The “Industry” of Writing Memoirs in Iran

You may be surprised by the title of this short article, and like that correspondent who interviewed me two weeks ago, imagine that by using the term “the industry of writing memoirs”, I mean we have to industrialize and mechanize the memories! If you suppose so, you are utterly wrong! In this article I want to mention a pathological subject in the area of memoirs and writing the memoirs of the Islamic Revolution and the imposed war, which without paying attention, it will bear irretrievable harms for the literature of writing memoirs In Iran and the oral memoirs and even oral history in this country, and this is what could be called the “the industry of writing memoirs in Iran”.

However what do we mean by “the industry of writing memoirs” in this essay?
Theodore Horkheimer, the well-known critical school philosopher has a book by the name The Dialectics of Enlightening which is written by the cooperation of Herbert Marcuse. He has used the term “The industry of culture” in this book, the brief definition and implication of which is the instrumental and commercial use of an entity called “culture” by the bourgeois and capitalist world and the mass production of corny and popular culture and pushing aside the original and celestial one.
In recent years the process of creating self-written or else written memoirs in on the area of the Islamic Revolution and specifically eight years of Imposed War in our country Iran has taken an unprecedented pace and there is almost no week in which government and pseudo-government publications would not produce and publish many books with various page numbers and qualities in this specific field. There are very few publishing organizations relating to the Imposed War which do not have an independent department called “oral history” or “memoirs” and which do not send numerous books to the bookshelves. There seems to be a competition among the state institutions on the area; the memoir mass production competition. In this competition     what have less been taken into consideration are matters such as the originality of the memoirs and their correspondence with the historical reality and the events happened. When the aim of state and pseudo government publishers would just be publishing memoirs solely with  the intention of giving about statistics and business accounts, matters such  as precision, originality, logic of reality and avoiding exaggeration would primarily be forgotten, and  just hasty printing and delivering statistics  and these days, such pompous  unveiling would become the main object. Because there is a lack of criticism and critiquing atmosphere in our homeland and therefore the published memoirs are not subject to comprehensive criticism and critiquing, the realm has been-and is becoming- even wider and more open to the careless government publishers.

What is harmed meanwhile?
It is the history of war which in the first place has been, and will be severely damagedwith publishing exaggerated and nonscientific works.For example when in a very famous book, the narrator announces with decisiveness that in the 34 days of Khorramshahr resistance the army air force did not perform even one flight  over Khorramshahr and did not bombard Iraqi tank columns, and nobody utters even one word about this blatant shameful  distortion of history, in the future if this book is to be introduced  as “memoirs” and a “source”  of information about the resistance in Khorramshahr for scholars and researchers of eight-years of war, this is the history of this country that consequently will be harmed.
I am among the zealous memoir readers. In published books in this genre these days I witness many times that the editor, in the words of the common people, has “watered down” the memoirs of the narrator and with the intention of increasing the number of the pages of the book, has added to text himself!

“Memoirs”, either “self-written” or “else-written” are a subclass if history  and they are considered as raw material for historians, but with the present conditions of producing memoirs in Iran, historians in the future will face the problem of genuineness of the text and validity of the narrators sayings, or those that have been put in the mouth of the narrator. Censorship, distortion, exaggeration, minimizing, political grudge, profiteering look at the events and considering enemies and opponent black and white, are dangerous blights which consciously or unconsciously lead the memoir writing of the Revolution and the Imposed War to the terrifying valley of “memoir writing industry” and “mass production”.

 What is the solution?
We should change the single-voice atmosphere of the memoirs to a multi-voice one, and let the critics, away from any hidden or obvious  bullying and away from any terror, criticize the published memoirs and severe the pure and impure. It’s also better to publish, to the extent which is possible and for initiating trust, the audio and visual context of the oral memoirs, which in the oral history bears the name of “oral and audio documents” in the form of CD or DVD along with the book. For instance, if an editor claims that he has done one thousand, five hundreds, two hundreds or even fifty hours of interview to produce a book, he can attach these hours of oral memoirs to the book and so the grounds are set for gaining the trust and investigations of the connoisseurs and experts on the field, then it will become evident that what is the share of the “narrator” and “editor” in processing and preparing a memoir book…

Seyyed Ghasem Yahosseyni
Booshehr Harbour, May 24th 2012
Translated by: Arash Yazdanpanah