The Little Black Fish and Other Modern Persian Short Stories

By Samad Behrangi. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1987. 128 pp. $7.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by John West

"No, it's a lie, don't believe it. Samad isn't dead. Samad is alive."

When Gholam Sa'edi wrote this in the introduction to the first edition of Samad Behrangi's work in 1976, Behrangi had already been dead for eight years. Clinging to the spirit of hope which shines through these sometimes dark and disturbing stories, Sa'edi still carried the torch of Behrangi's message: Things are bad but we can make them better.

For Behrangi, this belief turned his tragically short life into a mission to educate and enlighten. He wandered from village to village in the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan, giving books to poor villagers, telling their children stories, and teaching them how to read and write.

The stories in this volume, in fact, are the teaching tales whose first audiences were peasants and townsfolk, and you can still feel the rapt attention they must have captured. Sadly, however, despotism, revolution, and war have since drowned the voices of Iranians like Behrangi. His peculiar yet fascinating mix of criticism and optimism now seems like a voice from the past. His work offers a tantalizing glimpse both of what Iran was, and of what it might have been.

"The Little Black Fish," the title story, is a tale within a tale, told at bedtime by a "grandmother" fish to her offspring. A fish leaves home to set out for adventure and the sea. ("I want to know if life is simply for circling around in a small place until you become old and nothing else, or is there another way to live in the world?" the fish cries.)

Herons swoop, swordfish lurk, crabs entice, but the fish swims on undaunted either by them or the timidity and ignorant hostility of the other fish. The fish glides past women washing clothes on the banks under the soft, wise old moon, into a river, and eventually the sea. There, just when the journey's end is in sight, and a home can be found with a band who defeat the fishermen by swimming together and dragging down their nets, the fish tempts fate once too often and goes down in a last desperate struggle.

In this way Behrangi leaves the listener unsettled, frustrating our yearning for the happy-ever-after. But courage and the search for knowledge are their own reward, as we see in the last few lines, when the grandmother has finished her bed-time story: "Eleven thousand nine hundred and ninety nine little fish said goodnight and went to sleep. The grandmother fell asleep too. But try as she might, a little red fish could not get to sleep. All night she thought about the sea. "

The stories presented in this collection have been chosen for their diversity and subtle social commentary. "The Little Sugar Beet Vendor" is a deceptively simple, descriptive piece drawn directly from Behrangi's experience as a village schoolteacher. "24 Restless Hours," narrated by a fictitious Tehrani street urchin, falls between two genres: hard social realism conflicts with the fantastic dreamworld of the narrator who spends his days competing fiercely in the streets, and his nights on magic journeys with a toy camel that he covets in a shop window. But the camel is eventually sold and the child's dreams stolen.

"The Bald Pigeon Keeper" uses a traditional Eastern folktale formula but contains none of the escapism associated with that genre. The poor man who marries the princess is not handsome but bald. He does not set out to win his beloved but is pursued by her. His magical powers he uses first to steal, unconcerned for an individual happy ever-after ending. He succeeds by a courage which includes fearlessness in the face of the king and his army. The narrative, while containing these unusual elements, follows a smooth fairy-tale track—a subtle subversion.

In the travail of the Iranian nation, Behrangi looked for solutions in the strength of the ordinary people. In his work, self-respect and courtesy mix with an unquenchable humor and zest for life. All of his heroes are in some sense oppressed, but none of them feel sorry for themselves. In the literary sphere he revived the tradition of the teaching tale by knocking off its accretions.

In post-revolutionary Iran, Behrangi's work is prescribed, just as it was censored under the old order. But Behrangi himself would not have it so. In a variation on the traditional storyteller's ending, his book concludes: "Our story has come to an end. But I'm sure our story hasn't ended. Some day, of course, we'll continue the tale."

John West is a student of Arab history at Georgetown University.