The Blood of Flowers (50 page)

While researching this book, I also became interested in sharing Iran's extensive oral tradition because of its prevalence in pre-modern times. Many travelers have remarked that the most illiterate of Iranian peasants could recite long poems; even today, Iranians play a game in which they challenge each other to remember poems and prove their knowledge by reciting them. In addition to poems, the literature that was traditionally shared orally includes a large body of folktales, legends, fables, discourses, and teaching stories about spiritual growth.

The nesting, or layering, of stories was a common practice in the Middle East, one familiar to readers of The Arabian Nights. I was much influenced in this regard by the twelfth-century Persian- language poet Nizami, who wrote a book-length narrative in verse about a shah's exploits, called Haft Paykar (Seven Portraits), which includes seven thoughtful tales about love. In my view, Nizami's layering of stories parallels the layering of designs in Iranian carpets, creating a weave of infinite richness and depth.

Of the seven tales interspersed between the chapters of my novel, five are retellings of traditional Iranian or Islamic stories. In cases where I thought it was necessary for the novel, I adapted the original stories freely. The words that begin each tale, "First there wasn't and then there was. Before God, no one was," reflect my rough translation of an Iranian expression that is equivalent to "Once upon a time."

The story at the end of chapter 2 was recorded in Henri Masse's Persian Beliefs and Customs. Masse's original source was a book of Iranian tales, Tchehardeh efsane ez efsaneha-ye roustayi-e Iran, collected in the Kerman region of Iran and published in 1936 by Kouhi Kermani.

The stories that appear at the end of chapters 3 and 4 were written in verse by the aforementioned poet Nizami. The tale after chapter 3 is based on parts of the tale of Layli and Majnoon, which existed long before Nizami retold it and made it his own. My main source was The Story of Layla and Majnun, translated by Dr. Rudolf Gelpke with collaborators E. Mattin and G. Hill, but I used the Iranian name Layli. The story of Fitna the slave girl after chapter 4 appears in Nizami's Haft Paykar; my source was the translation by scholar Julie Scott Meisami. Her extensive notes make this wonderful book easy to enjoy and understand.

The tale at the end of chapter 5 is adapted from a traditional Islamic story, while the tale following chapter 6 is modeled on the one that opens the poet Farid al-Din Attar's Illahi-Nama (Book of God), in the translation by John Andrew Boyle. Attar, whose long life spanned the twelfth century, may be better known to readers as the author of the famous Sufi parable in verse called The Conference of the Birds.

The tales that appear at the end of chapters 1 and 7 are my own. Those tales, as well as the main narrative of this novel, are deeply influenced by the use of language in traditional Iranian tales, as well as by their approach to characters and plot. I was also much inspired for the language of this novel by eminent scholar Annemarie Schimmel's A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry.

The title of the novel is drawn from a poem. Called "Ode to a Garden Carpet," the poem appears in Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman's monumental Survey of Persian Art, a forty-three-hundred-page encyclopedia and labor of love published in 1939 by Oxford University Press, which I used as a reference on everything from carpets to coins. The poem is described as "by an unknown Sufi poet, circa 1500," and it portrays the garden carpet as a place of refuge that stimulates visions of the divine.

The narrator of this novel is purposely not named, in tribute to the anonymous artisans of Iran.

About the Author

ANITA AMIRREZVANI was born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in San Francisco. For ten years, she was a staff dance critic at newspapers in the Bay Area. She has received fellowships from the National Arts Journalism Program, the NEA's Arts Journalism Institute for Dance, and Hedgebrook. She worked on The Blood of Flowers for nine years, during which time she made three research trips to Iran. She lives in northern California.