"The Smell of Wet Bricks" by Chiya Parvizpur
The Smell of Wet Bricks by Chiya Parvizpur (Transnational Press London, 2024).
The Book Club discussed this novel on September 3. The author was present for our discussion.
The author, Chiya Parvizpur, lives in Sanandaj, in Rojhelat. He is not only an author but an English teacher, a translator, and a tambur player. The Smell of Wet Bricks, written in English, is his first novel; he’s finished a second one in Kurdish, and he’s currently writing his third novel. He has also translated four Kurdish novels in to English, which are to be published in 2025 and 2026..
The Smell of Wet Bricks is a symbolic novel, Chiya explained to the Book Club, in which Kurdish people can see themselves. It has two main storylines and many smaller stories within. The main one is about Resho and his mission to revive the innocent victims and the dead of his land by writing about them. Resho is not typical; he is an unusual person, a thinker, a painter, a lover of the land.
Resho is a believer of Tawuse Melek, the Peacock Angel, also known as Melek Taus. At first Resho doesn’t know anything about Kurdish people. The angel has to inform him.
He then wants to communicate with people about their Kurdish identity, but he can’t because they have forgotten it—they don’t know who they are and what happened to them. That makes Resho a highly solitary character. His mission is to tell them the untold stories of Kurdistan.
Resho has been a painter, but he can’t carry out this mission using colors, so he shifts to words. He writes in notebooks. But he has no idea how to write the stories. He sees dreams. He goes crazy because words are not adequate to the mission either.
Resho dies, and the mission is carried out by Sirwan, who has been reading his notebooks; therefore he is to piece together Resho’s life and weave it into his writings to create a novel, which was indeed Resho’s mission.
Oak Trees
In the center of town is an oak tree, and the characters sit under the tree to paint or write. Why an oak tree? we asked.
Kurdistan is a mountainous area, and many oak trees live there, Chiya explained. The oak is important to Kurdish life. Forty years ago the Iraqi regime bombed the Kurdish areas, and people went to live among the oak trees. A government representative went there to try to persuade them to return to cities. “You can’t go on like this,” he told them. But an old woman answered, “As long as there are oak trees, we can eat their leaves.”
The oak is a tough tree, Chiya told us. It lives without water, it’s hard to kill. It is resilient, as the Kurdish people are resilient. It is inherent in Kurdish Identity. It is a symbol of the people.
In the novel, Resho burns his paintings and goes to live in the forest. When he dies, the oak tree’s roots encompass his body.
A Kurdish Renaissance?
If Resho has a mission, so does our author, Chiya. He has read a lot about Irish writers and is fascinated by the Celtic (Irish) Renaissance of the early 20th century. That was when Irish writers went back to their own folklore and legends for inspiration, and they succeeded in making their own literature.
Chiya is inspired by this example and would like to see Kurdish writers do that. Too often, he says, they imitate Western writers. “But no Kurdish person can write like Paul Auster. Kurdish writers need to understand Kurdish life. I’m trying to do something like the Irish Renaissance, and the Harlem Renaissance. Those movements were successful because they were able to take back their own identities.”
For this novel, he was inspired by Melek Taus, the archangel of angels in the Yazidi religion. In Kurdistan, he explained, we have two religions: Yezidi and Yarsan. Yezidis worship the holy person Melek Taus. In Yarsan they worship a person who is the representative of God. In texts, the two holy persons have many similarities.
Unity
In this novel, Chiya explained, he is trying to create a unity between all Kurdish people by drawing on aspects from the diverse Kurdish cultures. For example, Resho’s name comes from Turkish Kurdistan. The tambur, also featured in the novel, is played in Kermanshah, not in Halabja. Melek Taus is sacred to Yazidis. He uses these symbols to create a unity among Kurdish people. His idea is to unite Kurds through different aspects of Kurdish Identity. Being Kurdish is not a linguistic issue. The colonizers have reduced Kurds to a linguistic identity and have registered all of Kurdish land, myths, stories, history, and music under their own names. The entire effort of Kurdish intellectuals has been to preserve the Kurdish language, and even this is problematic. Because the Kurdish language is not just a language but a collection of languages. What Resho does in this novel is unite and enlighten the Kurds by reminding them that the land of Kurdistan and its culture have been colonized. Resho is trying to decolonize the Kurdish lands and the minds of Kurdish people.
Eight hundred years ago Soltan Isaq, the King Isaq, fled to a mountain with his friends the Yars, “companions,” and founded the Yarsan religion. Chiya says he admires the humanity behind Kurdish Yarsan. Their holy text is called the Kalam, written in Gorani. The Kalam is not a closed entity like a book—it’s more like a notebook. It’s open to criticism. “Some people pose a question, others talk about it. This is the beauty. It doesn’t tell people what to do.” People live together through conversation.
Maqams
That Yarsan leader, Shakhwashin, brought an artistic revolution as well—he established the importance of the tambur in Yarsan, centuries ago. The tambur was from then on not just music but part of Yarsan music. Maqams are played by the tambur and are accompanied by singing and reciting Kalam, the Yarsan holy texts..
The character Resho is inspired by maqams, and Chiya himself plays the tambur. “When you write a novel,” he told us, “it’s dominating, it doesn’t let you sleep. It comes into your dreams. It makes you write. If you try to write about an instrument, then you have to learn to play that instrument. Writing this novel is what made me a tambur player.”
Next Novel
“This novel is dense,” one of our readers told Chiya. “It made me think about what is reality, what is perception. It has poetry in the middle of prose. … It is beautifully written.”
His next novel will be his third, and will be the concluding novel of the trilogy. It will be set in Dersim and take up the Dersim genocide.
The Smell of Wet Bricks is available from Transnational Press London.
