On the farm in Nebraska, where I stayed as an artist-in-residence, my duties were minimal: wake the chickens up in the morning, feed them scraps from the compost, and put them to bed at night. This job had been handed down to me from a poet that used to live in my room. She guided me through each step, and told me not to feed them citrus. Birds hate citrus, she said.

It was still fall, but I could feel winter in my bones. The night before, we sat around the fire, feeding it yellow phone books and telling stories. My housemate told me his childhood friend had just returned from Iraq. After the ‘Welcome Home’ party, they went out to the local bar. With every drink the soldier downed, he described the corpse of an Iraqi he had killed. As he stood over his victims, he had the urge to taste them. He liked to lick their blood off of his fingers.

“That’s not true!” I said.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” my housemate reasoned, “humans are animals.”

I got out of bed and ran to the coop. I had left the gate open, the door unlocked, the latch unhooked. The screeching chickens were an orchestra without a conductor, a requiem for the not-yet dead. Wings beat against glass and wood. Some clung to the rafters, others crouched against the metal screen. On the ground a dark animal spun in circles, tossing up hay and litter. A chicken writhed between his teeth.

The creature jerked its head around, its nocturnal eyes squinting to make sense of my flashlight. We stared at each other, and then, deciding I was not a threat, he turned back to his victim. His tail was three times longer than his body. He looked like an obese rat. A porcupine without spines.

I called the only person I knew who would be up at 6:25 am.

“It sounds like a possum,” my father said, from his couch in Massachusetts. He is a retired psychiatrist, and has a way of diagnosing all uncertainties like he would a latent schizophrenic.

My eyes were squinty from sleep, but my ethics felt sound: kill the possum, save the chicken. My relationship with the chickens was not a close one. I called them all by the same name, Tina Turner, because of their 80’s plumes, and I kept store-bought chicken cutlets in the freezer. But protecting the chickens had been my duty, and I had failed them. I returned to the coop, this time with a brass fire poker.

I threw the poker at the possum’s back, but he didn’t flinch. I screamed at him to leave, but he didn’t speak English. I told the other chickens to flee, but they stayed to watch. I came back with a sledgehammer, but lunged it between two wooden planks. Then I gave up.

I went back to bed, using a pillow to smother the squeals of the dying chicken. Fearful of where my mind would drag me, I dreamed lucidly for the first time: I was in the pews of a church with my twin brother, laughing while others prayed.

When the sun rose, my friend lifted the dead chicken with a shovel while I held a plastic bag open. The body was almost intact, which seemed even more despicable of  a crime—the possum had not killed to eat, just to kill. The other chickens crowded around a chicken leg in the dirt, pecking at the meat.

“That’s nature,” my friend reasoned, lighting the bag on fire.

At 23, I’ve lived long enough to distinguish tragedy from travail, a chasm in the earth from the smear and persistence of the every day. But I lack the stockpiled hindsight to remember that bones heal and stains come out in the wash. It’s the immediacy of youth I haven’t outgrown—the distrust of time. Every trauma feels like the end-all, until tomorrow proves me wrong.

On the farm, the days shortened. I clawed away at darkness, and prayed the days would forget to turn to night. As I put the chickens to bed each evening, I pressed my phone into my ear, listening to friends talk about their lease agreements, their hot yoga classes, anything that would distract me from what might be lurking inside the coop.

My fears expanded: a passing reflection in the mirror, the underbelly of a couch, the slow dance of tree limbs in the wind. A badger’s tail and an unplugged electrical cord are not the same thing, but fear has no taxonomy. It is undiscerning, ecumenical—a grab bag of shadows without owners and lakes with no bottoms. Long sleeve shirts on the clothing line hung like apostates, flailing in the stocks.

My room was on the second floor of the farmhouse, with cracks that grew down the sloping walls. I imagined vermin crawling out from the wooden chest, worming through my covers. I left my lamp on through the night, and wrapped my body in a quilt. Once I fell asleep, my dreams were pleasant, often mundane. It was my awakened mind that was under attack.

I was not convinced, like an evangelist heralding the apocalypse, that the world would end. I was just aware of all the ways in which it could. Before the chicken incident, I never considered that nature was capable of turning on itself. Dogs gamboled on trimmed lawns and fireflies flew free from glass jars.

“All natural” is the ethos of my generation, in reaction to commercialism and as an antidote to urban dread: free-range chickens, community gardens, weekend retreats to “be in nature.” I considered the damage wrought by natural disasters to be the result of a breakdown in government, not nature itself. Nature is good, I thought. Nature is cleansing.

I did not know “Nature, red in tooth and claw” could feel as unnatural as the partitions of a cubicle. I had always found walls to be confining, but they also serve as a buffer between ourselves and the outside world, and more urgently, from our own barbarity. If a possum could commit such fell violence, then what was I capable of?

The sky was an open window, the fresh air went down easy, and my mind inverted itself, spilling out beasts of my own invention and fears mislaid. Joseph Conrad warned “the created terror” of our imagination is far worse than reality. Breathless, I could not outrun my mind. A prehistoric nightmare—I was the predator and the prey.

***

Listen to Emma read her essay:

***

Rumpus original art by Devon Kelley-Yurdin.

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***

When I first received my Iranian passport shortly after my twenty first birthday, I looked up our last name in the dictionary. The first definition for Ranjbar is proletariat. The second meaning is toiler.

Uncle Massoud, a renowned sports champion and successful business owner, is the only Ranjbar who physically toils. Massoud has recently developed a passion for organic farming and works daily on our family’s rice fields. Given our family history of khans and wealthy land owners, and the stringent classism that remains a normative part of Persian culture, it is a strange sight for most.

I am only visiting Iran for one month and, although social convention demand that I spend my time visiting relatives and attending frivolous parties, my uncle and I are unseparable. Every morning we eat a modest breakfast of bread and feta with basil, drink tea from the samovar, and set off at sunrise, leaving the other Ranjbars in the house to gossip amongst themselves.

We begin each morning tending to our small organic plot. It is not difficult to find; the growing sprigs are half the size of the surrounding fields. My uncle hands me a plastic bag and points out the weeds. I diligently follow him as he weaves through rows of green sprouting rice seedlings. I try to avoid stepping on the frogs and small water snakes that swim through the flooded paddies.

Every so often, a farmer approaches to greet us. This particular morning, three farmers call out to us from the nearest canal. I know instantly from their use of the vernacular that they are from the neighboring village. Massoud is their boss and, as a sign of respect, they begin the conversation in coarse Farsi, thick northern accents that are barely decipherable to anyone outside of the region. After obligatory greetings, the formality melts away, and we speak casually and warmly in patois. The three farmers invite us for tea. We choose an idyllic spot by a lily pond. Using burning embers from under the metal teapot, we light up a humble water pipe and pass around sugar cubes for the tea.

The latest round of economic sanctions is the first topic of conversation. Inflation is rising, and there are rumors of factory workers who haven’t received wages in months. The price of bread doubled this past week, and we wonder aloud how people will cope. Everyone speaks in the third person, but the worry on their brows is noticeable.

The talk then turns to the legal battle over our fields. One of the older farmers, Mr. Reza, comments on the irony of the situation. One Ranjbar seeks solace from working the land, while another family member tries to exploit it for personal gain. He is referring to my cousin Shideh, a lawyer who stole several hundred acres of our family’s land by convincing my illiterate grandmother to validate a property document with her fingerprint.

As the men become more animated in their discussion, I wonder to myself if these farmers themselves are exploited. Their wage is fair by Iranian standards. As sharecroppers, they are entitled to half of the rice harvested on this land. In a time of steep economic downturn – in large part due to the oppressive sanctions driven by the U.S. government – I wonder if selling the rice when it is harvested in late summer will be enough to cover the inflated cost of basic necessities. Times are hard and these farmers have relied heavily on credit to tide them over until the harvest. Their debts force them to sell their crops at the height of harvest season, when rice prices are at their lowest. My grandmother’s capital allows her to wait until winter, when the value of rice doubles. As the matriarch of the family, she too is worried about the impact of sanctions. With the exception of Iran’s elite, the punitive sanctions are having dire effects on the entire population. Even if she wanted to, I’m not sure my grandmother would be able to offer the sharecroppers more. If the value of the land collapses, she will be left with nothing.

***

The conversation continues and I excuse myself to collect my thoughts. As I walk through the fields that my family oversees in northern Iran, I hope that my love for this land doesn’t reveal a darker side of my nature, the need to control and dominate. I try not to refer to this land in the possessive tense because it cheapens my connection to it. To do so would also be fundamentally untruthful.

These rice fields are the site of ongoing legal battles spanning generations; this episode with Shideh is only the most recent. This land first came into my grandmother Batul’s possession during the White Revolution, a land reform initiative implemented by the Shah of Iran in the 1960s to check the power of the aristocracy and woo support from the peasantry.

This scheme worried my great-grandfather, a khan whose family had controlled vast swathes of fertile land throughout the Caspian Sea region. Once an infamous figure in the region, by the time of the White Revolution, he was only a semblance of his former self. In his younger years, at six foot ten, when he rode his massive black stallion, the ground literally shook. He had a penchant for bacchanalian celebrations and beautiful women. Those days of aristocratic power were over and, in an attempt to retain ownership of the land, my great-grandfather divided up his property deeds amongst his three wives and twenty-two children.

He did not anticipate that the value my grandmother’s land would triple a few years later. An important component of the White Revolution was developing new infrastructure, including highways to allow farmers to sell their goods to larger markets. Urbanization in the north soon followed, and the value of property skyrocketed as rich Tehranis scrambled to build expensive villas on the pristine Caspian seaside. Seeing an opportunity to add to his already considerable riches, my great-grandfather quietly and illegally forged my illiterate grandmother’s signature, claiming that she had sold the land back to him.

My grandfather, who was already wealthy in his own right, was furious when he discovered what the khan had done. Enraged, he gave my grandmother Batul an ultimatum and she was forced to choose between a relationship with her husband or her father. With eight children and enormous social pressure from the extended family, divorce was not an option. A lengthy lawsuit ensued and, although she won the case, it burdened her already strained marriage.

My grandfather was both a successful capitalist and a champion of various social justice causes, which resulted in intermittent imprisonment throughout his life under both the Shah and Khomeini’s regimes. My grandfather was a known philanthropist as well as a philanderer. When he snuck out in the middle of the night, it was usually to drop off a box of food to a neighbor experiencing hard times. It was always delivered anonymously at night so as not to embarrass anyone. It was equally likely that he was visiting one of his many girlfriends. Like my great-grandfather, he left behind an ostentatious reputation and a great deal of property. My grandmother Batul became a very wealthy landowner as a result, but at a great cost to her personal happiness.

Twelve years after my grandfather’s passing, the controversy over ownership of this land continues. Our once cohesive family splintered with greed and, with the most recent dispute involving Shideh, has resulted in even deeper divisions. Shideh’s hope is to sell the seized land and escape to Canada, leaving everything behind and never looking back. My family often blames these betrayals on the shifting economic and political happenings in the country, but I can’t help wonder if these transgressions are inherent to our family.

Following the long conversation with the farmers in the fields, I return home to find my cousins visiting from a neighboring province. We walk down to the Caspian seaside and look for a restaurant on the beach. They ask me about my favorite Persian dish and I reply anything but abgoosht, a traditional dish of smashed up beans and meat. They reply that it is a calorie-rich meal that farmers use to maintain energy throughout the day. After a few moments, my younger cousin Kayvan remarks that farmers today are probably even too poor to afford that, so they probably just eat rice three times a day. I think back to my afternoon with Mr. Reza and the other farmers and know, without a doubt, they can’t afford to sell most of the rice they take home.

The rest of the walk is markedly silent. We don’t know who is listening and everything is political these days, even bread. With the influx of tourists to the Caspian Sea, the area is filled with basij monitoring the area for moral transgressions. I shift my attention to our surroundings and, in an attempt to change the subject, comment on the rows of tents along the sea shore. My cousin replies that no one can afford the price of hotels. We all sigh despondently until he quotes a line from my favorite Iranian poet, Sohrab Sepehri. As long as there are poppies, we must live.

***

Every morning, I throw myself into my little plot, weeding, flooding, measuring the growing stalks. I find myself nostalgic for a past that I’ve never experienced and, as I hear more about the history of this contentious land, I’m gradually realizing that this utopian ideal has never existed. At the same time, this land is my escape and it gives me freedom from the impasse I’ve seen in every direction during my visit, which only seems to worsen as time progresses. It is a way to elude the excessive gossip and infighting that is the one constant in my family. It allows me to evade the state’s watchful eye. Miles from the city, there are no basij skulking in the fields, although I still involuntarily lower my voice when politics is the topic of conversation. After only a week, this Orwellian state is already driving me mad. I feel ashamed that it has already impacted me so strongly. Everyone I know here must cope with this reality daily. I pretend not to notice the looks of resentment in some of the eyes around our dinner table. That is how they control us – we turn against each other and then ourselves.

***

A few days later, Massoud and I head back to the fields. As we wind through the plots, synchronized in our work, I ask my uncle what the family thinks of his new passion for farming. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy. A respected Ranjbar tending the land? They joke that I’ve become a villager.” After a pause, he says that their opinions aren’t important. “This is how I cope with the world and where I find my peace.”

After a few hours of working under the bright sun, we return to the pond with our lunch basket. I unpack dates and he lays out a spread of yogurt and bread, and then we quietly read Sepehri.

***

Listen to Azita read her essay:

Rumpus original art by Rob Kimmel.

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Let’s assume you have heard of him. Maybe you studied his groundbreaking theories of visual reception in art school. Perhaps you’re a latter-day Marxist who is fascinated by Berger’s correspondences with Subcomandante Marcos, not to mention Berger’s lifelong, unapologetic embrace of Marxism. Maybe you’re involved in peasant reform, homesteading, or farming and you’re in awe over the fact that Berger studied the European peasant experience to produce his Into Their Labours novel trilogy and that, in the early 1970′s he moved onto a farm in the Alps that he still lives in and maintains even at 82.  Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel, G; and was nominated yet again for it in 2008. A man like that accumulates a lot of documents, a lot of letters, scripts, ephemera, post-its, you name it.

And now, from Maud Newton, we learn that he’s offering to donate his archives (“over a 100 file boxes”) to the British Library for free, as long as someone makes the trip up through the French Alps to the “remote Alpine village” where he lives to fetch them.  I have to say that if anything sounds like a dream job, that does. And the young gent who will be undertaking the expedition will be recording his impressions along the way via the British Museum’s twitter feed.

I will leave you with this great essay about John Berger from The Broolyn Rail.

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