You are invited into writer and translator Poupeh Missaghi’s Sound Museum (Coffee House Press, 2024) as a welcome guest. You are there to assess from the outside, “a select group of foreign journalists chosen after much scrutiny and the first in the world to receive a tour of our truly exceptional establishment.” The curator frets for your creature comfort before the tour of the Iranian museum. “I hope the long flights were not too taxing and that your stay at the hotel has been restful so far.” As narrator, she speaks with candor, “I really value transparency, unlike many of my colleagues, especially—and I’m sure this won’t surprise you—the males.” You grow comfortable under her professional courtesy.
Then Missaghi unleashes a scream of a sentence. “I came to realize, during my time as an interrogator and torturer, that our government was not doing a good job maintaining an archive of its achievements.”
Sound Museum is a ruthless record scratch on human rights abuses, compressed into hybrid novella. Weaponizing her womanhood, Missaghi’s curator pretzels feminist vocabulary to legitimize the interrogation room. Her fellow women torture men who “never suspect a woman might be manipulating their male privilege for her own ends.” Feminism, right? Right? Missaghi’s curator conjures a lyrical soundscape of thinkers and artists to bolster the grand opening of her torture exhibition, a professional milestone. Sound Museum offers a chilling depiction of one woman’s ability to spin a please-pick-me-dictator career into sinister self-actualization. You are invited to witness true horror on the official tour, but not before a gentle series of breathing exercises. The curator sighs, “Honestly, I’m at a point in my life where I value nothing more than being true to myself.”
The day after Election Day in the United States, you sit at the bar of your favorite indie bookstore reading Hannah Arendt. This feels too on the nose, until you run into your creative writing professor from graduate school, who happens to be reading the same book. You scowl at the bar with another writer, grouching over right-wingers stealing punk culture. You both gag at a meme instructing all creatives to get to work, don’t give up, carry on, because you are already, and anyway, many people never had the choice. You stare at your laptop. As each new customer enters, they wonder aloud if it’s too early to day drink, and soon, all of your bodies squish close, even strangers to each other. Your boss emails you to check if you are okay today. You text your friends to check if they are okay. One leaves a voice memo to say they fell in love. Queer love still exists. Another friend texts back that they are enraged. Queer mothers still exist. Someone says they had a dream that Harris won, but then she woke up. A lot of Westerners appear to be waking up, suddenly. The death toll in Gaza continues to rise, only now your social feed suffocates over its fears about the United States. For the past few days, you’ve been teaching teenagers how to write short stories, many of them trans nonbinary. When you walked into the classroom where you guest-taught that morning, their regular English teacher said, “They’re tired because the history teacher assigned them to stay up and watch the election.” Twenty-five bloodshot eyes stared back at you. In the front row, a student said, “I like your septum ring.” You said, “Thank you. I like yours.” The students’ bodies were shockingly alive, capable of being pierced by every danger. “We’re going to write horror stories today,” you told the students. “Put everything on the page.”
Sound Museum is part dystopian horror-novella, part philosophical treatise. Self-labeled as “theory fiction,” Coffee House Press included Sound Museum as part of the NVLA series, an “artistic playground where authors challenge and broaden the outer edges of storytelling” in novella-short story hybrids. The book builds totalitarianism into its structure: one endless paragraph, unbroken monologue. The curator evades all questions for 113 pages. “Who can really touch us? No one. Everyone is benefitting from torture. . . . So we shouldn’t let others write our narrative for us.” Yes, she has listened to the Darius Rejali podcast episode of On Being. The curator namedrops artists and philosophers left and right, wrapping herself in the backwards logic of propaganda: kill the artist, then steal their art off the corpse. (Cue the United States president-elect co-opting Olivia Rodrigo’s “deja vu” for a campaign video, to which the singer replied in a deleted social media post: “ew, don’t use my sound ever again.”)
Sound Museum is Missaghi’s second book after her 2020 debut novel Trans(re)lating House One, another cross-genre exploration. Her new release exposes how easily you fall for the tricks of propaganda swathed inside hospitality. The curator offers a content warning before you enter. Do you want to freshen up or take a moment for meditation? Missaghi humanizes torture by way of wellness culture. The curator not only accepts Arendt’s banality of evil—she applauds the concept. “What more proof do we need that what we’re practicing here is all human, part and parcel of our nature.”
Is the word “dystopian” applicable to a book that identifies actual violence? Or any writing identifying a live-stream genocide? Or a systemic project designed to burn the planet and its citizens? “Dystopia” is a trick of the tongue, inscribing an unbearable reality within the parameters of fiction for safekeeping. Sound Museum is less horror than horrific, unveiling what’s been present all along.
When you forget her narrative thread, you almost root for the curator. She distinguishes herself not only from men, but from white Westerners. “[W]e women in the Middle East are suffering on both fronts, from the patriarchal men here and the Western gaze, which orientalizes and diminishes us.” She criticizes how the West circulates photos of the Iranian female police force. “You guys love those images. They fit so well with your stereotype of us as dark, violent, backward threats; you’ve even made our black veil such a threatening symbol.” The curator’s speech often rings earnest, even inspiring. “I wanted women who were imagining other kinds of communities, ones that would empower all of us, not one individual or group at the expense of others and not out of a desire for money or hierarchical powers.”
In a striking section on Palestine, the curator thinks through Rejali’s idea that torturers utilize their own trauma as a blueprint to torture others. To distance themselves from their original tormentor, the torturer changes the technique performed on them: “doing to others the worst things done to them, they never do the exact same thing.” When the curator speaks on Palestine, she does not flinch. “How can anyone see the conditions under which our fellow Palestinians live and not recognize that as torture? The limitations on their right to movement; their lack of access to clean water, electricity, and medical care; the continuous overtaking of their land; the constant violence against them; the attacks to their subjectivity and humanity—I could go on and on.” She notes that “many Israelis today do not really see themselves as forces of evil, because for them, evil and torture are what the Nazis did to them.” (In 1987, Israel’s Supreme Court made interrogational torture legal, distinguishing them as the only country to legalize torture.) Missaghi’s curator feels no shame over torture. So when she disparages the suffering in Palestine, the curator does not criticize Israeli violence in itself. One torturer merely glances sideways at the other, disgusted at the lack of self-awareness.
Sound Museum is a novella obsessed with sound and silence. The curator pitches pop music “devoid of true musical value” as torture tactic. “If we blast American music loud and long in the prison cells . . . then we’ll be able to make the prisoners confess to whatever we desire just so the music will stop.” (Olivia Rodrigo enters the chat again.)
Of course, confession is never the goal. Power is the end in itself, not a means to justice. “We mainly interrogate to put on a display of power, to show the prisoner and their larger circle, whether that’s family or friends or colleagues, that we can do as we please, to send them a message, to make clear that we have full control over not only their bodies, but also their internal states, emotional and psychological.” [Italics mine.] (Cue a right-wing creep weaseling, “Your body, my choice” to ham-fisted minions online, at least before his house was lit on fire.)
The curator speaks on Auschwitz, “in the face of extreme horrors, language begins to fail and we, humans, lose our ability for expression, for meaning.” Sound Museum is a gallery showcasing torture that pushes “the human beyond what makes them human: the capacity for language and to express meaning through language.” The curator believes that torture changes the human into an entirely new creature. For her, this always occurs in language. Stepping outside the museum, how do you resist? Once you walked in a protest where the adults handed the megaphone to their toddler, a child barely capable of walking. The child stumbled leading the people, giggling out a joyful babble of protest chant. The meaning was clear. You have seen a video of adults squatting before a wailing baby, screaming right-wing madness into the stroller while protestors ripped them off the child. The meaning was clear. You see the unending videos of dead children in Gaza, silent. The meaning is clear. The curator exposes her strategy: “We need to focus their attention and energy on negative, terrifying events and overwhelm them, so they have no opportunity for generative thought or dreaming about building a brighter future.” When Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda shares videos of the remaining children in Gaza, they are often playing. Who celebrates the silence of the dead, and who celebrates the sound of a people and their laughing children, even in the face of unspeakable devastation?
At the end of the novella, you might hope for intervention into the horror. Missaghi refuses to hedge the stakes. In Sound Museum, no one is coming to save the prisoners, except to celebrate their screams as masterpieces. The terror is not only its violence, but your position in respect to that violence. A chance of circumstance, to be a witness rather than another art installation. You could do a guided meditation. Try some finger food. But if evil is banal, so too is resistance. You could scream in protest instead, as loud as the prisoners. The horror of Sound Museum is real, but only because you accepted the free ticket.
