Babak Lakghomi’s disturbing fiction builds intensity and paranoia with its constant suggestion of growing but never-fully-seen darkness stalking beneath the muscular prose. His latest work, South, is a strangely seductive dystopian novel. In it, a journalist named B. is asked to report on labor strife in a distant region of his country. But his interviews and observations lead only to more questions about that region, his marriage, his father, and self-immolating protestors. Things get worse when the state kidnaps and tortures him in various creative ways.
Lakghomi is also the author of Floating Notes. His short fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review.
In this interview, we discuss Persian myths, the strange juxtapositions in his work, and the pleasures of language.
Marcus Pactor: In South, the narrator B embarks on a Kafka-esque mission to report on labor protests in a country that seems like a terrifying hybrid of America and (I think) Iran. Did you begin with this kind of setting in mind, or did you develop it in the course of your writing? In what ways did it open your imagination?
Babak Lakghomi: The setting was one of the starting points of the novel for me and provided a landscape where some of my preoccupations and interests collided. I think the combination of the industrial setting of the rig and local occult elements were present from the beginning and very much drove the mood of the novel and informed the writing process.
MP: Other than B’s wife Tara, the mythical Persian character Menmendas is the only conventionally named figure in the novel, suggesting her importance. Her vagina dentata legend echoes B’s adulterous experience with the woman from the bookstore, after which we can understand him as spiritually halved. How did you come upon this myth? Does it strike you, as it strikes me, as a pleasantly unlikely inclusion in a novel about a dystopic future? How important is the “unlikely” to your work?
BL: I was intrigued by some of the local traditions (of Iran) around exorcism and evil spirits (interestingly enough most of which came through African migrates to Iran), and I came upon the myth of Menmendas in my minimal research about those traditions. I found it relevant to the narrator’s fate and how the woman from the bookstore led him to play into the state’s hand.
But to answer your question, I am interested in strange juxtapositions, making the familiar look unfamiliar, and looking at things from unexpected angles, so I feel like “unlikely” does play a role in my work. There is something about the “unlikely” in shaking us out of what we expect to see and read and providing new ways of experiencing things.
MP: As my previous question may suggest, I enjoyed finding the mythology, demonic possessions, and blood rituals of the South’s people operating within a secular, industrialized, totalitarian national structure. Like so much in the novel, those rituals are described but never explained, nor does B share any personal response to them. The absences of reflection and explanation increase the reader’s immersive experience but, at the same time, make that experience difficult to interpret. Are you concerned with this difficulty? Would you in fact call it a difficulty? What sorts of difficulty do you, as a reader, find engaging?
BL: I tend to side more with mystery and abstraction as a reader and writer, but in this case, I felt that narrator’s blocked access to information, his sense of alienation, and his mental state justified the absence of more explanation and interpretation. I hoped that the text would translate the narrator’s disorientation at a more visceral level.
When I am writing, I mostly try to follow the text itself, what it demands from me, and where it takes me. I don’t think I am that aware of its “difficulty” much during the writing process. That being said, it is not totally possible to ignore how a text would be read and received when you go through the process of editing.
As a reader, I think I am drawn to formal play and difficulty (at the level of both structure and sentence) when it’s at the service of the text to achieve a certain impact and when it’s a vehicle for something that cannot be said without.
MP: Here, I’m afraid, is another question about difficulty and description in your work. You always write clear sentences, yet those sentences only suggest rather than depict any total scene, leaving readers with a narrative like a sculpted fog. This fogginess makes sense, given the number of drugs the state has forced upon the narrator. Yet a similar mix of fog and clarity is also a feature of Floating Notes, suggesting that it is characteristic of your overall approach. This approach captures, in a manner far from the encyclopedic exactness of Proust, the uncertainty of memory. Is that what you’re going for? How do you determine which details of a setting to include and which to set aside?
BL: I like your description of these narratives as sculpted fog and I think that it’s well representative of most of my writing though the level of fogginess may vary from one work to another. This may be just a product of my own past and how I experience things, but in both South and Floating Notes, I do see a challenged attempt in making sense of the events of the present and past (for both narrators). I think I arrived into this way of writing somewhat organically, and I am not that conscious about what to include and what not to include in a scene and I probably do this in a more intuitive way. What I’d like to happen is that there are enough sensory details to establish a mood and notions of a narrative without a sense of complete resolution.
MP: I found the fragments from the narrator’s notes, his father’s notebook, and especially The Book of Winds compelling and memorable. They enlarged the fictional world and allowed me to glimpse it from strange angles. What first led you to use these fragments to digress from the main line of B’s story?
BL: In the process of writing when I reached to the point where the narrator struggled more to make sense of the events around him, I felt that the fragments should become more dominant in the text. I thought this would help better reflect the narrator’s challenges in accessing the truth around his father and the events on the rig.
MP: Resignation seems to be the dominant mood of this novel. Readers can guess how the events of recent years (or maybe the 21st century thus far, maybe our lifetimes) might justify this mood. But I’m wondering if you are writing anything now. Do you see a different mood in this new work? How much of your work’s mood depends on exterior cultural conditions and how much on your own mental landscape?
BL: I think the overall events of recent years and how they started to permeate personal life in different ways may have impacted the mood of the novel. But I am not completely sure if I’d call it a mood of resignation. I think the narrator at the end is retelling his story in some form, and I am wondering despite all his passivity, if there is some form of agency and resistance in that telling.
There have been moments of asking myself in recent years what it means to write and publish in the current conditions, and I obviously don’t have any clear answers, but the pleasures of language itself return me to the page. I do find it more important to help whatever is happening at the margins of publishing (with small presses doing the selfless and most exciting work), and I think that anything little we do, as a result, matters.
I started working on a new novel last summer; it does take shape in a world in chaos, a near future that somewhat looks like a far past with mythical elements, but the narrator is very much a different narrator than B, on a journey to find his lost wife. The language has made a shift from the (foggy) minimalism of the two previous books. It’s pretty early in the process and I am not yet sure where it’ll take me, but I’ve been somewhat excited by it. At the same time, I’ve been trying in documenting my own past by writing in a more direct way about it. I am not sure that it will take the form of a book one day, or if it is something that I would want to publish, but that has been something else that has kept me occupied.
But to answer your last question, it’s somewhat difficult to separate the internal and external; I think I’ve been mostly relying on writing through a personal lens, but the exterior conditions have seeped through and made a significant impact.
Marcus Pactor is the author of Begat Who Begat Who Begat (Astrophil Press) and Vs. Death Noises (Subito Press). The latter book won the 2011 Subito Press Prize for Fiction. His story “Megaberry Crunch” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2021. His work has most recently appeared in Always Crashing and 3:AM Magazine. He lives and works in Jacksonville, Florida.
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