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Historically, the Western media has portrayed Iran after the 1979 revolution with images of women clad in black hijab, bearded men wielding kalashnikovs, and turbaned mullahs, shouting in unison with raised fists and steely eyes. With the recent uprising after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the West was flooded with a wholly different set of images about Iran: people marching down the street shouting “death to the dictator,” women (many adolescents) letting their hair go uncovered despite the threat of batons and tear gas, and couples kissing under the glow of flaming government buildings as an act of resistance. In this context, Tehran based psychoanalyst Gohar Homayounpour's Persian Blues takes on special significance.
In this short book, Homayounpour offers a set of thirty poetic meditations on a wide scope of topics ranging from the deeply personal (such as the death of her father, her experience of motherhood, and dialogues with her friends) to the more abstract (such as psychoanalysis, literature, translation, politics, and poetry). She weaves together many genres: fiction, memoir, case report, psychoanalytic theory, and literary criticism. The chapters vary in length but most are so short that the book can be called aphoristic, taking on enormous topics in short order. With chapters titled “In Praise of the Reality Principle, or In Praise of Disturbance,” and “In Praise of Hopelessness,” the chapters are intended more to provoke thought rather than thoroughly explain an idea. As Nietzsche wrote, “In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs” (1883, p. 45). Readers with shorter legs may aptly complain.
Central to the book are “The Blues”: as a color, a musical genre, and a human response to loss and limitations imposed by reality. Leaving readers without a definition of the concept, Homayounpour instead draws on art, personal experience, and psychoanalytic theory to give the reader a set of intriguing all