Mahmoud Dowlatabadi – The Colonel

Iranian author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel opens late at night with a knock on the colonel's door. The colonel has already smoked twenty cigarettes, is old and guilt-ridden, and has become weighed down over the years by memories of the sins he has committed and the mistakes he has made. The colonel is told that his daughter has been killed and he must pay the necessary fees and assist in her burial.

Dowlatabadi makes it clear from the outset that The Colonel is a novel of violence and guilt, concerned with Iran's long struggle against itself while outside influences (primarily the US through the machinations of the CIA) seek to push the country in directions favourable to them and not the citizens. As the colonel travels to bury his daughter the narrative fractures, splitting first into two distinct yet commingled sections – the “present” (the 1980s) in which the colonel attempts to bury his daughter, and the thoughts of the colonel, which anchor around significant events of the past (including but not limited to the coups in the 1950s and the wars in the 1970s). But soon the novel fragments further, following the colonel's family members as they, too, engage in and become victims of the relentless violence of Iran's troubled history.

The tragedy of our whole country is the same: we are all alienated, strangers in our own land. It's tragic. The odd thing is that we have never got used to it. Yet, woe betide us if we do. The irony is that, if you really want to be seen as a good Iranian, and especially if you aspire to high office in this country, you first have to be a foreigner, someone who wasn't born here at all. On the other hand, if you were born and bred here and try to remain true to yourself, your country and your people, then alienation is the most lenient punishment you can expect.

At times, The Colonel's back-and-forth narrative, which shifts from the present to the past and from character to character, can be difficult to follow, particularly when coupled with the novel's tight focus on Iranian military and political history, which is perhaps unfamiliar to many readers. Happily, translator Tom Patterdale provides useful and not too intrusive footnotes to explain various cultural references, as well as including a reasonably lengthy essay on Dowlatabadi's time, nation and career. The Colonel avoids - both within and without the narrative – becoming a dressed-up historical survey of Iran, but the cursory introduction is welcome.

The narrative itself becomes progressively nightmarish, culminating in several vicious torture scenes which, Patterdale informs us, were taken directly from testimonies supplied by people Dowlatabadi knew. The colonel himself is no stranger to the low menace of Iran's history: he has committed two grave mistakes, the first being his refusal to participate in the Dhofar Rebellion, the second being that he murdered his wife for cheating on him. Both mistakes have furthered his ostracisation, both professionally and personally and, it seems, his daughter's murder is perhaps the last straw. He can no longer function properly in the present and instead mulls over the mistakes he – and Iran – have made of the past.

One of the most curious aspects of Dowlatabadi's novel is that, while the CIA and America are mentioned, their role is presented as something far in the distance, important to Iran's recent history but not the entire cause of its problems. Instead, Dowlatabadi places the responsibility of the hope of the early 1950s fading into the violence of the intervening decades as an error to lay at the feet of the Iranians - all the dreams, all the promises, all the lives, all the possibilities - these were broken by Iranians. It is too easy to blame America (or, earlier, the British; or, at times, the Soviets) for the woes the nation has inflicted upon itself, and as long as the young in their outrage and the old in their calculation continue to blame an external source, then the real problems will never be fixed and the cycle will continue.

Dowlatabadi's novel examines the consequences of revolutions and the unexpected (and unexpectedly violent) paths they usually take once the euphoria of the coup has faded. Revolutions have a habit of eating the very people who created them, and virtually always devolve into a cycle of killing, violence and secrecy that can last generations. The colonel, while wrapped in his own guilt, functions as a kind of witness to these horrors, both through his own recollections but also through the lives of his children who, as Patterdale's essay informs us, act as stand-ins for the different types of ideologies that arose out of the turmoil of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It is no accident that each of the colonel's children end up dead, just as it is no acciden that even to this day the novel remains unavailable within Iran and unpublished in the original Persian. Dowlatabadi's criticism is sharp, unsparing, and directed against everyone: you are all responsible, seems to be his message.

I'm well aware that at every stage of history there have been crimes against humanity, and they couldn't have happened without humans to commit them. The crimes that have been visited on my children have been committed, and still are being committed, by young people just like them, by people stirring up their delusions, giving them delusions of grandeur. So why do I imagine that people might improve?

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's The Colonel is one long argument to support the idea that a sufficiently brutalised nation becomes a perpetual device of self-mutilation as one generation succeeds the next and the crimes, violence and death continues. There is no ideology or political party sufficiently coherent to withstand the pressure to commit violence in order to remain in power and, in the end, the blood of thousands stains the hands of every Iranian. The Colonel is a powerful and difficult text, brutal both in its fragmented composition and its unflinching examination of the consequences of power and the ways in which those in power will act to keep it.

Author	Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
Title	The Colonel (Original Title: زوالِ کلنل)
Translator	Tom Patterdale
Nationality	Iranian
Publisher	Haus Publishing
Published	2011 (English)
Pages	243
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond AU)

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