Tehran poet, storyteller and journalist, if we collect this trinity, "Adnan Greifi" would have come out in the form of an integrated plastic painting, as Griffy – who passed away from our world on the fourth of May in the Netherlands – contained the human being, love and homeland, believing that these elements are one issue that cannot be dismantled.
Griffey, who was buried a few days ago in exile, was influenced by more than one culture and history, as well as his knowledge of his Arabic language and culture, and rooted in Arab mysticism and mythology. He is of Arab descent and was born in the city of Mohammerah, as its relatives call it in southwestern Iran, or Khorramshahr according to its official name in the country.
Translator of Arabic literature to Persian
On the one hand, Adnan navigated Persian and literature, so that all his works are in Persian. On the other hand, he delved into Western literature, both classical and modern, as he is an avant-garde writer, a pioneer and a serious initiator of modernity in Iranian literature. Then, in the manner of young militants in the sixties of the 20th century, Adnan became a leftist.
Adnan Gharifi was born on the second of June 1944 in Mohammerah, and began his literary activity in the sixties of the last century by publishing the magazine "Art and Southern Literature" (Persian: Henr and Adabiyat Janoub), as a writer and translator from Arabic and English into Persian and published many of his works in this magazine. Adnan Griffy was the first to translate the works of leading European and American writers, including DJ Salinger, Italo Calueno, Giles Cooper, Bohmil Hrabal and José Trayana.
He is also one of the first translators of contemporary Arabic literature into Persian, first translating Adonis's Tomb for New York and Iraqi poet Abdul Wahab al-Bayati's Poems of Exile. Adnan Gharifi translated Arabic novels into Persian, including "Men in the Sun" and "um Saad" by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani.
He was arrested, along with a number of southern Iranian writers, by the Iranian security service at the time, SAVAK, and spent two and a half years in Karoun prison in the southwestern city of Ahvaz.
Adnan Gharifi is one of the first translators of contemporary Arabic literature into Persian (Al Jazeera)
20 years with Adnan Gharifi
In search of Adnan Gharifi, we met in Ahvaz film director and storyteller Habib Bawi Sajid, who accompanied Adnan in his last 20 years and filmed him to produce a documentary about him entitled "20 Years with Adnan", and Habib also published a book featuring a long dialogue with Adnan Gharifi.
Habib Bawi Sajid told Al Jazeera Net, "Mastering the English language helped Adnan to read English literary criticism and theories as well as English literature. Inspired by these readings, Adnan created many angles in story, poetry, criticism and literary theories. Adnan was one of the closest friends of the contemporary Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou, who headed the Khosheh literary magazine and translated many stories from Latin American literature published in that magazine.
"Mohammad Reza Shah's security apparatus (SAVAK) seized many books, some of which Adnan had written and others translated, such as books criticizing the works of William Fakner, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dastyovsky, and his poetry collections such as "From the Storm Camp" (Persian: Az Ardogah Tuvan), "The Resurrection of Karon" (Persian: Rustakhiz Karon), "Dove of Peace" (Persian: گبت ساله), and the translation of the collection "Words Do Not Die" by Abdul Wahab al-Bayati."
"After the end of his prison years, Adnan joined the national radio at the invitation of translator Reza Sayed Hosseini, and worked in the radio as editor-in-chief, writer, translator, editor, broadcaster, proofreader and expert, where he produced many literary programs such as "Comedy and Comedians of the World", "We Read to You" and "The Short Story in the World," Sajid said.
He adds, "Adnan was also active in cinema for a period of time in the seventies of the last century, where he wrote and edited the scripts of several documentary and narrative films directed by the southern director Hassan Bani Hashemi, and with the fall of the Shah's regime, Adnan Gharifi, like many of his colleagues, was excluded from radio and television, and worked as a translator and journalist for several years, until the beginning of the eighties, when the life of leftist intellectuals and writers in Iran became difficult, which made him emigrate to Italy and then the Netherlands."
Adnan Gharifi from the city of Mohammerah in southwestern Iran (Al Jazeera Net)
Prison and realism
Habib Bawi Sajid says that Adnan lived through transitional stages in his life, the most important of which were the years of imprisonment, which turned his thought into "realism", whereas before that period he tended to "surrealism".
Adnan Gharifi in the book "A Long Conversation with Adnan Gharifi" (by Habib Bawi Sajid, Afraz Publishing House, 2010) talks about this point: "I will tell you what I saw in prison and what made me inclined to realism. I remember very well, on the first day when we entered the prison and they had shaved our heads and were allocating our places, I saw a handsome young man standing combing his hair in front of a mirror; he wrote on his arm: 'I will be executed on such and such a date.'"
"It was five or six years since that date. I was terrified when I saw the struggle of life and what awaits it. Hey buddy.. This young man was awaiting execution, that simple! Before October 5 (Mohammad Reza Shah's birthday), two things happen: pardon (or reduced prison terms) or execute those sentenced to death. I have seen this horror twice. I wrote a story and of course I didn't publish it."
"I saw this fact; one of those sentenced to death combed his hair. Or someone else opened a hole in a corner of the prison so that he could escape from it. I wondered when I saw where hope leads man. Imagine that he smashed bricks and cement and all these things with something simple, for months and months and for the fourth time he was arrested and taken to solitary confinement. After the solitary confinement was over, he would come to us and say I would continue my work and eventually escape."
"There was an Arab prisoner chanting slogans like 'Dan Quixote'! For example, when we slept at night, we could hear this person talking and arguing in the prison courtyard, and his voice came from all corners of the prison (because they forced us to sleep in the outer perimeter of the prison building). I can tell you many details about the prison, the details that pushed me to become realistic again, and my first realistic work was "The Mother Palm" (Persian: ماد نکل) which won the admiration of my friends, including the Iranian writer Ahwazi Ahmed Mahmoud."
"It is the story of the destruction of the cultural and economic assets of the Arab region, which begins with the destruction of the huge palm plantations of the narrator family and the gradual transformation of his family from semi-feudalism to extreme poverty, and narrates the decline of the glory of Arab assets on the banks of the Shatt and the Gulf.
"The Mother Palm," which was supposed to be made into a feature film in the seventies, has received literary acclaim and has been printed and published several times over the past five decades, according to Sajid.
Adnan Gharifi lived transitional stages in his life, the most important of which are the years of imprisonment (Al Jazeera)
Years of exile and return
In exile, Adnan Gharifi published the magazines Fakhtah and Presto, a Persian literature and culture magazine. He also published two collections of stories entitled "Dove of Love" (Persian: مرگ Eshq) and "Four Buildings in Tehran Fars" (Persian: چاارـ� Today in this place" (Persian: رنه هرش: امruz, ayin ja), "Bombardment of the Angels" (Persian: بهوش بشت بشگان), the novel "Sharks" (Persian: سگه) and Diwan "The Burning Palm" (Persian: بیلیگه)
Habib Bawi Sajid argues that in his stories and poems published in Europe, Griffy somehow turned to explicit realism, unlike poems and stories written in Iran, and completely avoided symbolism and metaphors.
In 2004, as part of the "Assessment of the Capacities of Southern Literature" programme, a ceremony was held to honour Adnan Greifi. But he was not allowed to return home, and after the organizers of the concert contacted the Iranian Ministry of Interior, he was allowed to enter and was welcomed by people of culture and art upon his arrival. Interviewed by numerous magazines in Ahvaz and throughout Iran, Adnan Gharifi once again became a news headline for literature and art.