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Through the Sad Wood Our Corpses Will Hang (Kindle)
Guernica Editions, Fall 2017
252 pages
Kindle (eBook)
ISBN13: 9781771831581
ISBN10: 1771831588
English
$9.95 Canada, $9.95 US
At twenty, Sheyda Porrouya's life is almost over. Born in Iran on the day staunchly orthodox mullas declare the birth of the Islamic Republic, she is witness to their purging of the country of all things Western and un-Islamic. To make matters worse, as she matures, Sheyda seems increasingly unable to distinguish between fairy tale and reality. And her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. Accused of killing her mother, Sheyda is sentenced to death by hanging. As she awaits either release or execution, the narrative jumps back and forth from Sheyda's childhood to life in one of Iran's most notorious prisons.
I was called Lady Whore so often that the guards finally picked up the name and started teasing me with it too, except that they would add my full name to it and bark Lady Whore Sheyda Porrouya before collapsing onto their backs in thigh-slapping laughter. Within three days, my real name had become so out of use that when I was called Sheyda, it took me a few seconds to realize that I was the one being addressed. A few more weeks in here, I thought, and my whole identity would be annihilated. Maybe that's the point of incarceration: Erasing you from the world's memory and from your own memory in fragments … until you realize that you never really existed in the first place. Who will mourn you then?
The prose in this book is undeniably beautiful, emancipated by the unhinged mental state of the narrator. Sheyda's logical mental leaps disassociate her with reality and portray her dissatisfaction with life, and a yearning to find another like her. In her lonely existence, she finds comfort in broken dreams and in imagining returned love. Between moments of disturbed joy in Sheyda's imagination and her dark sense of humour, she is subjected to abuse in the conditions of a notorious prison. The use of physical symbols is also really interesting as it is ambiguous as to what Sheyda sees is actually there, such as the black cat and the birds. Her character is so fully fleshed out that the reader can fully imagine meeting Sheyda as a friend, and imagine how she might think and react.
Salima Bensalah
Books by Ava Farmehri
