Short stories: Leading female authors evoke the potent power of place

IRAN

Home is a place I lost and do not know. It is the place of the mother, the mother country, the deep verdant woods of Northern Iran, where, once upon a time, she walked the humid land, fell off an untamed horse, and refused to eat fresh Caspian fish.

Home is a city to which I won’t return. A city I’ve barely seen, and do not remember. At night, dinner conversation, so far away from home: old crossroads named, gleaming harbours recalled, round salty lakes. I don’t know them, won’t ever know them. Because if they still existed, they no longer do exist. They are disfigured, names changed, maps shifted by boys with pick-axes.

Home is a country of ancient spires and turquoise domes, of stones scintillating in the sun and blue-black seas. Home is a country of dry, windy cities, and concealed gardens where the shadows of poets speak. Do not grieve, says the poet, do not grieve, for lost Joseph to Canaan will return.Time and again I’ve heard this line in my mind. Hafez whispers to me across the seven centuries. And now I know why this line torments. In the Bible, Joseph never returns to Canaan. Yet ten times Hafez assures us that he will.

Home is a place for which I do not grieve. Because I hold it in my hand, and conjure its centuries at will. Landscapes that rise and fall, live worlds inside shadows in my eyes. Spaces full of spheres, sunshot, almost silent. The plateaus of Kurdistan, where my father rode saddle-less horses, and ate wild berries as a very young man.

Perhaps my parents’ loss of country is merely theirs, it’s no longer mine.Through their lilt of Persian, I have learnt my own, French-inflected, ever foreign. Through their loss, I have found my place, the only place I know, the only home I want. A place that’s always here, and nowhere at all, a home without perimeter. Its centre in nearly all the cities I visit, in the mystery of kindly gazes. It is a home for the restless heart, for wild ungrieving men. Born in 1976 by exiled Iranian parents and raised in Par is, Lila Azam Zanganeh lives and works between New York and London. She is the author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness

( Penguin, 2011). She wr ites for The New York Times, The Paris Review, Le Monde, and was a member of the jury for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

An all-female dream team. Six women authors with different histories, styles and origins. One common denominator: their perfect command of the narrative mechanisms that draw us into a short story, leading us to far-off places and times. Their storytelling goes beyond cultural and geographical clichés to reveal that contemporary identity is rooted in migrations and movements – which can be trivial or epic, and often unexpected. By doing so, they show us a basic but often forgotten truth: who we are today depends on how we relate to the Other.