The Unseen Memories
Hamid Qazvini
Translated by: Zahra Hosseinian
2020-12-15
The number and variety of cultural and artistic productions are usually considered as indicators for assessing the cultural condition, which is also the basis for judging by many individuals and institutions.
Many officials has obsessed with this view and it has led them to think only about the number of works in the allocation of budget and other support, regardless of the richness of the content and the degree of influence and attraction of the audience.
In such a situation, some publishers, who also have deep cultural and value concerns, have joined the line of producing rushed large number of works, and sacrificed the quality for quantity. Such works not only do not contribute to the growth of culture and the realization of its lofty goals, but sometimes also cause harm.
The high volume of published works in the field of memoirs and oral history is an example, many of which are incapable of attracting even the smallest audience and have no added value to the knowledge of society.
It has been repeatedly stated that the purpose of writing memoirs and oral history is not merely to publish the mental resources of a narrator, rather the goal is to add a new and of course valid page to the pages of the history book to help recording or discovering the truth.
In recent years, we have witnessed institutions, publishers and media which have recorded and published the memoirs of different people in various formats every day, but they did not specify how they supposed to meet the need of audience and history. Like any other research, the effect of oral history should have specific goals so that the audience can make a clear assessment of its achievement.
In this type of historiography, if the less seen groups of the society define a new role and position for themselves by entering the compiling history, care and delicacy must be exercised in presenting this role so that their works are not considered futile and do not cause a waste of resources.
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Tabas Fog
Ebham-e Tabas: Ramzgoshayi az ja’beh siah-e tahajom nezami Amrika (Tabas Fog: Decoding the Black Box of the U.S. Military Invasion) is the title of a recently published book by Shadab Asgari. After the Islamic Revolution, on November 4, 1979, students seized the US embassy in Tehran and a number of US diplomats were imprisoned. The US army carried out “Tabas Operation” or “Eagle’s Claw” in Iran on April 24, 1980, ostensibly to free these diplomats, but it failed.An Excerpt from the Memoirs of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi
As Operation Fath-ol-Mobin came to an end, the commanders gathered at the “Montazeran-e Shahadat” Base, thrilled by a huge and, to some extent, astonishing victory achieved in such a short time. They were already bracing themselves for the next battle. It is no exaggeration to say that this operation solidified an unprecedented friendship between the Army and IRGC commanders.A Selection from the Memoirs of Haj Hossein Yekta
The scorching cold breeze of the midnight made its way under my wet clothes and I shivered. The artillery fire did not stop. Ali Donyadideh and Hassan Moghimi were in front. The rest were behind us. So ruthlessly that it was as if we were on our own soil. Before we had even settled in at the three-way intersection of the Faw-Basra-Umm al-Qasr road, an Iraqi jeep appeared in front of us.Boycotting within prison
Here I remember something that breaks the continuity, and I have to say it because I may forget it later. In Evin Prison, due to the special position that we and our brothers held and our belief in following the line of Marja’eiyat [sources of emulation] and the Imam, we had many differences with the Mujahedin.
