Bio: Houra Yavari
Houra Yavari is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and an M.A. in Psychology from Tehran University, and an M. Ed. from the Bank Street College of Education, New York (1990). She has published extensively on topics in psychoanalysis and Persian literature, including Psychoanalysis and Literature in Iran: Two Texts, Two Selves, Two Worlds (Tehran, 1995) and Living in the Mirror: A Literary Perspective (Tehran, 2005). Her articles include, ³The 'Third Ear' of the Analyst,² Critique, Journal of Critical Studies of the Middle East, Fall 1995, ³Modern Persian Fiction: History and Development,² in Encyclopædia Iranica (1999), ³Ideal Kingship & Failed Monarchs: Speech-Act Theory and Medieval Persian Historiography,² Iranshenasi, Spring 2001, ³he Autobiographies of Jalal-e Al-e Ahmad: Who is Schizophrenic, the Culture or the Self?², Goft-e Goo(Spring 2002).
Abstract
Is Public life Publishable? Ask Shaykh Ibrahim Zanjani!
While biographical literature has a long-established reputation as a major field of Perso-Islamic studies, the production of autobiographies have been considered as limited to the Persian encounter with the West and modernity. Perso-Islamic life narratives have been thought to conform to highly stylized and rigid conventions, depicting types rather than individuals. Almost all critical studies of the genre lament the lack of depth on the private lives of their subject. Characterized not only by a dichotomous conceptualization of the self, but also divided along the axis of privacy and the ethics of public life, The Story of My Life, by Shaykh Ibrahim Ibn Hadi Zanjani (1855 –1928), in which he traces the gradual development of a pious cleric into a doubtful politician, holds a unique critical value for studying the traditional and modern modes of interpreting and representing public and private life in written form.
This study will first attempt to situate Zanjani’s autobiography within the context of self-narration in Perso-Islamic culture and the way it resembles to, or differs from the more or less recognized genre of autobiography in the West. It shall then try to establish that contrary to generally held conceptions, this is a meaningful account of the public life that is missing from his autobiography. Despite the fact that Zanjani settles down to recall his life and write its story at the age of 72, he does not include anything that occurred beyond the age of 51, which corresponds to the heyday of his political and public career. His narrative is void of any reference to his failures and successes as an influential member of the Democratic Fraction of the Parliament, his betrayal of his own patriotic claims, and most importantly, the significant role he played as a member of the panel of judges that delivered the death sentence of Shaykh Fazl-Allah Nuri; a death all too present by its absence from his life narrative.
Does The Story of My Life tell one story to conceal another? Does the other story return with the very act of narration? Are we dealing with a written text in which narration repeats not by what is but by highlighting that which gets blocked or concealed by the telling?