Reza Baraheni, a Bio-bibliography

Reza Baraheni, the author of more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, literary theory and criticism, currently teaches at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

Winner of the prestigious Scholars-at-Risk-Program Award of the University of Toronto and Massey College, Baraheni has taught in the University of Tehran, Iran, University of Texas in Austin, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the University of Toronto and York University. He has also been Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, Britain, Fellow of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and Fellow of Winters College, York University.

In numerous articles and several books written on Baraheni’s fiction, poetry and literary theory, fellow writers and critics both inside Iran and in the Iranian Diaspora have testified to the deep impact his literary output has had on the Iranian literature of the last four decades. There have been numerous special issues of literary periodicals on his poetry and fiction. The publication of the French translation of his long suppressed novel in Iran, Les Saisons en enfer du jeune Ayyaz (Pauvert-Fayard, Paris, 2000), and two recent novels, Sheherazade et son Romancier (Fayard, Paris, 2002), and Elias a New York (Fayard, Paris, 2004) have gained him comparisons with Georges Bataille, Jean Genet and many other French and world authors. Two plays of his, Enfer and Queskes (a three-part play), directed by Thierry Bedard, the outstanding modernist director, in the main section of the Avignon International Festival in July, 2004, were widely reviewed by the major press in France and other parts of Europe. A third play, Exilith, based on his short novel, Lilith (to appear in French, Fayard, January, 2007), also directed by Thierry Bedard, was performed in several festivals in France, and in Geneva. His 1300-page novel, Les Mysteres du mon Pays, is scheduled to appear in France soon (Fayard, September, 2007). This novel, encompassing fifty years of Iran’s history, including the 1979 revolution, was a bestseller when it was first published (five prints in less than eighteen months). However, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran published two books and numerous articles against the book, banned it for good, and its secret agents set fire to the bookstore of the publishing company, finally forcing the company to give up book publishing altogether.

Baraheni has won numerous honours and awards, among them: Human Rights Award of the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada (2006), a Canada Council of Arts Grant (2005); the Sepass Award in Canada, for Life-long Achievement in Literature (2005); The Yalda Life-long Achievement Award (2003); The Iranian Critics and Journalists Award (2000); Scholars at Risk Program Award of Massey College, the University of Toronto (1999); an award from The International Freedom to Publish Committee of the Association of American Publishers (2000); and The Overseas Press Club of America Award (1977). He has also been a Fulbright Professor at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah (1972-3).

Baraheni’s fiction has been anthologized along with works by Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Babel, Natalia Ginzburg, Antonio Skarmeta, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; his poetry along with the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Eluard, Nazim Hekmat, Osip Mandelstam, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and Wislawa Symborska (Approaching Literature in the 21^st Century, ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston, New York, 2005; God’s Spies, ed. Alberto Manguel, Macfarlane, Walter & Ross, Toronto, 1999; The Prison where I Live, ed. Siobhan Dowd, Forward by Joseph Brodsky, Cassell, London, 1996; Voices of Conscience, Poetry from Oppression, ed. Cronyn, McKane and Watts, Iron Press, Great Britain, 1995), and many other anthologies.

Baraheni’s works have been translated into a dozen languages, among them: Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. He has also written poetry and prose, originally in English, among them: the collection “Masks and Paragraphs” in The Crowned Cannibals (Random House, Vintage, New York, 1977, introduction by E. L. Doctorow); the long poem, “Exile Poem of the Gallery,” in Making Meaning (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2000); and the long poem, “Death of a Greek Woman in Seattle,” in Exile Writes Back (Massey College, Toronto, 2001). His poetry and translations of his poetry by himself and others have appeared in the Time Magazine, City Lights Anthology, the New York Review of Books, the American Poetry Review and many other prestigious periodicals. There have been numerous and laudatory reviews of his books in the New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Le Figaro Litteraire, Figaro Magazine, Liberation and other world press. Helene Cixous, the outstanding French philosopher and novelist, has called Baraheni, “a giant poet.”

Baraheni, along with his late friends and fellow-writers, Jalal Al-Ahmad and Gholamhossein Saedi, initiated the first steps in 1966 leading to the founding of the Writers Association of Iran in the following year. Their historical stormy meeting with the Shah’s Prime Minister Hoveyda in that year, led to an open confrontation with the Shah’s regime, placing the struggle for unhampered transmission of thought as a preliminary step towards genuine democracy on the agenda of Iran’s contemporary history. In spite of the laborious struggle of some of the most famous writers of the country to turn the Writers Association of Iran into an officially recognized human rights organization, the Shah’s government suppressed the association, intimidated many of its members, arresting and torturing some of its members, among them Baraheni, who had returned from the United States after the completion of a year-long teaching position in Texas and Utah. Baraheni was tortured and kept in a solitary confinement for 104 days (See God’s Shadow, Prison Poems, Indiana University Press, 1976; The Crowned Cannibals, Vintage, 1977, Introduction by E.L. Doctorow).

Back in the United States a year later, Baraheni joined the American branch of the International PEN, working very closely with Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Howard and others at PEN’s Freedom to Write Committee, sharing at the same time, with the outstanding American novelist, the late Kay Boyle, the Honorary Chair of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom (CAIFI) to release Iranian writers and artists from prison. He also published his prose and poetry in the Time Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the American Poetry Review…, and worked with international human rights organizations to release writers and human rights activists from prisons in the Soviet Union, in Latin America and the Middle East.

In 1976, during his exile in the U.S., human rights organizations were alarmed that the Shah’s SAVAK agents had arrived in the U.S. with the intention of assassinating Iranian opposition leaders, among them Baraheni. With the help of the American PEN and the assistance of Ramsey Clarke, Baraheni exposed the Shah’s plot. This led to Baraheni’s testifying on the atrocities and human rights violations of the Shah’s regime in Iran, in the Sub-committee for International Organizations of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Baraheni returned to Iran in the company of more than thirty other intellectuals four days after the Shah fled the country. There was a misunderstanding in those days that every activist retuning to Iran after the fall of the Shah was going to be politically active. Baraheni, who had been a founding member of the Writers Association of Iran, had no political ambitions. He joined his friends in the association, and this time the uphill struggle for democracy and the unhampered transmission of thought, in fact, the battle against repression and censorship, was with the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran. Baraheni’s concentration was on three major themes: 1)the unhampered transmission of thought; 2)equal rights for oppressed nationalities in Iran and; 3)equal rights for women with men. In the wave of the crackdown against the intellectuals, the liberals and the left in Iran in 1981, Baraheni found himself once more in the solitary confinement, this time under the new regime. Upon his release from prison in the winter of 1982 under international pressure, he was fired on the trumped up charge of having cooperated with counter-revolutionary groups on the campus of the University of Tehran. He was not allowed to leave the country for many years.

With the death of Khomeini, senior members of the Writers Association of Iran, Baraheni among them, decided that they should revive the association. They formed the Consulting Assembly of the Writers Association of Iran, and wrote two texts of utmost importance. Baraheni was one of the three members of the Association who wrote the “Text of 134 Iranian Writers.” He was one of the “Group of Eight” who undertook the job of getting the signatures of other Iranian writers. He was also secretly assigned to send the text to his connections abroad. Baraheni translated the Text into English and sent it through his connections to his friend Arthur Miller. Miller sent a message back to Baraheni, reiterating that although he had not been to the International Congress of PEN for twenty five years, he was going to Prague where the convention was to be held, and read the text personally and get the approval of the world congress of writers. The plight of Iranian writers was brought to the attention of the world by Arthur Miller and the International PEN.

The second text was the re-writing of the charter of the Writers Association of Iran. Several times, Baraheni and two other senior members of the association were called by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, asking them to withdraw their signatures from the resolutions of the association, and Baraheni was told that he was a persona non grata. It was then that he knew that he had to leave the country. They declined to withdraw their signatures. He renewed his passport, pretending he too was going to Armenia on a bus that was to take Iranian writers to that country. Later, the bus was driven to the top of a hill on the way, and with the driver getting off and running away, it was clear, and later it was proven to be true, that the Iranian government wanted to get rid of the members of the association by sending them all on the bus down the precipice. Almost by a miracle the writers, most of them members of the Writers Association, were saved. In the meantime, Baraheni made arrangements with friends in Sweden to get out of Iran and travel to Sweden. He escaped two attempts on his life, and finally took his chance and went to the airport. There was a rumour that those who wanted to kidnap writers were unofficial goons of the regime, and perhaps official organizations hardly knew what was going on. He boarded the plane. A few hours later he was in Stockholm. It was in Sweden that he found out that his name had been on the hit list of the regime for some time. With the help of Eugene Schoulgin, head of the International PEN’s “Writers in Prison Committee,” and Ron Graham, the President of PEN Canada in 1996, Baraheni sought asylum in Canada. He arrived in Canada in January 1997. He later became the President of PEN Canada (2000-2002). During his presidency, Baraheni recommended a change in the Charter of the International PEN to permit the inclusion of all kinds of literature in the charter. The document had not been altered since 1948. The change was aimed at making room for exilic literature in the world. The historical change was recorded in the documents of the International PEN with Reza Baraheni as its initiator.

From 1982, the year he was fired from the University of Tehran for his advocacy of equal rights for Iranian women, to 1996, the year of his forced departure from Iran, he taught courses in creative writing and literary theory, first at the home of friends and former students, and later in the basement of his apartment in Tehran. Documents published both in Iran and abroad show that the younger generation of Iranian writers, particularly women, have noted in their biographies that they had been the students of Baraheni’s workshops. Not finding the right material in the conservative university classes and circles of Iran, students, as well as young university professors, attended Baraheni’s Basement Workshop, where he taught world fiction from Dostoevski to Nabokov to Calvino, modern and postmodern poetry, and world literary theory (Nietzsche to Derrida to Cixous). Baraheni’s own poetry, extremely musical, is said to have combined Rumi’s breath and reach with the spirit of fragmentation found in the non-conformist music of John Cage and others. He has read his own poetry, as well as Rumi’s, to large audiences in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. Harper’s has called him, “Iran’s finest living poet.” The New York Times has called him, “the father of Iran’s literary criticism.” Le Monde has called his novel Les Saisons en enfer du jeune Ayyaz , (Fayard, Paris, 2000) (The Infernal Seasons of the Young Ayyaz) “A Statement on the Human Condition.” Jeri Laber, one of the outstanding founders of Human Rights Watch, recounts in her book (The Courage of Strangers) how Baraheni’s account of his personal torture in 1973 in Iran and the accounts of other victims of torture in other countries made her decide to dedicate her life to the cause of human rights. Addressing a large audience at Massy College, University of Toronto, Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s Nobel Laureate for Peace, noted that it was from the lesson of the dedicated work of her friend Baraheni that she had set out to fight against repression in Iran.

Reza Baraheni lives in Toronto with his wife Sanaz Sehhati. She is the translator into Persian of: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time and An Unfinished Woman, and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Being There. She is a former English instructor of the University of Tehran, and the Free Islamic University of Iran. She holds a Master’s Degree from Teachers College, Columbia. She was also on the leading role of the Iranian movie, “Remember the Flight” (made by Pouran Derakhshandeh, 1988), called by Variety “the first feminist film” made by Iranians. She teaches English in the Toronto area in Canada.