Born in Teheran in 1976, two years before the Iranian Revolution transformed the country into an Islamic Republic, Ali Alizadeh produced his first piece of writing at 13, winning a young adults’ literary award and becoming the subject of a documentary film for Iran’s national television.
He migrated with his family to Australia in 1991, without knowing a word of English, and went on to enrol in the Creative Arts Program at Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus in 1995. During these studies, he released his first book of poetry, Elixir: a Story in Poetry, soon beginning to build an impressive writing career spanning fiction, creative non-fiction, drama and literary criticism.
Centered around themes like history, dissent and the dilemmas of religion and spirituality, Alizadeh’s works have been concerned with the desire and possibility for a renewed universalism, a cross-cultural, cross-national consciousness in the face of the horrors of global capitalism.
His latest book, Transactions is a collection of short stories featuring characters who live on the edge of what is considered civilized society, an attempt, Alizadeh says, to "expose globalisation's dark secrets."
We asked him about his work, his inspirations as a writer and balancing literary roles.
You started writing as a young boy. What drew you to the pen in the first place?
Reading, more than anything else. Traditional Iranian culture places a heavy emphasis one the aura of writing – by viewing, for instance, classical poets as national icons and so on – by I don’t think that sort of thing had much influence on me. If anything, the deification of canonical medieval poets and the like discouraged me from wanting to become a writer. I found all the adulation bestowed upon poets like Hafez and Saadi quite insincere and pretentious. But, as I was growing up, I was also becoming aware of the books and ideas that were banned by the Iranian regime, works by Marxist historians, European atheists, etc., and these books had a huge impact on me. I felt that the society in which I was growing up was profoundly unjust, and reading about things like the French Revolution inspired me to think about the possibility of justice. And the more I read, the more I wanted to write. That's how I started.
How influential is your Iranian upbringing to your writing? What role does the concept of identity play in your work?
I don’t think Iranian literary traditions have had much direct influence on me. As a child growing up in Iran, I found the weight of the country’s literary heritage quite stifling and unhelpful. At the same,growing up in a country ravaged by war and political violence certainly did activate my mind and triggered my interest in history - which then resulted in me wanting to become a writer. I’m not a believer in the concept of identity. I’d like to think of myself as a radical universalist; I believe in the absolute equality and shared/common subjectivity of all people. I find individuals’ obsessions with their national, racial, cultural, religious, sexual particularities rather boring.
Who are the writers that first inspired you to write? And who are the writers you read now?
I think reading a Farsi translation of Voltaire’s Candide when I was in my early teens, just before leaving Iran and migrating to Australia, made me aware of the radical possibilities of literature. Until then, I hadn’t really thought all that much of literary/creative writing (that is, fiction, poetry, drama) and had mostly been interested in history, political theory and philosophy. Even now, and despite being a literary writer and a lecturer in literary studies and creative writing at Monash University in Melbourne, I find that the writers I read most are philosophers, historians and political thinkers - Marx, Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek. But there are also quite a few creative writers I admire, and these are mostly writers whose works, whatever their literary attributes, make me think and consider interesting new ideas. I’m now finally getting around to reading the English transition of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, and it’s certainly giving me much food for thought.
You cover a number of different roles within the literary field. How do you balance them when it comes to create a piece of writing?
I don’t see literary genres or modes as separate, and I think there’s a profound kinship between them. I think there are features that make a text poetic, as opposed to prosaic, but I don’t think one could develop an interest in only one set of features. Whilst there are many things a poem is useful for – say, engagement with the immediacy of an experience – there are also things it can’t do. I’m currently really interested in the philosophy of love, and I find that it’s something that I can best deal with as a fiction writer. So I don’t find the shift between different writing modes as a difficult balancing act. In fact, I find it quite liberating.
Do you ever consider your work political?
Well, it’s mostly others – usually unappreciative and/or conservative book reviewers and critics – who describe me as a political writer, mostly to imply that my work is too contentious, too confronting, too argumentative. I’m not too sure about that, but I don’t mind being seen as a political writer either. I have a keen interest in political philosophy – although I find most things to do with actions and postures of professional politicians in a place like Australian rather facile and boring – so I suppose it’s inevitable that my work would incorporate that. I certainly hope to write for the people – as opposed to, say, a small gang or clique of narcissistic poets – so that probably means that my writing is inherently more political than most.
Tell us a bit about Transactions. How did you develop the different characters and storylines of the novel? Was there anything in particular – a topic, an idea, a message- you wanted to address with the book?
I based the general structure of the book on the sequence of the Major Arcana cards of the Tarot. The book begins with a chapter/story called The Fool, and ends with one called The World. The characters are almost allegorical – they simulate a range of dominant figures from the contemporary world, business entrepreneurs, human rights activists, asylum seekers, penniless poets, etc. I guess my main reason for writing the book was to make people think about how deeply hierarchical and exploitative our so-called globalized world is. We’re led to think that today’s world is inherently different to the one Marx wrote about in the 19th century. I don’t think that’s at all the case, and I’ve tried to propose my perspective in Transactions.
Is there any specific issue or matter that, as a writer, you feel the urge to address?
That changes from book to book, from story to story, from poem to poem. I’m generally interested in ‘big picture’ questions – love, justice, war, death, etc. – and the ways in which they impact on and are impacted on by singular subjects. I’m not an individualist, but I think particular lives and experiences do create a rather oppressive sense of uniqueness and individuality – especially in an advanced/late capitalist state like Australia – and the radical challenge is to break with that, to emerge as a true, eternal human subject. That’s probably the key theme of most of my writing.
You’re highly involved with China – you’ve lived here before and will be holding talks this month at both Nottingham University, Ningbo and the Australian Studies Centre at Nanjing University. How did such collaborations come about?
These collaborations have been put together by the organizers of the Australian Embassy Beijing’s Australian Writers’ Week, to which I'm participating. The initiative will consist of a series of seminars and events bringing contemporary Australians writers to readers and students in China.
What are your thoughts on the current state of Chinese literature?
I feel that Chinese literature, as with most other literary scenes in the age of global capitalism, is a scene of con/tension between traditional/canonical works and styles, and new/popular forms and approaches. What fascinates me is that, due to China’s population, it also has a rather sizeable diaspora presence in other countries, so the works by writers of Chinese background are becoming very significant globally, works often written in languages other than Chinese. It would be interesting to see if these works have an impact on writers and readers in China.
// March 16, 2pm, RMB75, Crystal Room.
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