Ausma Zehanat Khan, the Iran Protests, and the MLA Convention

Flying across the country tends to wear me out, so I splurged at the airport and lined up for a car service rather than take the fast, convenient, and reasonably priced Union Pearson express. I just couldn’t with crowds anymore.

The driver, after chitchat about weather and tourist sites, asked about my weekend conference: he’d been taking a lot of people to the same hotel over the last few days. And it turns out that he was a professor of Persian literature in Iran before his family was forced to flee, so then we talked about the protests and about the Canadian writers whose work I’ve been reading: Marina Nemat’s memoirThe Prisoner of Tehran (I’m excited about her first novel, due out later this year) and Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Iran-set novel Among the Ruins. We talked about Zahra Kazemi, and he explained to me that in her Iranian Canadian community she was more frequently known as Bibi.

I asked, if a political transformation of his home country made return to Iran possible, would he go back?

He laughed.

“Of course.”

In Canada, over many years, he has tried to be a teacher again; he was told he would need to go to teachers’ college and train for at least three years, a financial impossibility.

We talked about his airport taxi colleagues, doctors and lawyers and accountants and teachers in their home countries.

Grateful to be in Toronto; not impressed by how challenging it is to get their credentials and professional expertise respected in Canada. Even during COVID, he told me, doctor-friends weren’t allowed to help out.

I’m reminded that the “wise taxi driver” is a notorious journalistic trope; I learned a tiny bit about one Iranian Canadian’s life and perspective, tailored to our twenty-five minute trip. But thanks to the writers whose memoirs and fiction bring contemporary Iran richly to life, I could at least ask better questions.

So thanks, today, to Marina Nemat and to Ausma Zehanat Khan (who is not from an Iranian family, but whose family roots overlap with the region in complex ways).

Zehanat Khan has become increasingly central in my book project, because each of her six Khattak-Getty novels is a world unto itself: the settings and social issues shift, and new and intriguing characters are introduced. And then she’s gone on to write multiple other series, and in different genres. I can’t think of many mystery writers with that kind of expansive range of interests in subject matter and approach.

The novel I’m currently reading is The Language of Secrets; I’ll write more about that soon. But I’m also trying to shape an article on her mystery fiction, international law, and human rights. My argument is that her books demonstrate what a more interventionist, internationally-inclined Canada (think Pearson–Prime Minister, not airport) could do in the world. Notably, her characters don’t stay home; they don’t retreat to rural idylls (a delightful fantasy of comfort, but not an international engagement). Instead, they travel to Bosnia, to Iran, to the Greek island of Lesvos and, more prosaically, across provincial borders, going where they are most needed, even though their resources are limited and their capacity is finite.

These books are not thrillers: they are deeply thoughtful meditations on what it means to be a citizen of a suffering world.

And as Iran suffers, again, and her diaspora around the world watches and worries–and hopes–I’m imagining what it could be like if we followed through with the idea that “the world needs more Canada.”

This has me resolved to attend more sessions today on languages and literatures that are far less familiar to me, including panels that foreground the relationship between human rights and fiction, poetry, and drama. It’s a rich MLA convention program, and I’m so excited to be here.

But I’m also reminded that teaching literature and writing is a privilege, and it’s one that has been taken away from people like the driver I met last night, who would like to be back in a classroom, teaching Hafez and Khayyam. And we also need to figure out how the MLA and how scholarly associations in Canada can help expat and refugee colleagues.