Description
In A Picture Out Of
Frame our
sympathy
is wholly engaged. A boy grows up in poverty in Iran; he goes to the
capital;
he receives a letter from a friend; he is in exile. Nothing else
happens.
It will break your heart.
The prose is simple like that of Juan Ramón
Jiminéz in Platero
and I. (Yes there are
donkeys
here too.) But the village life so lovingly portrayed is on the brink
of
tragedy. That fate is precariously held in balance; its extent is only
fully
revealed in the letter received at the end. Aidani's deft ability to
hold
back in the face of overwhelming odds justifies his deliberate
simplicity
of style. The structure is invisibly subtle.
A
meditation on the
connections between reality, imagination, past and its present, this
is a challenging book with revealing emotional
richness. It
tells the story of a young man who speaks in the third person
in
order to examine what he saw and suggests that this story could be
anyone’s when invasion, war and terror dictates. The book
invites
the readers to be the real witness of its character’s
narrative
and observe how he shares his shattered world with us. The
narrator invites us to think about the power of memory and its
expression in our lives.
A Picture Out Of Frame
is
ultimately both hopeful and challenging, revealing how
urgently
the West and the East need to embark upon an understanding of each
other.
ISBN 1876044233
Published 1997
86 pgs
$21.95
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‘What kind of
world are we living
in?’ He asks himself looking into the distance of his
memories. He
feels the exhilaration of his strong desires and hopes for a better
future. He murmurs to the walls around him, ‘We all wait. Yes
the
oppressed men and women always fight and wait for that bright future on
the horizon.’
He gazes upon a piece of paper which sits on the table in front of him.
He shifts his eyes to observe the environment around him. He looks at
the dusty floor and contemplates the room’s shadows. His
chair is hard
and uncomfortable, so he shifts around until he is more comfortable. A
strange pang of weakness disturbs him and reminds him that he is hungry.
In irritation, he stands up and tries to force himself to think of
something else. He picks up a map of the world. With an unusual air, he
looks at the strange, unfamiliar names of different places. He is
unimpressed by them. So, he crumples the map up and throws it into a
corner of the kitchen. He tries to breathe calmly and deeply and the
rain slowly falls in a continuous curtain outside the hut.
The kitchen is bare. There is no food, but there are one or two pots
and pans, a few plates, a kettle and not much else. He tries to
concentrate on his thoughts. He raises his head upwards and looks at a
picture which is hanging on the wall. It is a picture of a Kurdish
woman. She is wearing the beautiful traditional costume of the Kurds
and she is embracing her unique-looking child. Reflections from the
beams of light, which are grey in this black and white photograph,
illuminate her face to create an image of life which enchants him. He
shuts his eyes as he sits down and
continues on his voyage, as he pictures another spot in his memory.
Kurdestan. He is entranced by the picture of it in his mind’s
eye. He
thinks to himself, ‘What does it mean, Kurdestan?’
Then he answers
writing, ‘The land of the Kurds, the land of freedom
fighters, the land
of harsh mountains and the land of soft, fertile earth. The land of
valleys, and agriculture, the land of poverty...’ Again he is
irritated
and he drops his pen to the table. He gets up and goes over to the old
primus stove. After filling the kettle with water, he struggles to turn
the primus on. After a few minutes, he gets it alight. He mutters
angrily, ‘No oil in the land of oil.’ In his
frustration he clenches
his fist and strikes out to smash the air before him. ‘In
spite of the
industrialisation, we don’t even have access to our own
gas!’ He yells
at himself angrily, as his frustration increases, ‘Shut up
you and make
your bloody glass of tea!’
With sharp movements he swiftly returns to the old chair. The noise of
the primus disturbs his concentration. Tensely, he grabs the chair, to
complement his annoyance. He sits there, and rests his head on his arm,
as he waits for the water to boil. He looks outside through the window
at the distance. On the street, cars race one after another, as if in a
competition. The rain blurs them from his view and quickly they pass
from his field of vision. The sound of their splashes resounds in his
ears. ‘I wish I knew where they were going,’ he
muses. He rubs his eyes
and then looks over at the primus. ‘That bloody old
thing.’
On this spring day, the weeping willows waltz and the rain and the
trees show off as though to tell the willows ‘We can dance
too!’
It is afternoon. He tries to calm down, but the noise of the primus
won’t let him. Suddenly an image of the village appears. He
tries to
capture it but suddenly it vanishes as it had appeared before.
‘It is difficult to make a connection,’ he says.
‘The product of what?... He smiles when he thinks of the
word, ‘...of
nothingness.’ Finally, he is pleased to see steam rising from
the
kettle.
His mind now focuses on the kettle and he goes over to fill the teapot,
the old, ancient teapot. He puts the tea in it and then pours in the
boiling water. As he turns the primus off he yells at it,
‘You old bastard!’
He sits and waits for the tea. The rain pours down constantly creating
new walls around him. He pours the tea into a glass.
He picks up the pen again and writes, This
is illusion. ‘No.’ He
changes his mind. It
could be an
illusion for me to believe that I
would ever be able to introduce myself to you completely, in relation
to what I write... because if I try to explain the sign first.
He
trails off. ‘The sign... that’s too technical. But
I pretend to talk
technically don’t I?’ He says, ‘Leave it
there.’
‘The sign is a word I have in my mind. I am frustrated enough
to change
it though... but this is naturally me. Me - who seems to know what it
means to say what I am producing.’
He stops and looks at the picture of the Kurdish woman. He becomes
entranced again. ‘Ordinary language...’
The face of the woman frightens him. It is so strong, so painful, so
clear. It is the vision of an ordinary human being who has an ordinary
language.
‘Any person must be able, in the first place, to listen to
his or her
own voice,’ he muses. ‘I mean, before writing their
ideas down on
paper, they should be able to listen to themselves.... It is there, in
relation to speaking, that I will meet myself. It is a completely
different relationship to when I’m writing.’
As he thinks to himself he looks at the view out the window. He
thinks of when his brother walked into the room. His face is drawn and
tired. It reminds him of one of the local beggars.
It never occurred to him that his brother would be hanged many years
later. There was no indication of it, just now. There was an image of
death there, though. And of the excitation of language, the being of
the family and the voyage.
His heart started beating faster and harder. He put his hand on the
table and stood up to look outside once more. He could see the images
of the outside pictures and he sees the unjust court. He walks away
from the chair, taking two or three steps forward and then he turns
back.
‘The blood responds to the mountains and the valleys and to
that vast
land. The land of no roads...’ He stops in frustration.
He begins to picture everything that happens around him as if he
weren’t there. He tries to interpret the picture of the
valleys. He
comes from the desert, but that picture is green, fertile and alive
There is a lone tree in the middle of this picture. It is as green as
possible, with its picturesque shadow, and the rich desert obeys it. He
cannot sort out why the tree is there.
He returns to the side of the chair, thinking, ‘What would it
be like
to be prosecuted and to be waiting for the following morning to be
hanged or shot?’
A strange fatigue invades him and seems to take over his whole
existence. He stands motionless, near the chair. His wide eyes shorten
the distance, the blurred distance. He sits down and begins writing.
Before talking to
others, I talk to
myself. Before trying to impress
others, I listen to myself. I have inherited this from you - prisoner
of justice.
I am writing to you, so
that I can
listen to myself properly. I know
you are going to be shot tomorrow morning. I am not agonising over this
event. We have experienced the fact that when justice fights against
injustice, death is always there. They will kill you because you have
listened to your own language. The sounds of justice have been cemented
in your voice and in your ears, so the power of language is unable to
deceive you.
He puts the pen down. Again he is irritated. ‘I cannot write
and I
cannot connect.’ He stands up and imagines, ‘The
firing squad grab him
by the hair...’ Suddenly he asks himself, ‘What has
that village done
to us?’
He picks up the pen and drops it again, repeating, ‘I
can’t write.’ He
leaves it there. It is all too painful.
I had 1972-1975 in mind when I began to write this novella in the early
’80s when the army of Saddam Hussein invaded my city of
birth. I
wanted to create a book in which I was going to re-create the
‘story’ of how I witnessed when my city was turned
into
military base due to the menacing propaganda by the Bathist regime in
Iraq. This was due to the conflict that was looming between two
dictators with their violent ambitions both to their own and each
other’s peoples. These were the Shah of Iran and young Saddam
Hussein who was pushing himself to become absolute ruler of Iraq. The
background of this book depicts and reflects the fear that I was still
carrying within me as a result of that experience.
But the invasion of my town by Saddam’s army (1980-1988)
moved me
into a new emotional and physical space and forced me to focus on the
absurd rather than a descriptive pattern of events, to create the views
of my little town, which is on the border between Iran and Iraq.
The book tries to depict how the invading army killed or took away
thousands of civilians including some of my friends, many of whom
became prisoners of war who have never been found. They either died in
prison camps in Iraq or were simply buried in unknown mass graves
inside that country or dumped in the river Karun. The reason that I
used the third person singular pronoun in this book was that I imagined
the character in the book as a nameless person who could represent any
of those who witnessed these horrifying events.
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Reviews
Exiles
in
heart and mind
Andrew McCue
Ulitarra,
No. 14, December 1998
If you take your hat off to Sant
[Album
of Domestic
Exiles]
for giving you the exile’s natural, if cool-heeled
intelligence, you
eat
it for what Mammad Aidani can do with banishment’s blistering
heart.
Neatly,
for the conceit of this review, Sant’s finale is this:
‘Write! And make
exile
/ unite with the reach of a table.’ Mammad Aidani’s
short novel starts
out
with a man at a table doing this. ‘What kind of world are we
living
in?’,
he asks himself looking into the distance of his memories. He feels the
exhilaration
of his strong desires and hopes for a better future.
Aidani’s ‘he’ is not so much a man who
writes his exile at arm’s
length,
as feels it written upon him. He asks, ‘What kind of
world?’ and reads
himself
for the answer. The marks run deep, but he also finds hope in the
remarkable
plasticity of his own substance.
The passions and excitations of exile are never allowed to wallow in
self-pity
or nostalgia. Aidani’s man may be banished from his homeland,
but the
tall
canopy of his exile also enables a critical overview of his nurturing
roots.
‘What has that village done to us?’ he asks of his
childhood haunts (in
what
I take to be Iran), but the voice that replies is that of the older and
exiled
man:
Suspicion
is always there in the village. One can see it and almost taste it in
the
air. There is no language there. People speak only on rare occasions.
Men
speak to each other and women speak only to other women. One may ask,
when
seeing them, what planet are they living on? It brings me to believe
that
natural human interaction has been suppressed for centuries. This is
called
intimidation. In the marketplace, silence is the symbol of
discussion...
The ground is the only medium to which one can talk freely.
Clear-sighted, hawk-eyed the vision may be, but as it is rendered in
this
humble but far-reaching book, it is in constant and dramatic conflict
with
the blind longing to belong. These are, after all, the memories which
constitute
his own sense of being. And if in exile he ‘wishes he could
hear
someone
or write, ...he knows, as they would all know by now, that memories are
private
possessions’ - not to be spoken aloud, painfully kept to
yourself, yet
ironically,
the only attachments that cannot be ‘stolen or
destroyed’.
It is a cruel exile, whose heart confesses its longing for a past in
which
the heart cannot speak, but Mammad Aidani lends it voices of passion,
compassion,
drama and even hope. The exile, at least, and unleashed, can speak for
itself.
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The Australianity of this
Literature
Dan O’Neill
Overland,
No. 152, Spring 1998
A hundred years ago some of the best energies of Australian literature
were
devoted to defining and registering what was typical of the nation. It
was
always possible for discerning spirits to see that enterprise as
somewhat
foolish. Christopher Brennan, in the Sydney University magazine Hermes in 1902, for
example, saw
‘the
Australianity of this literature, which largely dealt with and was
mainly
addressed to mythical individuals called Bill and Jim’ as
‘painted on,
not
too laboriously, from the outside’. What was wanted was
something
cooler
and less chauvinistic. But neither the writers he mocked nor Brennan
could
have predicted the present state of affairs in which the national
writing
scene is full of the most ‘untypical’ characters,
being Australian in
the
many ways that their various pasts in various parts of the globe have
made
congenial, natural or necessary to them. Among those ways is that in
the
tradition of Conrad, writing as someone who has embraced the English
language with a passion born of a love of its literary potential,
writing about places
that are ‘over there’, writing with the complicated
feelings of the
migrant,
the refugee, or the exile, writing with the conviction, wrested from
widespread
forms of modern suffering, that all countries, all cities, are capable
of
showing the same terrible things about the plight of being human that
have
driven some people to this country, where they are still at least free
to
write. This, for some people nowadays, and for those who read them, is
‘the
Australianity of this literature’ as well.
Those who are already familiar with the poetry of Mammad Aidani will
know
that he is such an Australian writer resident here after three years in
Europe,
principally
in Italy. I am sure they will welcome this prose work, as will readers
who
here encounter him for the first time. The genre lies somewhere between
novella
and prose poem. It was a good idea to precede it by a foreword
consisting
of an excerpt from a letter that the writer sent to his family from
Brisbane
in early 1983. For its preoccupations give the best clue to the real
content
and the real method of the work that follows. He speaks of
‘the war’
(it
remains that undefined and thus potentially historico-mythic
throughout)
that continues, of his isolation (‘People here do not talk
about the
war
and us at all, as if that part of the world that I come from is
irrelevant’)
and of his desperate attempt to maintain some kind of human continuity,
some
link with them and with what he must keep on valuing to survive -
‘I’m
seeking
goodness and love, for beauty and knowledge, as you have taught me with
your
simplicity and poverty.’ He speaks also of the necessity he
feels to
keep
on writing: ‘I feel now that I’m alone I have to
create my world in my
mind’s
imagination... I have this strange feeling that if I don’t
write I will
die
unnoticed ...’ Writing helps him in ‘forgetting the
pain’.
The work has two parts. Its overall effort is to keep alive the images
that
remain in the mind of the exiled anonymous central figure who is first
presented
to us as someone looking back with his fading memories to an otherwise
irrecoverable
past, to a land that is, for him, a village and then a city slum of his
childhood
and adolescence. He is in a barely furnished kitchen in a new land, and
the
reader joins him in a painful effort of recall, of going inward to
glimpse,
fan alive, and warm the mind and heart at, whatever ashes of the old
life
remain there for his imagination to cherish and extend into a renewed
attempt
to live. Aidani has very evidently given a lot of thought to the
travail involved
for a writer in working, not with fantasy elements, but with what is
genuinely
there, and
in building on the
remembered
fragments of the precious past to recover the world that one once lived
inside. In
fact, for the
reader, a great
part of the subtle but firm structure of the work is the
well-communicated
process of gradual emotional breakthrough to a solid connection with
the
threatened past of the central figure. In the first chapter we see and
feel
this effort begin, as the narrator shows us the exile, under the
pressure
of his great need, trying to get too far:
He
returns
to the side of the chair, thinking, ‘What would it be like to
be
prosecuted
and to be waiting for the following morning to be hanged or
shot?’
This thought, which will not be explained until near the end of the
second
part, and which is centrally important to the effect of the whole work,
exacerbates
the frustration and despair of exile. And, in the mind that has been
cruelly
torn from its native context, it is a thought that can only stay alive
after
that mind has gone back to the beginning. Hence, for the rest of part
one,
we see in quickly evoked flashes a retrospect, from childhood on, of
images,
fragments, residues that are deftly interpreted with the later
knowledge
of the character-narrator so as to go beyond the boy’s then
world. For
the
boy has ‘a vast array of images’ but,
‘like the others, he has no
language other than a vocabulary of three hundred words’.
The true pathos of the work lies in the sort of healing that the
central
figure is trying to bring about by this attempt to go back from the
world
he now lives in, to re-connect that old world that has made him to this
new
world that is so big, so cruel and merciless, and that was already
there
in the occupation of the city by the soldiers. This, which he begins to
remember,
and, as it were, re-make in part one, is the obsessive theme of part
two.
Years of living in cities of strangers seem to lie behind
Aidani’s
skill
in evoking the imprint of massive events on the collective psyche, as
gleaned
by the lonely and sensitive individual from the look and feel of public
spaces,
crowds on streets, queues, bare trees and other indices of gloom,
anxiety
and suppressed anger.
He is good at the poetic evocation of the symbolic and allegorical
dimension
of events - a conversation between friends as the troops begin their
seizure
of the city, the return and then death of the family’s
long-lost
adopted
stray dog, a train’s crossing of a stretch of desert to get
from
village
to city, the gathering of migrant Kurds on a particular street in town.
In
fact, as a true poet, he shows facility in managing the lyric and the
epic
tasks of writing, guiding the reader to the individual’s and
the
people’s
feelings. He has yet to become master of the dramatic. The dialogue,
except
where it can be read as the externalization of archetypal thoughts of
quasi-mythic figures, reads a little stiffly, set-pieces designed to
expound thoughts
of the author, rather than the utterances of living beings. The
conversation
of the mother and father of the central character seems mainly devoted
to
demonstrating the poverty and oppression that afflicts their whole
class.
It contrasts unfavourably with the power and tenderness of the more
direct
evocation of the character-narrator’s feeling for the love
between his
parents.
It is true of the work in general that its life resides in the
saturation
of memories of a treasured past in the powerful feeling that the act of
writing
both calls up and embodies in words. Its true unity lies not in the
concatenation
of its episodes or the interaction of its characters, but in the sure
growth
and flowering of its emotional world towards a climax of sensibility,
after
which we return to the central character sitting at his desk in the new
country.
There he is trying to deal with the question of how he has survived
while
his friend is dead at the hands of their common enemy. We are back with
the
isolation and alienation of the foreword, but the confusion has abated.
The ending of the book is both calm and dark. For a political radical
it
presents both a realistic presentation of a common experience of defeat
in
our time and a real problem about where to go from here:
He
wishes
he could hear from someone or write. But, he knows, as they would all
know
by now, that memories are private possessions. And although many things
can
be stolen or destroyed, the people’s private memories cannot
be. So,
although
they may not be able to speak out as they wish and as they need to,
they
still have their memories.
As a prose-writer, Mammad Aidani still has a lot to learn, principally
I
think about the rational and craft-based elements that distinguish this
kind
of writing from poetry. But on the really indispensable thing, the
intuitive
grasp of the way feeling holds material together and makes it alive all
the
way through, he is already totally sound. His capacity for the
undefended
and honest expression of positive and valuable emotion marks him off
from
the more common Australian mode of ironic and laconic understatement,
in
a way that makes him an unusually interesting new voice in the
cacophonous
national choir.
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A
Picture Out of
Frame
Michelle Maree Ehrich
Social Alternatives,
Vol. 17,
No.
4, October 1998
Born in 1955 at Khorramshahr, Iran, Mammad Aidani migrated to Australia
in
1982, after three years in Europe. He has published a collection of
poetry,
edited a collection of stories by victims of torture, and written a
play.
A Picture Out Of Frame
is
Mammad
Aidani’s first novel. The novel comprises a foreword and two
parts. The
foreword
contains an insightful excerpt from a letter (dated 23/2/1983) that
Aidani
sent to his family in Iran from Brisbane, Australia. Here Mammad states,
I’m
seeking
goodness and love, for beauty and knowledge, as you have taught me with
your
simplicity and poverty. You know I’m 27 now, and I started to
write
this
book to keep myself sane. I’m not sure what will happen to it
but I
have
to write it. I know you might laugh but I mean it - I have this strange
feeling
that if I don’t write I will die unnoticed. You see... When I
write, I
only
think of writing and what’s in me to write, and then I think
I’m
forgetting
the pain
(pg.ix).
A Picture Out Of Frame
is a
touching
account of a young man’s memories of his former life in Iran.
It spans
his
childhood through to adulthood and his ultimate exile. The story begins
with
the young man sitting at a table, much like the young man in the
photograph
on the book’s cover who is depicted in shadow and
‘out of frame’. The
young
man is reminiscing. This book is an evocation of private memories which
represent
for Aidani his most precious possessions. He conjures up images of his
past
- his family, his homeland, his friends and his experiences. Aidani
presents
us with such a loving portrayal of his life in the village with his
family
and friends despite terrible hardships. Apart from the natural hardship
caused
by the desert climate and the tragic circumstances caused by the
oppression
of poverty, there was also military oppression from an occupying army,
and
the turbulence of living under extreme fundamentalism. The reader
shares
in the fearful and repressive atmosphere and a culture of silence
because
(pg. 57) ‘...the holes in the walls have mice... the mice
have ears’.
We
also eavesdrop on recalled conversations between his mother and father,
the
young man and his friends. We hear stories that his Grandmother told
him
which provide much needed comfort for him in later years. These are
such stirring
and tender moments. The reader also gains an understanding and
appreciation
of what it’s like to be dispossessed and separated from
one’s family
and
homeland. It is a moving tale of loneliness, sorrow and despair
interspersed
with moments of happiness derived from love for family and homeland.
Mammad Aidani’s subtle narrative skill and deliberate
simplicity of
style
make for an emotional and very worthwhile reading experience.
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Tale
of Iran poses questions for our times
Edward Reilly
Geelong Advertiser,
30 May 1998
What kind of world are we living in? It took me a long time to get
around
to finishing this sad tale.
There is only so much I could bear from time to time, my sympathies
going
out to all those bruised by poverty, ignorance and wickedness, knowing
that
I am privileged in this world, and yet quite powerless to ameliorate
the
suffering of Aidani’s people.
This book is set in Iran, a potentially rich country that had been
wasted
by its irresponsible Shah, and now ground into dour fanaticism by the
Mullahs,
where ordinary people, farmers, tradesmen, wives and students are
increasingly
preyed upon, driven out of their houses, sent to beg for one rial,
murdered
or exiled. for what? ‘What kind of world are we living
in?’ Aidani
asked.
Nothing, not even memories of his beloved mother and grandmother can
relieve
the tension and fear of seeing armed men in khaki standing about his
town
- the gulf between the ordinary people and their would-be saviours is
too
great for sympathy: he becomes a prisoner in his own country.
The only way out in such a situation is to retreat inwards. Friends
such
as Scheherezade, Sharif and Fereshteh become lifelines to sanity. He
dreams
about Kurdestan, a land of hills and valleys while living in the
impossible
dust of a big city. But even such a retreat cannot shield him or Sharif
from
army reinforcements and the horrors of his times.
In 1983, while the Persian Gulf War was still burning, Aidani sent a
letter
to his family in Khorramshahr, crying out ‘I have not heard
from you
for
so long’. How many victims of this century have echoed that
cry? In a
bleak
letter which eventually reaches the narrator, Sharif details how he was
picked
up by military agents, tortured with nails driven into his feet and
under
his skin and placed on trial (we are not told what for). Signed
‘Your
school
friend’, Sharif cannot write his own name lest he implicate
others.
Such
fears pervade this novel that I think it must have taken a great toll
upon
the writer to recount even the better times with his friends and
family.
Aidani, now in his early 40s, eventually went into exile and migrated
to
Australia.
Carrying with him a love of Persian literature, he is our gain. He has
proceeded
to publish a collection of his own poetry, Better Not To Explain,
and also has
edited
an anthology of stories of the victims of torture, Voices from the Deep Close
Distance.
I strongly recommend this novel to teachers and readers who value the
truth
and who are able and willing to impart that to their friends and
families.
These days in our own society, we teeter so close to intolerance and
social
distrust that we have need of corrective tales, reminders of what could
happen
to ourselves if we let our freedoms be sold cheaply to prophets,
religious
or political. We must keep on asking ourselves, as does Aidani,
‘What
kind
of world are we living in?’ and find the answers for
ourselves.
Back to top
Shorts
Thuy On
Australian Book Review,
No.
199,
April 1998
Reading the biographical note on Mammaid Aidani, you discover that he
once
edited a collection of stories by people who were victims of torture.
This
piece of information prepares you for his first novel, A Picture Out Of Frame.
You know,
for
a start, that it will not be light and fluffy. Yet although the book
deals
with wartime oppression in Aidani’s motherland, Iran, the
narrative is
not
as heavy as expected. A third-person account provides a subtle
distancing
ploy, enabling a more objective eye to be cast over intense personal
tragedies.
In a style close to prose-poetry, Aidani presents a critical but loving
panorama
of his homeland. We are duly surrounded by the dust and humidity, the
mud
wall houses and the boys picking for copper wire in dumps. At one
point,
there is the wry observation that ‘The confrontation of life
and death
does
not leave one room’ to romanticise. And yet, the poverty and
political
fracas
in Iran are elegantly commented upon. The narrator, after having
trouble
with his old primus stove, mutters angrily about there being
‘no oil in
the
land of oil’.
Owing to its slimness, its novella length, what is significant about A Picture Out Of Frame
are the
things
that Aidani does not comment on - the things that remain out of frame.
The
book is testament to the power of the unspoken, and is all the more
harrowing
for what it leaves out.
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New Books - A Picture Out Of Frame
Write On,
December
1997-January
1998
Mammad Aidani’s book deals with memory and exile, focusing on
a
poverty-stricken
village in Iran and the formative influence of place and family. Heat
and
desolation form the backdrop - then the army arrives. The cover shows a
man
silhouetted in a window: the book itself is a window on a life we know
in
Australia only through the exiled who live among us.
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Compassion
outweighs desire to impress
Veronica Sen
The Canberra Times,
21
December
1997
A Picture Out Of Frame
is not
quite
so successful [as Pham Thi Hoai Nam, The
Crystal Messenger] in its portrayal of a war-haunted
country.
Mammad
Aidani has written with sensitivity, but in a rather plain and
repetitive
style, about a rural and urban poverty that permeates every aspect of
life
down to ‘clothes, gestures, posture’. In the
process he condemns recent
political
turmoil in modern Iran.
What he has to say about these situations, and their effect on ordinary
men
and women, is worth hearing. His low-key writing creates a real sense
of
the injustice and fear that stalked the land that he has now left for
Australia.
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Top Shelf - Fiction
Michelle Griffin
The Sunday Age,
23 November
1997
Iranian-Australian writer Mammad Aidani is a wonderful poet, but his
novel
about poverty and exile in Iran is not really successful. The book
shakes
with half-choked rage about the oppressive regime and its contempt for
the
poor. However, the highly formal English in which it is written suffers
from
a stilted tone and extremely wobbly syntax. The story itself is
certainly
strong enough, following one of the sons of a desperately poor village
family
into the city and out into exile. And the mother, illiterate, exhausted
and
proud, is warmly and powerfully captured. Those who pick their way to
the
ending will find it unbearably sad.
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