Amir Moosavi, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Amir Moosavi (AV): I did my PhD in Middle East studies. This is a book that comes out of studying Persian, Arabic, and comparative literatures during that time, as well as my current job that involves teaching both Arabic and Persian literatures, largely in translation, while being based in an English department. One of the things I noticed in reading contemporary Iranian and Iraqi fiction was that the Iran-Iraq War was a recurring theme in novels and short stories of writers from both sides. And not just in the types of novels and short stories that we typically consider “war literature.” Rather, the war, along with commentary on it, appears in all kinds of fiction that touches upon any aspect of life in Iran and Iraq from 1980 until today, because writers from both countries, whether they live inside or outside Iraq and Iran, continually revisit the war and its consequences. It is almost impossible not to, as the conflict lasted nearly a decade (1980-1988) and had devastating effects on both countries.
When I first began looking into the subject I read about the history of the Iran-Iraq War and the way the war’s literature was first developed largely as controlled, state-sponsored propaganda projects in both countries throughout the war years. In examining both sides, I saw several parallels. The Ministries of Culture (or equivalent bodies) in both countries promoted works that reinforced “official” state narratives of the war. And both of those narratives, coincidentally, framed the war in terms of seminal moments in the first century of Islamic history (the Battle of Qadisiyya in Iraq, and the Battle of Karbala in Iran). Generally speaking, throughout the war, each side sponsored literature (and other forms of cultural production) that romanticized the war front, soldiers’ heroism, and martyrdom.
There has been a lot written about the literature of the 1980s in Arabic, Persian, and English. I did not want to write another about that. Rather, I wanted to write about the postwar literature that sought to rewrite and challenge the narratives of the war years (and which continue to be produced with state-sponsorship today in Iran). I thought doing so from a comparative perspective would be interesting for people who study either literature or who are interested in war and culture, or potential entryways to comparative study of modern cultures of Southwest Asia.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AV: As a book that primarily takes on the way the Iran-Iraq War has lived on in Arabic and Persian fiction since 1988, Dust That Never Settles focuses on some of the similar ways in which Iraqi and Iranian writers have addressed this war’s still unsettled legacies in each country. So, while Chapter 1 shows how the two wartime states captured the literary spheres, Chapters 2-5 focus on Iranian and Iraqi writers’ confrontations with the state narratives of the Iran-Iraq War and shed light on literature’s contentiousness and sociopolitical relevance in both countries. Topically, the chapters focus on early postwar narratives of mourning, attempts to directly challenge the states’ war front representation, fiction that expresses writers’ futility in challenging the wartime states, and more recent ways that Iranian and Iraqi writers have utilized ghosts and the undead to talk about the war’s ongoing effects, especially on the natural environment.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AV: Most of my publications to date have focused on the literature and culture of the Iran-Iraq War, but I have mostly focused on the Iranian side of the conflict. This is partly because my first job out of graduate school happened to be in Iranian studies and I suddenly (and unexpectedly) found myself much more involved in the world of modern Persian literary studies, which is much smaller than that of Arabic. There also happens to be far less critical work in English about how this war has been treated in Persian literature that is not sponsored by the state, and there is a plethora of great examples to draw from. By contrast, there are many more people working on modern and contemporary Arabic literature, and in the past decade or so there have been several good books about Iraq and that have treated Iraqi literature’s relationship to the war with Iran (Khoury, 2013; Masmoudi, 2015; Al-Hassan, 2020 are just a few book-length examples). Thus, as far as making a scholarly intervention in these fields, I thought I could contribute more meaningfully by developing a book-length comparative project around the topic of the war and its literature. In the meantime I also published some articles that highlighted how, over the past thirty-five years or so, Persian fiction itself has become sort of a battlefield over the representation of the war.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AV: On the most basic level, I would be happy if Dust That Never Settles simply encourages a few people to think across the national and linguistic silos that dominate the study of cultural production from this part of the world. Beyond that, I think the book has a few potential audiences. I am hoping that it will be read by anyone interested in the cultures of this war and how writers have dealt with those cultures and the war’s representation from 1980 to the present day. After that, I think the book could be interesting for scholars and students of modern Arabic and Persian literatures, the cultural histories of Southwest Asia, and comparative literature more generally. As scholars increasingly turn their attention to the cultural history of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War in this part of the world, I think this book has something to offer. As a teaching tool, I think the book could be useful for courses dealing with contemporary literature and culture from the Middle East, since it offers a historically grounded way to compare contemporary Persian and Arabic literatures. Finally, as a scholarly reference, I am hoping the book will be valuable to scholars of contemporary Iranian and Iraqi literatures, in addition to scholars working on the relationship between war, memory, and cultural production in the modern era. I think the book will be most interesting for folks who know about one side of this conflict but not the other.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AV: I am working on a few other things that developed out of this book. The first is a regional cultural history of the 1980s that looks at the ways writers, artists, and filmmakers, from Egypt to Afghanistan, have dealt with social, political, and cultural changes of the period. This includes the defeat of the secular political Left, the rise of Islamic political movements, and the dominance of neoliberal economics. I already allude to this topic in my book’s conclusion, part of which I include below. I have also organized (or co-organized) a couple of conferences in Berlin around the topic and, along with my colleague Anne-Marie McManus, am currently co-editing a special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures titled “The Literary 1980s in the Greater Middle East,” which will hopefully be out before the end of the year.
A second project goes in the direction of eco-criticism and centers on similar geographies as my book—Iran, Iraq, and probably the addition of the Gulf. That developed directly out of my book’s final chapter, which explores works by Diaa Jubaili and Nasim Marashi (among others), who both tie the war’s afterlives to the marshlands found in Southern Iraq and Southwestern Iran. As an aside, I am also (slowly) translating Marashi’s novel Haras (Pruning) from Persian to English.
Excerpt from the book (from the Conclusion, “Cultural Afterlives of 1979,” pages 188 to 90)
From page 188
WRITING THE FUTURE
Whether it is in literature or within other cultural media, the use and representation of the Iran-Iraq War remains controversial to differing degrees. To breathe life into the narratives of the wartime states is to endorse the regimes’ politics of an unsettled, violent past. To contest those narratives is to write back against the wartime states and the sentimentalization of one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts. But recent works of fiction also use the Iran-Iraq War to call attention to other ongoing catastrophic consequences of the conflict for both countries: the effects of war on the natural environment.
In this way, it is useful to go back to the novel with which this book opened: The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon. Although it only briefly deals directly with the Iran-Iraq War, it does so poignantly and provides one of the finest examples of how Iraqi novelists have treated the war within the longer duree of Iraq’s modern history, with the war against Iran forming just one of several chapters of violence that have plagued the country since 1980. Midway through the novel, the protagonist, Jawad, receives a letter from his uncle Sabri, a former communist who fled Iraq in the early 1980s, going first to Beirut and then Berlin, where he remained. Shortly after the U.S.-led invasion and following Jawad’s father’s death, Sabri returns to Iraq for a short visit for the first time in two decades. Upon his return to Berlin, he publishes his reflections on the visit online, an excerpt of which he includes in a letter he sends to Jawad. Titled “A Lover Pauses before Iraq’s Ruins” (“Iṭlāl al-Mushtāq ʿalā Aṭlāl al-ʿIrāq”), he writes:
Iraqis and palm trees. Who resembles whom? There are millions of Iraqis and as many, or perhaps somewhat fewer, palm trees. Some have had their fronds burned. Some have been beheaded. Some have had their backs broken by time but are still trying to stand. Some have dried bunches of dates. Some have been uprooted, mutilated and exiled from their orchards. Some have allowed invaders to lean on their trunk. Some are combing the winds with their fronds. Some stand in silence. Some have fallen. Some stand tall and raise their heads high despite everything in this vast orchard: Iraq. When will the orchard return to its owners? Not to those who carry axes. Not even to the attendant who assassinates palm trees, no matter what the color of his knife.
The passage does not name the Iran-Iraq War directly, but its mournful framing of what Iraq has become after more than two decades of relentless warfare and sanctions speaks directly to the legacy of the conflict and gestures toward the ways other Iraqi authors allude to the war. In particular, the passage’s references to resilience, exile, death, and silence, all symbolically articulated through the palm tree—itself a trope from both sides of this war’s literature—point to the themes that have been explored in the post-Iran-Iraq War literature throughout this book. At the same time, by not mentioning any specific war, Sabri presents an allegory of all that the Iraqi people have experienced since the mid-1970s, as the Baʿthist regime tightened its grip around the country and Iraq barreled from one war to another. The Iran-Iraq War was just one part of this story.
In using the palm tree and orchard as an allegory for Iraq and Iraqis, Antoon also calls attention to the environmental fallout from war. The Iraqi date palm, which once numbered over thirty million, with large groves in the areas that were hardest hit by the Iran-Iraq War, has been reduced to less than half that amount.13 Cutting the trees during war, combined with Saddam Hussein’s draining of the Iraqi marshlands following the 1991 uprising, as well as the effects of climate change, have made the country’s date palms more than a metaphor for Iraqis’ pain, but rather a physical symbol of the country’s present-day struggles. It is possible that this signals a transformation in the war’s representation, in other words, an “environmental turn.” This book’s final chapter shows how recent prominent works of fiction by Diaa Jubaili in Iraq and Nasim Marashi in Iran, focus on the slow violence and environmental ruin left in the aftermath of wars. In Iran, war fiction has mostly focused on the physical violence faced by humans. But like Antoon and Jubaili, Marashi also sees traces of that violence on the earth. Her focus on the scars of war literally left on the palm trees and water buffaloes of Iran’s marshlands shows a broader understanding of violence than what Iranian authors had previously presented.
Marashi’s 2017 novel, Pruning, appeared while Iranian consciousness of climate change and the Anthropocene was on the rise, and public concern for the issue has only grown since then. The well-known Iranian climate activist, Mohammad Darvish, recently called attention to the Iranian government’s persistent summoning of the Iran-Iraq War and simultaneous enforcement of conservative social norms while utterly neglecting the country’s environment, which in recent decades has succumbed to desertification, incredibly high levels of air pollution, and a sharp rise in the number of animal species that are now critically endangered or extinct. In an interview with the Iranian media site Bāzār o Mā (The Market and Us), he connects the state’s exploitative memory of the war with the current environmental decay, noting that during the war:
Around 500,000 [soldiers] were martyred, taken prisoner, or injured in combat [but] we didn’t give up a bit of land. Now, however, we’ve lost 50,000 square kilometers of Iran’s soil [to desertification]. What’s even sadder than that—the ruling powers of this country don’t even see these 50,000 square kilometers. If you take your headscarf off, they [the government] will see you but they don’t see these 50,000 square kilometers. This is all incredibly sad.
Darvish’s comments highlight a growing frustration toward a government whose priorities no longer align with a large segment of society. He alludes, on the one hand, to the recent uprising in Iran in opposition to the government’s “morality police” (gasht-e ershād) and imposition of forced hijab since 1979, with the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Zan, Zendegi, Azādi), and on the other, to the government’s incessant messaging and reminders of the sacrifices made by Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War. If Iraqi writers include the war with Iran as an integral part of recent Iraqi history that calls for literature’s interrogation, we might read contemporaneous Iranian writing on the war as an effort to highlight aspects of the conflict that continue to be censored by the same regime that existed during wartime.
CULTURAL AFTERLIVES OF 1979
Whether it is debating the war wounds of the past or connecting those unhealed wounds to other issues, the ways in which Iranian and Iraqi writers continue to address the war between the two countries recalls the notion of “writing back” that I allude to in this book’s introduction. Iranian and Iraqi writers have written against the official stories of the Iran-Iraq War by creating a variety of counternarratives that, with the passage of time, have become increasingly critical of the war and the wartime regimes. As the literature of this war demonstrates, Iranian and Iraqi writers of fiction remain invested in writing their countries’ recent, unsettled history, channeling many of the committed principles of previous generations of writers but combining them with increasingly complex literary styles and aesthetics.
An examination of Arabic and Persian fiction of the Iran-Iraq War demonstrates how multilingual, relational comparison informed by literary history and sociopolitical context can help understand, periodize, and even canonize these two literatures. The historical and political circumstances in which Iraqi and Iranian writers found themselves during the 1980s create the first basis for contemporary comparison between the literatures of Iran and Iraq. These writers’ textual strategies for dealing with their mutual entanglements with the war and its afterlives since 1988, opens another space for the comparative study of war and literary production between the two countries. This approach hints at considering the pivotal year 1979 and the era that it inaugurated not only as a historical and political turning point but a cultural one as well, particularly for a region that stretched from North Africa to South Asia. A post-1979 literature might be a body of texts produced in response to, and in the aftermath of, the political and social changes that occurred in or around the year 1979, including the Iranian Revolution, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saddam Hussein’s full ascent to power, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It would encompass not only the Persian and Arabic literatures of the Iran-Iraq War, but also literature written in Kurdish, Turkish and other regional languages. A regional post-1979 literature might also consider the rich literary legacies of the wars in Lebanon, Algeria, and Afghanistan, the 1980 Turkish Coup, and the first Palestinian Intifada, among other contexts.