The “eye” and “being rooted in the absence of place”: on the Relation of Exile, Diaspora, Language and Bodily Being in Madjidi’s "Marx et la poupée" and Farhad Showghi’s "Wolkenflug spielt Zerreissprobe"

The presentation will deal with two of the more recent books of the European-Iranian Diaspora Literature that got both published in 2017, one in France, the other one in Germany: On the one hand, we have Maryam Madjidi’s "Marx et la poupée" ("Marx and the Doll"), on the other hand, Farhad Showghi’s "Wolkenflug spielt Zerreissprobe" ("Flight of Clouds plays Endurance Test"). The first one is called a novel, the second one a book of poetry. Despite the great differences between these two books, they seem to have one thing in common: they kind of closely turn around and/or directly work with certain quotes at the head of passages, especially with two quotes that each stem from a French philosopher: one from Simone Weil and the other one from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. And again, despite the big differences between these two thinkers in general (one – to put it roughly – being metaphysical, the other phenomenological) and despite the big differences between the two quotes in question in particular, what in a certain way unites these two quotes is the fact that they both distinctively act out the fundamental questions of the relationship of perception, places, bodies and migratory moves and that they then become in return true power or impulse units for each of the above mentioned books.
So, the presentation will deal with exactly these questions and with problems and aspects of exile and bodily being and of how our two authors Madjidi and Showghi make literary use of the chosen philosophical lines. In the course of a deeper reflection on the interacting of memory and actualisation, ‘seeing’ (in a broader sense) and conceiving space and nature(s) through words and body alike I will, in this talk, elaborate a possible reading of these two texts that are part of the wider array of what I call the “Poetics of Migration”.
By doing this, my presentation actively contributes to the focus of the panel it is part of: the consideration and discussion of the Iranian diasporic cultural production among contemporary European writers. As pointed out, it hereby uses a at once comparative and interdisciplinary approach.