Gray histories: post-revolutionary Iran and its ambiguities in Zakariya Qaʾimi’s Alabula (Hazy) (2020)

Approaching the 1978/79 revolution as a moment of rupture in contemporary Iran, this article aims to spotlight a highly nuanced narrative of post-revolutionary Iran through a close reading of Alabula (2020), a recent historical novel by Zakariya Qaʾimi (b. 1980), published in Iran. I argue that by focusing on a certain type of middle-class lived experience within the Islamic Republic shortly before and throughout the war-torn 1980s, the novel challenges the official ideological history of the Islamic Republic and that of the Iran-Iraq War exposing the dysfunctionality of the regime’s bipolar logic of inclusion and exclusion. Additionally, by foregrounding the destinies of its main characters belonging to that generation of pre-revolutionary leftist political activists who neither fled the country nor were executed in the Islamic Republic’s prisons, the novel opens a narrative space that has been absent in Persian literature, both in Iran and within exile.