Saudi crown princes, Egyptian intellectuals, Syrian rulers, and the writers and journalists who lived through these shifts—tracing how political rivalry hardened into cultural and religious control, and how suicide bombers and the fatwa came to be used as a political weapon.
The aircraft is now steady. It was turbulence, not war. But it’s hard to get this senseless conflict out of my head.
At our book clubs, with readers based in India and all over the world, we have been scouring literature with increasing desperation. We are trying to make sense of the barrage of claims and counter-claims that arrive on social media, turning to history, fiction, even graphic narratives to triangulate the truth.
We start with Woman, Life, Freedom, a collection of graphic stories edited by Marjane Satrapi, best known for her graphic novel Persepolis.
“I found it to be a book that’s useful to read bits of and then go off and, you know, research other things… it was an eye-opener,” says one reader.
The story set in Evin Prison, for instance, leads us to The Evin Prison Bakers Club, a heartbreaking account of women being jailed by the Iranian regime. For the most part, though, this graphic story collection is uneven and skims many issues.
We turn to a genre that can feel, paradoxically, the most truthful of all: fiction.
In The Lion Women of Tehran, we find ourselves in Tehran during the reign of the Shah. There we meet Ellie and Homa, two best friends who move to opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
“It shows how history not only affects the lives of ordinary people, but of generations to come. Plus it is a fast, very readable way to absorb a lot of history and context that would be harder to take in via dense non-fiction” says another reader.
There’s a problem, though—one that we all feel acutely. Most of these books are written by Westerners or people living outside the region.
“The diaspora narratives, including books like Not Without My Daughter or other books marketed in the West, can over-malign or flatten Iran,” says a reader, voicing what a lot of us feel.
So where should we go to learn the ‘real’ story?
The Empire podcast, says somebody. The Ex-Files podcast by Christiane Amanpour, says another. Read The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, says a third. I feel compelled to read and listen to all three. Books and other such related narratives seem the best way to navigate the turbulence of these times.
Yet when we land in Mumbai, and I close Black Wave, I feel the helplessness that comes from understanding something clearly and being able to do nothing about it. Outside the window, the world looks ordinary - landing gates, neon-clad ground crew, luggage carts. It is hard to reconcile the world I am reading about with the one I inhabit, even though they are, unmistakably, the same. Perhaps that is what these books are about - they do not give us solutions, but they make sure we don’t look away.
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)