Being multi-faceted, violence is hard to define and distinguish. Sometimes it is overt like raid, confiscation and beating; sometimes it is subtle, covert and soft. Some consider an experience as violent, while others understand that very experience in a different way. Here is a story of two novelists and their books. One has experienced violence with his soul, psyche and his skin and flesh, and the other experienced it in the form of a restless mind in a more subtle way.
Reza Baraheni and Scott Symons were born almost in the same year, and both wrote their first novels in the same period. One wrote one of Canada’s first homosexual novels, and the other authored the first modern Iranian novel with homosexual themes and references. They had similar political concerns and were engaged in similar literary activities besides story writing. Both have gained a prominent reputation in their society’s intellectual circles, although they were finally forced to abandon their homelands.
Scott Symons was a novelist, political journalist, university lecturer and curator. He studied contemporary history at the University of Toronto and Cambridge University and then because of his historical and literary background, became an assistant professor in the fine arts. Then he accepted positions such as curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and researcher at the Winterthur Museum.
In 1965, he wrote Place d’Armes— his first novel— which is the first part of his trilogy and also has been described as one of the earliest gay novels. Come as no surprise, Place d’Armes fueled controversies. It took time for the book to be accepted by literary critics; for instance, Terry Goldie believes that “Place d’Armes only reacclaims the misogyny of Tory heterosexism in a Tory homosexualism.”[1] Or Robert K. Martin noted that “One problem with Symons’s project is that it amounts to a kind of literary blackface, the performance of sexual or racial identity.”[2] Or Robert Fulford criticizes one of the novel’s characters as “the most repellent single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing.” He also labels Symons as “the monster from Toronto” for being unable to write about love.[3]
Yet the novel little by little received vast arrays of compliments. It has been praised for both its controversial avant-garde content and its unconventional anti-novel form. Place d’Armes was awarded the Beta Sigma Phi First Canadian Novel Award. In 2005, the work was named one of the most important books in Canadian literature history. This book has achieved all kinds of posthumous success.[4]
Centred on the Place d’Armes as architectural heritage of Canada, his work is interwoven with Canada’s culture and history; as David Warren points out: “With sex out of the way, Scott’s topic was Canada: the dignity she had and had lost…”.[5] Place d’Armes is a novel of love, passion, and resistance. Psychologically iconoclastic, Symons challenged the status quo with his work since his protagonist rebels against capitalism and heteronormativity.
His creative works have been, to some extent, personal and autobiographical. Publishing this novel unveiled the homosexual identity of its author publicly. Thus, Symons embarked on a new life and new romances— a long journey. For most of his gay life, he lived like a nomad, fleeing from Toronto to Mexico, from Mexico to Vancouver, from Vancouver to Morocco and so on and so forth. Yet he never felt settled anywhere.
Symons coined the term “quiet revolution” in a series of articles for which he was awarded a National Newspaper Award.[6] He was always a political figure, although he was never a gay activist. Nevertheless, the achievements of gay liberation advocacy would not have come true without Symons’ pivotal role. As Donald Martin[7] comments on him: “He was a catalyst to changing the whole social fabric of this country in terms of sexuality and the government’s role in dictating what we do where we do…?”
In his portrait documentary, God’s Fool, Symons narrates that the police pursued him for publishing a pornographic novel. Yet just two years after the publishing of Place d’Armes, the then Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau famously declared: “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,” what laid the basis for the state’s partial decriminalization of homosexuality.[8]
Even though all of his endeavours either made a sociocultural change or earned an award, Symons was satisfied neither with his political condition, nor with his literary works, nor with his personal life. As June Callwood[9] insightfully mentions: “Scot doesn’t feel comfortable here…he is an exotic here and doesn’t fit comfortably into the social set or the writing set, he is a maverick and I think mavericks have an ambivalence, they really enjoy that they are outside the smug center as I see it, but at the same time they would like to belong.”
Although Canada and the intellectual society praised and valued him, he isolated and marginalized himself in Morocco for more than 20 years and still considered himself as an exiler: “the question is if I am an exiler or an expatriate, or have chosen to live abroad, the answer is all three.”![10]
While Symon’s trilogy chronologized a personal gay history, Baraheni archived Iran’s political history in his novel— the infernal life of Agha-ye Ayyaz. Reza Baraheni, a leftist writer, poet, translator and literary critic, was jailed and tortured for being politically active in academic and literary circles. In his first novel, he attempts to narrate the ruling state’s suppressive power by employing sexual metaphors in his text. Homosexual motifs in Iranian literature have a long-lasting presence, but Baraheni’s work absorbs this predominant thematic explicitly and politically in a historical/fictional way.
This masterpiece has been printed in Iran only once and has never been left the publisher’s depository and never been distributed in the book market. Fearing the totalitarian government, the book’s prominent publisher pulped all prints right after publishing it. Just an enthusiastic typographer kept one volume for the author, and that one is the sole original version of this book held by Baraheni himself. More than half a century has passed and this book still has not been published officially, and Iranian readers must read this book either in an electronic pdf format or an illegal offset print.
While Symons’ novel opened up doors for gay rights and blurred and widened the boundaries for gay liberation, Baraheni’s remained in a state of complete deadlock. Twenty-five years after the publication of the Infernal life of Agha-ye Ayyaz, Reze Khoshnazar wrote a homosexual novel—The Gods Laugh on Mondays, which was seized by the government just after the publishing, and Islamic fundamentalists torched the book’s publisher during the night. Khoshnazar also departed Iran and has pursued his career in Sweden.[11]
The similar destiny of these two Iranian novels with homosexual themes indicates how extensively Iranian politics is tied up with the sexual. Despite Trudeau’s declaration, which sought to depoliticize the personal, the Iranian society, which is overtly ideological and theocratical, over-politicizes all phenomena, especially the sexual. Hence, Baraheni, as an utterly political figure, has inevitably been sensitive to the sexual terrain. He has asserted his kinship with the queer family in his first novel, in his theoretical works like the male history and his interviews and speeches.
Pairing Symons and Baraheni leads us to two conclusions. In both cases, an artistic object functions as a political subject. Symons considered autobiographic novel as a counter-archive for an explicit expression of a personal/collective queer history. While he never got engaged in any gay activism, his work paved the path for the LGBTQ2+ movement.
Baraheni makes use of the novel’s creative format for archiving a political history; to achieve this purpose, he employs homosexual references. His homosexual references are themselves a symptom of a failed queer policy in Iran. In a society with an impalpable and fragile LGBTQ2+ movement, Baraheni’s or Khoshnazar’s works cannot be a catalyst that can be added to a previously active and tangible movement; Consequently, their bold venture cannot trigger any collective rage and revenge. Nevertheless, the efforts of the state apparatuses to annihilate both novels are revealing. Obliterating the books (read political subjects) through pulping the books or torching the publishing companies voices the state’s fear of the radical impacts of artistic objects.
The second conclusion is that in both cases, life is somewhere else; the utopia is always over there. Baraheni, who has experienced the most savage and brutal forms of violence in his country, fled from the east to the west while Symons traversed the trajectory inversely. When Symons left his life and career in Canada, Baraheni settled down in Toronto, where he has also taught in the universities Symons abandoned them reluctantly. Metaphorically speaking, they exchanged their lives with each other for one reason: utopia is queer and always somewhere else!
[1] Quoted in: Elson, C. (2010). Siting La Place [Introduction]. In S. Symons (Author), Combat journal for Place d’Armes: A personal narrative (pp. 16-64). Toronto, Ontario: Dundurn Press.
[2] Quoted in: Elson, C. (2010). Siting La Place [Introduction]. In S. Symons (Author), Combat journal for Place d’Armes: A personal narrative (pp. 16-64). Toronto, Ontario: Dundurn Press.
[3] Quoted in: Martin, S. (2009, February 27). His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece. Retrieved November 19, 2020.
[4] Scott Symons. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2020.
[5] Quoted in: Elson, C. (2010). Siting La Place [Introduction]. In S. Symons (Author), Combat journal for Place d’Armes: A personal narrative (pp. 16-64). Toronto, Ontario: Dundurn Press.
[6] Scott Symons. (2020, October 10). Retrieved November 19, 2020.
[7] Sheehan, N. (Director). (1997). God’s Fool [Motion picture]. Canada.
[8] For further discussion see: Jennex, C., & Eswaran, N. (2020). Out north: An archive of queer activism and kinship in Canada. Vancouver: Figure.1 Publishing.
[9] Sheehan, N. (Director). (1997). God’s Fool [Motion picture]. Canada.
[10] Sheehan, N. (Director). (1997). God’s Fool [Motion picture]. Canada.
[11] The Gods Laugh on Mondays. (2018, August 05). Retrieved November 19, 2020.