Mariam Rahmani

The narrator of Mariam Rahmani’s debut novel, Liquid: A Love Story, is a queer adjunct professor of Persian literature living in LA. Unable to find sure footing in the ever-fickle academic job market, she decides to ditch the university classroom, and marry rich. Dramedy ensues, à la Nora Ephron.

When I first read the novel’s blurb, I felt thrilled and vaguely nauseous, since I am currently getting my doctorate in Persian literature, and the narrator’s post-graduation life is, in many ways, a scary glimpse into my own precarious future. There’s a line early on in the book that goes: “graduation loomed like a public execution scheduled for the next sunny day.” Ha! I said to myself, highlighting the sentence with a grim chortle of recognition. The analogy is, sadly, a spot-on comparison, and one that made me read this book like I drink chocolate almond milk at 2 a.m.—very fast, in large gulps.

Mariam’s ability to capture the queasy mashup of capitalism, education, and the arts is only one of the many reasons why her novel is so stimulating. Other reasons include the narrator’s deliciously judgmental voice, her skill at delivering a punchline (“White guys who correctly pronounce the Arabic letter ‘ayn are FBI agents, at best. Worse, informants”), and the way the novel criss-crosses between rom-com levity and more “serious” introspection; in Liquid, we go from beach sex to grief, high heels to Islamophobia, mascara to a mother’s absence. By the book’s end, I found myself in that marvelous state of happy-sad, eager to speak to the author herself.

Mariam and I talked over email about what happens when a queer person falls into heterosexual love, the fact that US universities have CFOs, and the fun in being slippery. Or dare I say . . . liquid.

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Anna Learn: What were the questions that you wanted to explore initially in the novel, and did those questions change over time?

Mariam Rahmani: Everyone’s always talking about the death of the humanities. But here we are living in language, and poetry has existed in human society for millennia. There’s a crisis in funding in education—I suppose I was interested in whether there’s also a crisis in literature. That is, in language as art. How much can we starve the arts before American English suffers? I say American English because plenty of countries around the world remain committed to producing literature, and many of them write in English.

That was one of the loftier concerns. I also had a couple more particular questions about genre. How smart can a rom com get? Can a “serious” novel have a happy ending? Can a novel be aggressively femme?

Most significantly, perhaps, can the politically sad choice merit celebration? Can another brown woman ending up with a white guy—my own (happy) fate, admittedly, but also that of so many of my friends—feel, in the heat of the text, like what you’re rooting for? What of the bi or queer woman who chooses heterosexual love? Is the personal always political or is sometimes “just” personal? Incidental.

In short: Can politics be separated from love?

The next question is a logistical one that I ask with indignation on behalf of graduate students everywhere: How in the world did you make the time to write fiction while also doing your coursework, dissertation writing, teaching, and translating a whole novel, etc., etc.?! Are you an extremely disciplined and routinized person? Tell us your secrets. 

I write in the morning—always before lunch, or if I’ve had lunch without sitting before the blank page, it means that day is not a writing day no matter how much time I have. I don’t listen to music—I can’t think that way. I don’t write every day, and I don’t believe in it as a practice. My goal is four days; on a great week, I may hit five.

I am disciplined, an accident of my upbringing. I don’t necessarily recommend it; I just don’t know any other way to live.

To my delight, digs against the institution of higher education are a significant part of the novel, and I admired how forcefully the narrator states her opinions. Do you share the narrator’s profound pessimism? Is the neoliberal university the henchman of cultural decline?

There are a lot of things this narrator doesn’t get quite right—she’s often an asshole, or settles for an easy answer—but these particular lines do indeed capture my own politics. Why should art be free in a society that makes you pay for water? For clean air? Why should ostensibly nonprofit institutions operate as ruthlessly as corporations? We take it for granted that our educational institutions have CFOs—period, first of all, but also—with training in finance; how else would they do their job? But the entire orientation—the fundamental axiom of maximizing profit and minimizing costs—is wrong applied to education. Morally and ethically, I truly believe. Education is a social responsibility. And in a country as rich as the US, an individual right. We need to start there.

With all the biting and brilliant criticism of the US university system that appears in the novel, I would expect you to be miles away from academia. But you have a faculty position at Bennington College (congratulations!). And yet, I still sense a hint of ambivalence in your participation in institutions of higher ed in the US. For example, on your Instagram, you present yourself as a “writer, translator, and maybe scholar.” You are a professor! Why the “maybe scholar” part?

Well, I don’t quite work in the scholarly space anymore in that I am not trying to publish peer review. Though I did enjoy editing a chapter of my dissertation, rather belatedly, this past summer for inclusion in an academic volume. It was energizing, a nice reminder of why I spent so many years of my life privileging that work over my “creative” writing.

I teach because I’ve had a 9 to 5 before—I didn’t go straight to grad school—and in my experience it’s pretty impossible to write in the odd hours before or after work. It’s also the context. Dealing with all the bullshit—emailing nonstop, selling things (all jobs, in one way or another, come down to that)—poisons your mind. Academia is a more familiar kind of poison. I know how to mitigate the effects. How to make space, for me and my writing.

The sad truth is I also genuinely love teaching. I like thinking about what makes a curriculum, what’s solid pedagogy. I like thinking alongside young people, not being moored to my own generation. I like learning.

Liquid carries a healthy dose of Nora Ephron-esque rom com energy (it plays on the friends-to-lover plot), and the narrator compares her own post-dissertation life to the kind of predicament a heroine might face in a nineteenth-century romance novel. It strikes me that both of these genres are also typically thought of as feminine ones. Can you say more about your relationship to rom-coms and to Victorian romance literature?

Strong! I love both and I always have. Not as an academic—I never worked on Victorian lit, I read it for fun, and have since middle school—but a more innocent kind of joy. The rom coms speak for themselves: They’re engineered to make you like them.

Except I can’t turn off the critic in me.

The narrator’s closest friend is a white man named Adam. At one point, after the narrator has been out of the country for a while, she realizes she has completely lost touch with Adam. “Our friendship, our intimacy, was a contract,” she thinks, “and I’d broken it.” Why describe friendship as a “contract” here, as if it were adjacent to companionate marriage?

I grew up in a context that thought of marriage as a contract, a practicing Muslim household. Later I studied the history of marriage in Iran and how it not quite coincided with, but rather actively was part of the program that helped straighten Iranian romantic and sexual mores. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, homoerotic structures that had been taken for granted were flattened in a Europeanizing attempt to define heterosexuality as exclusive of homoerotic desire. Believe it or not the two simply weren’t opposed; it wasn’t a binary. The contract of marriage had to be redefined in order to make this happen: It couldn’t include side pieces of the same gender, for example, whereas previously it had, and for both men and women. (Though perhaps less prevalently for women—perhaps. The research is inconclusive as the historical materials are hard to come by for obvious reasons.)

All that to say, contracts are important. On the other hand we, as Americans, live in a culture obsessed with contracts: All lawyers do is draft contracts or sue people for breaking them. You can’t buy a tampon these days without signing off on corporate mediation—so now we have a contract to avoid these contract people. (To the corporation’s benefit and your detriment, naturally.)

I don’t think I described friendship as a contract; our society already has.

In Liquid, the narrator has so much venom for Julia, her friend Adam’s on-again off-again girlfriend, whom she describes as having a body that “upheld, rather than challenged, the impoverished aesthetic of whiteness.” Julia gestures to racial or sexual otherness when it is advantageous or profitable to her, but the narrator has her doubts about the veracity of these claims to difference. What new things does Julia’s character bring to conversations about predatory appropriation?

I don’t necessarily see Julia as appropriative. The narrator does, but there’s also another side, a softer side: Here’s a woman who’s interested in her past, her family’s past. To me Julia is a question, not an answer. Right now I see this as a dominant question in our society: What’s diversity and what’s appropriation? Julia’s use of her “otherness” is cynical; the narrator’s is hard won—that’s about skin and it’s real and neither of them came up with the system. So, yes, they’re in distinct positions, and Julia’s squeezing profit out of relatively little. When it comes to difference. When it comes to pain. But the narrator also critiques her own plying of her pain for career ends when she talks about her job materials. No one gets off scot-free. There’s always a tax to pay. That’s civilization.

Another element of racialized difference that comes up in the novel emerges within the narrator’s family. The narrator’s mother is a Sunni Indian woman, and her father is a Shia Iranian man. When visiting her father’s family in Iran as a child, the narrator overhears her paternal grandmother derisively refer to her mother as “that Indian girl.” Can you say more about this moment, and why you wanted to include it?

One of my major concerns in this novel is pairing US Islamophobia with Iranian cultural chauvinism and colorism—that is, one form of Orientalism with another. I wanted to explore how these forms of racism intersect, overlap, support each other, are derivative of fundamental tenets of modernity, etc. For me that’s a major theme in the book; it’s not about one moment, though that moment really does sum up a lot of the dynamic.

What other kinds of difference did you want the novel to explore?

So many! Sectarian difference. Gender, race, sexuality; all the usual suspects. But also the binarism of being bilingual, and the more fractured lines of the narrator’s tripartite identity. Moreover, above and underneath it all, the self-alienation that’s characteristic of contemporary life.

The narrator notices that artists in the US often try to hide their wealth. So she is shocked when she meets an artist in Tehran, named Leili, who casually lays out her naked wealth. Is the aversion to talking about money and art in the same sentence an American thing? Would you say there is more openness about wealth among people in Tehran’s “art world”?

I find the US has a particular brand of class posturing—posturing “down”—that’s incredibly annoying. It requires a lot of wealth—as a nation, I mean—to act like there’s something romantic about not having it.

What side of you is animated when you are translating, and how is that different from when you are writing your own fiction? Do you become someone different, or fall into a different mood for each?

It really depends on the project. When I translated In Case of Emergency, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the narrator, who thinks and talks quite differently than I do. Right now I’m elbows deep in a new project, translating the scholar Farzaneh Milani’s definitive biography of the poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Milani draws extensively on Forugh’s letters, and I feel an uncanny connection with the poet when I render her words into English. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. I don’t really believe this, but part of me feels that the spirit of Forugh is there, animating my fingers. Of everything I’ve ever translated, it comes most easily to me. I get her, and somehow—I imagine, rather narcissistically, undoubtedly—she gets me.

But translating Milani I’m closer to my “scholarly” self, the version of me that did a traditional PhD (by which I mean, not a creative one); the version that teaches history and analysis when rereading a text with my students. The once or twice I’ve tried translating Forugh’s poetry—when available, I use published translations—it’s all play. I could spend an entire day twiddling with the lines but can’t afford the time, so I limit myself to relatively small windows. (Between yesterday and today, that came out to two hours for four lines, plus another half hour posing the problem to my students in my advanced translation class—you see why I have to be strict.)

Writing fiction draws on entirely different resources for me. Sure, both involve language and that’s where the pleasure lies. (My fiction, incidentally, also requires translation: When relevant I compose dialogue in Farsi, playing out the scene mentally, then write down the translation in English. The original Farsi exists as a ghost text I can see when editing, and I tweak the translations accordingly.) But what’s different is the emotional register. There’s no distance between me and the work. That’s taxing.

There’s a lot of play with binaries in the novel. Things (love, thoughts, assets, fruit) are described as liquid or “illiquid.” The book itself is broken into two parts (the first half is set in LA, the second half moves to Tehran), calling up the classic orientalist west-east binary. But towards the novel’s end, the narrator experiments with translation for the first time. “Translation was a homecoming,” she says. “Existing in both worlds at once. Not having to choose.” Is this how translation feels to you? Is translation a way of escaping binary thinking?

I think of the two halves of the novels—and the two cities—as a couplet. They mirror each other in crucial ways and fall flat alone. It’s in the strangeness of the juxtaposition that the novel comes alive, if at all. Before the book sold some people really hated that. They felt this was two books smashed together, partial works. I’m interested in that friction. In fact, I wrote the book in one go and knew from the beginning it would toggle both contexts, both tones.

As far as translation goes, the narrator’s is a rosy view of things. Translation is terribly difficult and often requires one—me—to divorce myself from both contexts in order to come up with a solution. For me personally translation is a way to embrace binaristic thinking. To drown yourself in the mess as a kind of solution. (It’s a strange sort of solution. Perhaps merely a salve.)

Are there plans for the novel to be translated into Persian, or other languages? What kind of role will/would you take as the person whose work is being translated?

So far Dutch and Croatian, which is wonderfully unexpected. I haven’t been consulted but would happily answer questions. As a translator I think translators need to be left alone. As an author I intend to do that.

Did you have input on the cover design? Can you tell me the backstory there?

Sharanya Durvasala is a design wiz I happened to be close friends with in LA, and we also worked together on the In Case of Emergency cover. It was important to me for the designer to have outsider sensibilities, and I was lucky to work with her again. Of course this time around, no longer with an indie press, the publisher had much more to say—Sharanya’s designs and my invariably unwelcome opinions were run through the machinery of an art director, marketing, etc. I love what we landed on. The British cover is very different—more in your face—while Sharanya and I both enjoyed how much this cover held back. Side by side I feel like they really capture an essential duality of the novel.

And finally, the obligatory Sadeq Hedayat question: Both your narrator and Hedayat’s (in Buf-e kur [The Blind Owl]) are unnamed. Was the choice to not name your narrator a tribute to Hedayat? Are there any other Hedayat Easter eggs in the story that you want to point out?

Thank you for noticing! This is one way the text plays homage to Hedayat, though for me homage is not separate from critique, in this case perhaps even censure. I was also interested in the intimacy the lack of a name attests to, in the way a beloved is simply “you”—here again I suppose we see a reference to Persian literature, though older classical poetry. I wanted both to show that intimacy in relation to Adam and to create it in relation to the reader. I also wanted it to signal how withholding the narrator is being; she never even tells you her name. This offers a fracture in her reliability that suggests the political landscapes she’s intervening in might be even more complicated that her confidence suggests. I don’t always agree with this narrator, and I certainly don’t think all her allegations should be taken at face value. For me that’s the difference between fiction and essay. In a novel you can be slippery.

It’s more fun.

Anna Learn is a PhD student at the University of Washington, where she studies Persian, South Asian, and Hispanic literature. You can find her work on her website.