Amir Moosavi's "Dust That Never Settles"

Amir Moosavi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, and shared the following:

Page 99 of my recently published book, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, treats the war fiction of Iranian writer, Ahmad Dehqan. My argument about Dehqan is that, even though he is a writer who is backed by the Iranian state and whose fiction has been published by state-sponsored presses, he is a rebel and his novels and short stories from the late 1990s and nearly aughts challenge the Iranian state’s representation of the war with Iraq as a “Sacred Defense,” which largely glorifies battlefront soldiers and enchants their martyrdom.

The chapter of Dust That Never Settles in which page 99 is located is called “War Front Apocrypha.” It is the only chapter to solely treat fiction written from the perspective of battlefront soldiers. The chapter deals with short stories and novels written by Iraqi writers Jinan Jasim Hillawi and Mohsen al-Ramli, alongside Iranian writers Hossein Mortazaeian Abkenar and, of course, Ahmad Dehqan. By juxtaposing these writers’ works the chapter shows “how Iraqi and Iranian writers have defamiliarized the banal and ubiquitous wartime representations of battlefront violence to undermine and redefine” parts of the official discourse promoted by both Iranian and Iraqi states during the war. Although specific to the war front, the aim of the chapter in comparing the construction of literary counter-narratives aligns with what the rest of the book does.

Page 99 of my book leaves readers with a sense of what the book does but tells only half the story. Dust That Never Settles is a comparative study of how Iranian and Iraqi writers have dealt with this war’s representation from 1980 to the present. As such, it uses the experience of the Iran-Iraq War as an entryway to the comparative study of contemporary Persian and Arabic literatures. In this case, page 99 gives a good idea of how I deal with Iranian writers and their construction of counter-narratives to the Islamic Republic’s story of the eight-year war with Iraq. However, if a browser used page 99 to speak about the entire book, it would miss at least half of what it does, since there’s no mention of the ways that Iraqi writers have approached the conflict and the ways in which they compare or contrast with that of their Iranian counterparts.

Learn more about Dust That Never Settles at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue