Introduction

The Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980 marked the advent of one of the bloodiest conventional wars of the second half of the twentieth century. This war, which stretched to eight years of WWI-like trench warfare, resulted in more than a million deaths on both sides and left the neighboring Middle Eastern countries with pain and devastation. A large number of films in Iranian cinema have attempted to portray the plight of civilians affected by the war and the challenges faced by veterans in its aftermath. Films like Gilaneh (Rakshan Banietemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab, 2005), M for Mother (Mim Mesle Madar, Rasoul Mollaqolipour, 2006), In the Alleys of Love (Dar Kucheha-ye Eshgh, Khosrow Sinai, 1991), and The Scent of Joseph’s Shirt (Bu-ye Pirahan-e Yusef, Ebrahim Hatamikia, 1995), Glass Agency (Ajans-e Shisheh-i, Ebrahim Hatamikia, 1997), Minu’s Watch Tower (Borj-e Minu, Ebrahim Hatamikia, 1996), From the Kharke to the Rhine (Az Karkheh ta Rhein, Ebrahim Hatamikia, 1993), and Marriage of the Blessed (Arusi-ye Khuban, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1988) are only a few notable names from a long list.

Among all the diverse cinematic representations of this conflict, Bahram Beyzaie’s Bashu: The Little Stranger (released in 1989) is quite significant with regards to its portrayal of war traumas inflicted upon civilians. The film compellingly captures both the psychological burden borne by civilians in war-stricken regions and the transmission of that trauma across the nation. In doing so, it reveals how the violence of war reactivates older and more fundamental national wounds, exposing fractures that predate the conflict itself.

Far from the nationalistic sentiments or ideological manipulations of the state-sponsored Sacred Defense Cinema,¹ Beyzaie delves deeply into the communal psyche of post-revolutionary Iranian civilians who were confronted with the devastation of a bloody war and compelled to find ways of grappling with the unbearable and the incommunicable. In this paper, I will examine the representation of the communal war trauma in Bashu. I argue that the film represents how a war as a historical trauma is capable of unsettling the national myth of unity and exposing hidden, longstanding cracks within the Iranian social fabric. Finally, the paper explores the pathways to healing that Beyzaie envisions, through which a war-torn Iranian society might preserve its cohesion while confronting its internal divisions. Through this analysis, I highlight the film’s significance in identifying diversity as one of the most enduring historical challenges within the geographic and cultural entity known as Iran.

Produced in 1985,² Bashu: The Little Stranger was released a year after the conclusion of the Iraq-Iran war in 1988. Written and directed by Iranian independent and auteur filmmaker Bahram Beyzaie, starring Iranian actress and director Susan Taslimi (1950) as Naii, the film was later recognized as one of the best Iranian movies of all time. The movie was banned from public screening for a few years for untold reasons. The movie is unique in its portrayal; it avoids the highly ideological conventions of the government-sponsored genre in Iranian cinema called Sacred Defense Cinema. And, right after the screening, Bashu was praised by critics and the public as a profound anti-war contribution to Iranian cinema.

Sacred Defense Cinema is a term assigned to a large body of government-funded films that aimed at showcasing the spiritual valor and victory of the Iranian soldiers during Iraq-Iran war. The term originates from the expression the Islamic Republic of Iran used for the Iraq-Iran war calling it the “The Sacred Defense.” This cinema is marked by its government-sanctioned agenda to offer a highly ideological and romanticized narration of the war through religious analogies, surrealistic metaphors, sublimation of the victims, omission of the violence, and celebration of the victories. Some of the prominent names among the large number of directors who have practiced this discourse include Jamal Shoorje, Ali Shah-Hatami, Ebrahim Hatamikia, Rasoul Mollagholipour, Masoud DehNamaki, Mohammad Hossein Latifi, and Amir Hossein Mahdavian.

In the large body of scholarship about Iranian cinema, Sacred Defense Cinema is an umbrella term carelessly assigned to any Iranian films that in a way relates to the Iran-Iraq war. Yet, a large body of films about this war do not subscribe to and never practice the same discourse and cannot belong to this category. Critics like Rastegar have attempted to challenge this flawed categorization by considering Bashu as “Counternarrative of Sacred Defense.” Rastegar writes: “the sacred defense discourse is denied any place within the film [Bashu]” (2015: 147). By highlighting this denial to ascribe to the Sacred Defense discourse, Rastegar attempts to show how directors like Beyzaie have offered counter narratives and challenged the highly ideological discourse. While this is a useful lens, I assume Beyzaie’s project is much more subtle than merely offering an alternative narrative to oppose the ideological discourse. I side with Saeed Talajooy who, in his Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema and Theatre: Paradigms of Being and Belonging (1959–79) (2023), considers Beyzaie to be following his own unique project of establishing an “emancipatory aesthetics” through invoking the diverse indigenous and ritualistic art forms and cultural heritage belonging to multiple ethnic groups across the country. Bashu is about the Iran-Iraq war but does not even gesture to respond to the sacred defense discourse. Beyzaie follows a distinctive project which represents a nation in trouble as a result of a historical trauma, most of whose population do not even have access to the war fronts. This population is living in siloed ethnic communities who are not even exposed to the sacred defense discourse due to the lack of access to the new media at the time. Beyzaie’s film is away from the noises of the TVs or radios of the time and such devices are totally absent in his film. Beyzaie stands above the tide and follows his project irrespective of the ideological manipulations of his time.

Set in Iran amid the country’s war with Iraq, Bashu recounts the story of a young boy named Bashu (Adnan Afravian), who escapes the war-torn Khuzestan province in southern Iran by taking refuge on the back of a cargo truck. Not knowing where the truck is heading, Bashu is taken to the evergreen and peaceful Caspian region in the rural north of the country, where there seem to be no signs of war (Figure 1). But for Bashu, anything is a sign of war and conflict. There, on a rice farm, Bashu finds a female villager named Naii (Susan Taslimi) and her two children.

Figure 1

Bashu (1989, Beyzaie): Naii and her two children walking back home in the rice farm.

Naii takes great care of Bashu and eventually becomes his surrogate mother. Except at the beginning of the film, the entire story unfolds in a peaceful village with its ‘homogenous’ ethnic community; nonetheless, psychological and material traumas of war haunt the lives of Bashu and Naii. The film portrays the psychological challenges that Bashu faces and the social hardships Naii suffers in her support for the young traumatic stranger. These challenges (at the level of individual trauma and socio-political trauma) perfectly represent the Iranian society traumatized by a devastating war in the aftermaths of the earlier traumas resulted from the turbulences of the post-1979 revolution and the older economic, ethnic, and sociopolitical challenges that the country had faced and have now resurfaced in the face of war trauma.

Bashu Representing a Post-War Traumatic Subject

Wars pose some of the most acute forms of psychological distress on their victims. The scale of violence and the immensity of the unexpected devastations have the power to create long-term psychological imbalances in the victims and witnesses. The Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek (Born in 1949) describes trauma as “the violent intrusion of something radically unexpected, something the subject was absolutely not ready for, and which it cannot integrate in any way” (2011: 292). Such events come to the subject as a total shock that leaves the person in awe and creates a different selfhood and a wounded body. People affected by such traumas may develop special characteristics with different degrees of affliction and intensity. There are partial disagreements about the many symptoms of war traumas among psychologists, but Bashu incorporates some of the most fundamental symptoms of traumatic subjectivity,³ including the infliction of long-lasting disruptions in memory and recollection, lack of transference, and the formation of a new traumatized identity in crisis. In the following sections, I will elaborate on each of these symptoms and discuss the ways the film represents them. Then, the socio-political effects and implications of such traumas will be examined later in the article. Finally, I will show how Beyzaie, by effectively representing the aftermaths of the war, offers pathways for working through the historical traumas.

1. Traumatic Memory

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan considered the subject’s psyche to have three dimensions: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Based on this model, the human subject operates mainly within the symbolic, which is the realm of language and socio-cultural practices (Johnston 2016). Based on this theory, we access reality through the symbolic. The symbolic is the realm of the language as well as the site of the unconscious stories and myths we create for ourselves and the relations we suppose to have with the world around us. However, the real is the kernel outside the symbolic. The real escapes symbolization. It is “per definition antonymic to the symbolic” (Bistoen 2016: 62). The real poses a threat, damages, and breaks the web of the stories we have been telling ourselves in our symbolic functioning.

Following a sudden intrusion of external reality, and its long-lasting irremediable aftermaths, in Lacanian terms, the supposed coherence of the subject’s symbolic mode of perception shatters. The traumatic encounter has the power to shatter the subject’s stable reality (Lacan and Miller 2011). Violent events like bombings cannot be comprehended in people’s memories and therefore create cuts in people’s life stories. In his Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan uses the term “tuché” to describe the sudden intrusion of the real in the symbolic. The function of tuché is to create gaps in the personal narratives of the subject. Lacan assumes: “The function of the tuché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in a form of that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma” (1998: 55). Based on Lacan, the immensity of traumatic incidents like bombings in Bashu cannot be comprehended in the human consciousness and therefore will remain as an essentially missed encounter in the subject’s memory. The event of war as violent intrusions of the real becomes a missed encounter and creates a gap in the normal functioning of memory. The missed event disallows narration or representation in the symbolic. The missed event remains as an incomprehensible experience in the mind of the subjects and forms a psychological imbalance that we call trauma. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, in order to reach psychological equilibrium, the subject needs to maintain a coherent narrative from their past, their identity, and their life. Yet, the missed encounter like bombings cannot be easily symbolized through language or contained within this life narrative, and therefore, the traumatic subjects, estranged from their past narratives, need to recreate a new set of life stories about themselves to hopefully create some kind of coherence narration and function as a subject.

Bashu portrays a similar traumatic subject whose experience of Iran-Iraq was as a missed encounter cannot be easily comprehended or represented. The movie starts with shocking scenes of bombings destroying houses and leaving people devastated in the hot lands of Southern Iran. Shelling tosses a man into the cracks of a house, sets a woman wearing a black chador on fire, and makes a young girl run away in distress. Then, a wide shot tracks a cargo truck in a wasteland finding its way through the smoke and destructions caused by the shelling. In the truck’s shortstop, Bashu appearing from an everglade, sneaks into the truck and leaves (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Bashu (1989, Beyzaie): Bashu hiding in the everglades.

This two-minute prelude (in a two-hour movie) is all the actual violence of war that Beyzaie portrays from the bombings. This introductory sequence is cut-driven with every fast jump-cut serving to portray a new face of war’s devastations. Instead of spending more time to show the devastations that the bombings causes, the director chooses to keep the war scenes limited to highlight the ephemeral nature of the violent event and emphasize the enduring effects in the lives of the victims. After brief tracking shots of the truck treading roads and passing mountains, the rest of the movie is all shot in the green Caspian landscapes. The brief experience of war with fast-paced jump-cuts from bombing is reminiscent of the very unexpected violent intrusion of the real and the missed encounter. The scenes of bombings and devastations pass so fast that they become difficult to capture and remember for the audiences. The technique is meant to emphasize the war’s intrusive events which leave immense impacts on people’s lives. The war scenes are succinct, but their irremediable effects persist throughout the film and in the lives of its wounded subjects.

To regain his mental balance, Bashu needs to work through his traumas. In order for him to come to terms with his new post-traumatic situation, the subject needs to remerge by recreating a novel symbolic consciousness for themselves with their blind spots in their prosaic temporal and historical memories. As Freud writes, trauma is a sustained wound which “continually takes the patient back to the situation of his disaster, from which he awakens in renewed terror” (1922: 8). In other words, due to the gaps the intrusion of the real (like bombing) has created in his psyche, the traumatic subject needs to recreate a new life story for themselves in order to regain their psychological balance. This constant repetition and rehearsals of the past events cause all the terrors in the mind of the traumatic subjects.

Similar rehearsals of the war traumas lead the narrative in Bashu. The film’s dramatic story starts in the rural north of Iran when the young Bashu jumps off the cargo truck. He faces a green road in the middle of the woods, peaceful and quiet. Bashu’s point of view shots shows the strange roofs of the houses untouched by any shelling. However, for Bashu, as a traumatic subject, every phenomenon recalls the war. Shelling in the south is personified in the north through the loud sound of road construction; explosions that startle him and cause him to escape into the woods. Natives are not moved by the sound of the explosives at all.

Throughout the movie, Bashu recalls the war scenes over and over again. In one instance, after Bashu joins the Caspian family, the fire made by Naii to make food sparks memories of shelling in Bashu. The flames startle him and trigger a rehearsal of the war scenes, of bombing and destruction, in his mind. Even the birds in the sky echo the sound of warplanes in his mind, and the natural sounds of the jungle are heard as shouts and screams reminiscent of the cries of the victims at the southern cities where Bashu lived. As Anne Rutherford notes, “trauma exists here in its residue in the child, triggered by the sound of explosions, the sight of flames and gestural traces that bring forward flashes of his lost family” (2013: 96). Bashu’s damaged memory constantly recalls past events but can never make a coherent picture of it as transferable into the world of language.

The flashbacks that cause terror in Bashu are fragments of the horrible events that Bashu has encountered in the past and are recalled to be linked to his present condition or his past before the actual traumatic event happened. However, none of the linkages can be coherently made for him and this problem becomes a constant process of traumatizing rehearsals of the past event. In other parts of the movie, Bashu sees his (most probably dead) parents and even follows them as if they are living with him in the Caspian village. In a masterful presentation, Beyzaie can blur the line of reality and hallucinations in order to represent the intensity of the shattered prosaic temporality in a traumatic subject. As Kamran Rastegar describes, “[T]raumatic memory is woven through the fabric of the quotidian, as Bashu frequently experiences hallucinations of his dead parents, and flashbacks to the experience of war” (2015: 147). Such hallucinatory imaginations happen when the fabric of the consciousness or the linear narration of the subject’s life story is shattered. Bashu’s memory has lost its temporal coherence and due to the immensity of the traumatic experience, Bashu cannot recall his past prior to the traumatic shelling.

In such a devastating mental condition, Bashu needs to recreate a life story for himself that incorporates the war memories of the past, the impacts on his present life, and the new space of refuge he happens to find in the Caspian region. This choice of the director to relocate Bashu from the war-driven cities and placing him in the new geographical space with new culture and language has a profound psychological message that needs to be explained. In order to define the post-traumatic situation, Malabou & Miller in their seminal book The New Wounded: from Neurosis to Brain Damage, argue that after experiencing intense forms of trauma and due to the gaps in the memory formation, a new self will emerge cut off from their past and full of contradictions. When anything happens to the traumatic character, “it is another self which is affected, a “new” self founded in misrecognition” (2012: 235). This newly emerging subject contains the symptoms of the traumatic memory including the constant repetition and rehearsals of the fragmentations of the past events, but it cannot make a full account of them. These echoes of the past and nightmarish regressions to the missed encounter are at the core of the traumatic memory. As a result of all these experiences, Bashu needs to create a new subjectivity based on those fragments that he recalls from his past before the war and tries to link them to connect current condition. He sees a figure of his mother whenever Naii is around and he practices his native rituals of for helping Naii in her farming or in her sick bed.

Through Bashu, Beyzaie is successfully creating a significant image of post-traumatic subjectivity, who is estranged from their past and their surroundings, while unconsciously attempting to recreate a new self far from the past experiences and family history based on the new condition. As I will show later in the paper, this is a new subjectivity which binds the subject to his prior self through cultural and ethnic rituals and grounds himself in the new self by forming new bonds with Naii, other children in the village, and the new environment.

2. Death in life: Crisis of Temporality and Identity

At the core of the experiences of historical traumas is a kind of crisis between the subject’s position in the past and the present. As discussed before, an event is deemed traumatizing when it unexpectedly and violently disrupts the normal flow of life. Malabou & Miller maintain that traumatic events like wars and their extensions—bombings, near-death experiences, physical traumas, displacements, loss of loved ones, and many more—can bring about similar long-lasting effects to those of natural brain diseases like dementia (2012: 77). Žižek also assumes that traumas can “destroy the psyche of the victim” or, at least, damage it in an irremediable way (2011: 292). This destructive force does not necessarily mean that these subjects lose their immediate access to the reality around them, but the effects of those traumatic events create disturbances and cuts in the subject’s access and perception of reality. In this traumatic situation, the subject tends to emerge as a restructured self with qualities, starkly different from that of their past.

The dislocation of the subject in time and place is believed, by psychoanalysts, to be the result of the proximity to a complex incidence of death and survival. Following Lacan, Cathy Caruth offers one of the most compelling discussions on the significance of traumas and their narrations by the survivors and witnesses. In her book titled Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth writes: “At the core of these [trauma] stories…is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (1996: 7). The proximity to the actuality of death and the undulation between the past event which has remained alive in the traumatized memory provides the basis for a crisis of identity and subjectification. To elaborate on the status of such death-ridden characters, Žižek writes: “When a human subject falls victim to a traumatic intrusion, the outcome is the empty form of the “living-dead” subject” (2011: 312). For this subject, the dead are more present than the living. This crisis results in the formation of a puzzling and random set of emerging and residual characteristics for the subject that requires much work to construct relative balance in its imaginative structure.

The best scene that describes this mode of traumatic subjectivity in Bashu is in 55:11 when, while Naii is dragging a trolley in her house, Bashu sees his family walking in a desert in a southern region and accompanies them (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Bashu (1989, Beyzaie): A scene showing Bashu’s dislocation through his hallucinations of Naii dragging a trolley on one direction while Bashu and his lost family walk in the opposite direction.

While walking together, a wide shot shows Naii carrying a trolley passing by in the opposite direction. Bashu turns back and looks at Naii while walking with his family. Bashu lives with the dead family at present, and at times he mixes up his present and his past recollections. The opposed direction and the way Bashu is confused between the two subjective realities perfectly portray the traumatic subject’s position.

Bashu sees gestural traces of his family and mainly his mother all over the place. For the most part, Beyzaie uses point-of-view shots and eye-line matches to signify Bashu›s perspective. The woman in a black chador, masked like the traditional ways women in southern Arab populations of Iran still practice, is embodied all over the place as if accompanying Bashu and even silently inviting him to follow. The woman figure, apparently Bashu’s mother, appears in single shots and hovers around Bashu in most scenes as if she were still living with Bashu. The same is true of the rest of his family, who are lost in the shelling. In 19:42, when Naii blocks Bashu in the barn to prevent him from spending the night outside, the entire family including his father and young sister are embodied in the barn, watching for him. For Bashu, these dead family members are more present than many of the living people around him in the village.

The past trauma appears as spirits haunting Bashu and distracting him from the reality of the present situation and place him in his shattered memories from the past. In one instance, Bashu calls his mother in Arabic “Umi” meaning my mother, when he sees her in a short single shot, but then covers his face in pain, not being able to distinguish the flow of recollections from the past and their role in his present condition. The violent intrusion of the real as a result of shelling and war has created a gap in his symbolic register, not allowing him to make a subjective connection between his past, the traumatic incidents, and his present condition. He is dragged between the past world of the dead and the present life of a survivor.

3. Lack of Transference

In psychoanalysis, transference is the process of assigning or projecting emotions and former relationships to other people and negotiating the past unresolved psychological conflicts with them through verbalizing and recounting memories. Transference can help the traumatic subjects to reduce the burden of trauma and reach psychological equilibrium. However, in severe cases like the victims of wars, traumatic subjects cannot transfer their wounds in analysis sessions with a psychoanalyst or even in their relationship with ordinary people. Their narratives are considered failures and only a collage of bits and pieces of the past recounted by an unfocused memory. Freud called this condition transference neurosis (1922: 13–15). These traumatic subjects are normally devoid of the ability to transfer their wounds through language (Malabou & Miller 2012: 346). Language fails to contain the veracity of the intrusion of the real. Others are also not ready to listen to the repeated circular stories of these subjects (Žižek 2011: 298). This inability to discuss and narrate the wound creates a condition of total stagnation, emotional detachment, and alienation in the victims of wars and similar historical calamities.

The basic premise of clinical Lacanian psychoanalysis is for patients to reach a full narration about themselves and what has happened to them. As Žižek notes: “The final moment of the analysis is reached when the subject is able to narrate to the other his history in its continuity; when his desire is integrated, recognized in full speech (parole pleine)” (2009: 147). This is while in traumatic subjects, due to their fragmented memory, cannot reach full speech that is recognizable and relatable for others and remain at a condition of stagnation and inability to narrate the wound specifically through language. The loss of psychological equilibrium will also impend the integration of any desire.

Beyzaie shows Bashu’s new subjectivity and his lack of transference through the artistic choice of situating Bashu in a new setting with a different climate, ethnicity, language, and culture. Bashu speaks Arabic native to the southern cities of Iran, and he cannot communicate in the north where Gilaki, a Caspian dialect, is spoken. The problem of language and interpersonal communication is at the core of the film. Earlier in the film, Bashu only speaks Arabic. In an early sequence where Naii tries to speak to Bashu, the young boy remains silent and is entertained to see that Naii communicates with an eagle by imitating a bird’s voice. Naii keeps speaking in her northern dialects and after a while Bashu responds in Arabic. Naii’s repeatedly attempts to speak with Bashu by exchanging the names of some objects and food in Arabic and Gilaki, and this conversation leads Naii to realize the name of Bashu. The recognition of the name is quite significant as it becomes the first steps towards the recognition of the stranger in the new space. This brief communication and recognition bring the first laughter to the face of Bashu shot over the shoulders of Naii. The scene represents the healing power of linguistic communication, though it is brief and only offers temporary relief.

The other significant portrayal of the role of language in transference happens when Bashu views the flames of a fire of an oven and hears approaching fighter jets. Bashu panics in terror, takes shelter behind the oven, and starts acting frantically while attempting to warn the children and villagers of the imminent danger of bombings. This behavior makes the children of the village to ridicule Bashu and engage in a physical bout. After Naii intervenes to disperse the kids, Bashu picks up a schoolbook and starts reading in standard Persian (Figure 4). The lines read: “Iran is our country; we are all from the same water and soil. We are the children of Iran” (58:57). The words read in Persian helps Bashu to connect with the children in the village and initially seems to be an effective tool to communicate his pain. Yet, when the children start to speak in standard Persian and ask multiple questions about Bashu’s family and his past, he bursts into tear and fails to respond.

Figure 4

Bashu (1989, Beyzaie): Bashu reading a textbook in Persian for other children.

Many scholars have discussed this scene before, among whom Rastegar’s reading echo a major line of interpretation. Rastegar highlights Bashu’s ethnic background as an Arab-Iranian and views the use of official Persian language in the light of “Persianist chauvinism” (2015: 147). On the role of Persian in Bashu, Rastegar writes: “Bashu’s traumatic experience has resulted in an aporia caused by the ideological fixity of the of the formal language taught in schools, a crisis of meaning that cannot be resolved easily…. His turning away restates the line of incommensurability that exists between the official nationalist discursive real—and that of his traumatic experience” (2015: 149). Rastegar takes the lines carrying the children of Iran in the book to be ideological fixations, yet these lines are only sharing a pluralistic vision of a land owned by the numerous ethnic identities who live here. Rastegar takes the traumatic impasse to be resolvable through language expression. It seems as if, Bashu could transfer his pain in his own regional Arabic dialect. Yet, such interpretation downplays the inability of linguistic expression to transfer and capture trauma and pain. The problem is not which language is used, but in intense cases of trauma, the veracity and extend of the pain disallows representation through language.

In Bashu, the failure of communication is reminiscent of the lack of transference. The traumatic subject is unable to communicate his wound in the proper language. Any representation and narration of war traumas to fully capture the experience will be a total failure, and this not due to the linguistic diversity. The politics of the film is much more subtle here. It views cognition to be an embodied experience, and believes transference is only possible through genuine bodily enactment and affective connection between people. This is shown when Naii embraces Bashu, adopts him, supports and caresses him, and gradually learns to accept him as he is, rather than through baptizing him. This is a level of transference which happens at the level of cognition prior to the linguistic perception.

The displacement of Bashu is not only material and physical but is also a function of his traumatic mind. After the shelling of his town, even if Bashu had remained in his town, he would have been yet again a stranger. This is perfectly represented in the figure of Naii’s husband—Qesmat. When at the end of the movie, Qesmat comes back home, he has also suffered the trauma of losing an arm and it is not clear if this has happened at war or during an accident. The same trauma makes him seem like a stranger in his own home. When Bashu sees him and offers him water, Bashu speaks Persian and says: “I can see you are a stranger” (1:47:34). Bashu uses the word “Gharib” in Persian, which connotes being alienated from the place, while the person can be a native of the region. And Bashu is right: he is estranged in his land due to his trauma. And Bashu can relate to this form of consciousness better than any other person in the village since he is a stranger as well.

One might argue that Bashu’s account of the traumatic event that he narrates in Arabic for Naii can be a form of Lacanian coherent narration of his life story (parole pleine)⁴ since he seemingly gives a ceremonial account of what had happened to him in the shelling. Yet, the account of Bashu is again fragmentary and in a language that cannot communicate the wound to Naii. Bashu begins to show signs of transference through a few means: first through the music and imitation of the natural sounds that he learns from Naii, second from the time he starts speaking in Persian, third through the embodied reenactment and performance of rituals, and finally by taking responsibilities and collaborating in the livelihood of the family and community. All this emergence of the new subjectivity of Bashu happens only in the light of the motherly support and embodied empathetic acceptance of Naii. The two translations that he does affect his consciousness to stop translating the wound into unbalances and bodily reactions and translate them instead into the language of nature and body gestures of animals, and the language of the utmost other, the Persian, as a new symbolic realm.

The imitation of the natural sounds and gestures of the calls of the birds and dogs is quite an important achievement for the actor and actress in this film. The films shows how, when the human language fails to transfer the wound, the only means of communication that might be capable of doing the impossible task of transferring the wound is the call of mother nature. The mimicry of the birds’ sounds by Naii, and later by Bashu learning from her, making various sounds including playing pipes can be considered a form of more meaningful transference through these translations. These scenes recall the Lacanian imaginary register,⁵ which is the site of the fullness of the image and nature, and therefore Beyzaie’s romanticized recourse to nature suggests a way to reconstruct new symbolic narratives for the subject.

Lovatt in her article on the idea of sound in Bashu assumes that the kind of natural sound mimicry and noisemaking is “connected to physiological and psychical healing” and writes: “The rich aural texture of the film moves between, and often overlays, the sounds of the rural environment, such as birds, animals, and the wind, and human voices that mimic these sounds…the acoustic environment seems to assert an agency of its own that co-exists with the animals and humans that inhabit it” (2016: 173). Thus, Bashu’s attempt to communicate with the natural elements can be considered a return to the imaginary register in childhood when the subject considers a unified holistic image of the world. This new mode of communication helps the subject to start over and reestablish his connection to the symbolic and proceed in the process of subjectivation.

Speaking Persian as the language of the Other is also significant for both Naii and Bashu. Persian is the language of the modern cities of the time, but the entire movie is shot in rural villages that are still very traditional and ethnocentric. This mediating language, with all its difficulties, seems to be the only shared way for communication among the diverse members of Beyzaie’s highly political society. This language does not help Bashu to transfer his ordeal but helps him to translate and create his new subjectivity based on an effective way of communication. When, based on Lacan, a human is born into language, then, following a trauma, a new language can have the potential to help the new traumatic subject to be reborn, and Beyzaie is seemingly arguing for this philosophical premise.

Conclusion: Stitching Tuchés of the National Myth?

Up until now, we have mainly discussed the personal aspect of trauma in Bashu. Trauma is by definition an individual experience that drives people to find recluse in pain. But when it comes to the shared traumas such as wars, the communal experience makes it highly political. Thus, there is value in studying the ways Beyzaie’s film treats war traumas as a communal experience and highly political experience. In this sense, one can claim that Bashu is an allegory of a nation in crisis and Beyzaie is representing the challenges and the ways this traumatic nation can survive its calamities. This does not mean that individual trauma can be generalized and projected on society, but traumas like the Iran-Iraq war can be considered as shared experiences of most Iranians and were transmitted to the entire society.

To better understand the social conditioning of the subject in Bashu, an elaboration on the relation between the subject and society seems necessary. In Lacan, subjectivity is never an autonomous phenomenon that can be imagined outside the social fabric that creates and stitches the symbolic web. For him, the “subject is rather an effect of this social order” and this effect seems retroactive as well (Bistoen 2016: 58). Therefore, the subject formation is dependent upon the contextual and historical texture in which it is formed. The Lacanian subject is defined through its interaction and negotiation with the other. Therefore, the post-war traumatic subject, being the result of social and political conditions, should be studied on the backdrop of the same historical condition. It is also true of the fantasies and narratives that people create for themselves. These narratives are not autonomous but are primarily based upon the collective narratives, desires, and myths that exist in the social fabric.

Jenny Edkins in Trauma and the Memory of Politics emphasizes the retroactive process of subject and social formation. She argues that the two retroactively contribute to the fantasy that is called a social order and this order is an imagined reality. “The person is formed…by imagining or supposing that the social order exists” (2013: 13). Thus, when a real incident like war happens, the collective narratives and social fantasies of order which suppose the existence of a unified social fabric are jeopardized and distorted. Therefore, trauma affects the entire society and shows itself in ways unimaginable to the initial traumatic experience. In this sense, more than anything else, traumas create tears in the social fabric, in a similar way that it introduces gaps in the psyche in relation to the missed encounter with the real.

The same social rifts are noticeable in Bashu. In the film, the myth of a coherent and unified nation is challenged with the introduction of war traumas. The monoethnic Caspian community of villagers becomes an allegory of a nation which presupposes homogeneity of the nation. When Bashu appears in the village, his dark skin color, his Arabic language, his name, and his comportment resulting from his culture along with his traumatic symptoms makes him a total outsider. The villagers have a hard time accepting him as a fellow human and citizen of the land they have been living their entire lives. The villagers’ pale complexion, Caspian dialect, and familial bonds lead them to assume that all Iranians resemble them, rendering Bashu an outsider to their normative expectations. The presence of Bashu introduces a rent in the national myth of a homogenous nation for the villagers and this causes all the trouble for Naii’s family.

One can claim that Bashu references a historical gap in the Iranian society which has always been masked by the national myths. Based on this view, and as Andreescu argues, social trauma occurs “when an old social order together with the fantasy that supports it, suddenly loses its validity while a new one is not yet established. This is a moment of an encounter with emptiness at the core of and the inconsistency characterizing any social organization” (qtd. in Bistoen 2016: 118). The trauma here becomes the site of the realization of the cracks and gaps in the myth of the unified and coherent social fabric. The cracks that happen in the social order as a result of traumas cause society to enter a new phase facing the kernel of the real contradictions that have long been there but have always remained unnoticed to maintain social integrity.

Bashu, as a traumatic stranger in exile, becomes an agent to transmit the wound to the northern village. The child’s emergence reveals the inconsistency in the social fabric and resurfaces the ruptures in the Caspian society. Since Freud, psychoanalysis considers traumatic effects to be the return of the older repressed traumas (or childhood traumas in Freudian theory). The traumatic event only uncovers the older ruptures in the former narratives, destabilizes and mobilizes the rest of the cracks in human consciousness. Bashu’s presence forces the Caspian villagers to face a new reality, a village (representative of a nation) where not everybody looks, speaks, and lives like them. The problem of color and race as a defining factor in global social stratification is omnipresent in the film. Bashu becomes an emblem for the loss of homogeneity for villagers whose seclusion have disallowed any exposure to the diversity of their country. Villagers are there to face diversity in their myth of homogenous community. The presence of the strange child resembles the Freudian childhood life with the caveat that Bashu represents the challenges of difference which has always been pushed under the carpet. Beyzaie’s entire project revolves around emphasizing this incoherence and diversity in the national identity.⁶

Bashu represents the multiple layers of diversity and difference in the nation. We rarely see any young people in the village except Naii and her husband and this symbolizes the generational gap between the traditional ethnocentric worldviews as opposed to the progressive new generation in Iran (which Naii’s family represents) embracing plurality and diversity. Naii’s agency in managing her household without the oversight of her husband in a patriarchal society shows another aspect of diversity underscored in the movie. In a sequence early in the film, when the villagers find out about the presence of Bashu in Naii’s house, the elders of the village and relatives gather in Naii’s house to visit Bashu. An elderly woman inspects Bashu’s hair and skin for signs of disease, a young girl touches his face and examines her finger for any trace left behind, and another woman speculates whether his presence portends misfortune. The villagers encircle and pressure Naii to relinquish Bashu, raising the legal and economic burdens associated with his care as a means of intimidation. Naii first tries to tolerate the scorns of elders but upon seeing the distressed face of Bashu, and in an act of total revolt against the traditional norms, she asks the guests to leave and stop scorning her. Naii’s rejection of the traditions, gender norms, and social bond and hierarchy is quite transgressive and shows her deep understanding of the new order and the need to embrace the other irrespective of the old prejudices. The fears and anxieties of the villagers are also representative of the ways their imagined ethnic purity that is endangered by the appearance of a child who looks, acts, and speaks totally different from them.

The diversity in languages and dialects in Iran is powerfully showcased in the film as well. Iran hosts minorities who speak numerous languages and dialects including Azerbaijani and other Turkic dialects, Kurdish, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Luri, Laki, Arabic, Balochi, Tati, Talyshi, Armenian, Georgian, Neo-Aramaic, Circassian, etc. Such diversity makes linguistic borders between ethnic minorities. In Bashu, the standard Persian language becomes the most practical way for the people to negotiate difference. Instead of presenting Persian as the official language of the other imposed on the ethnic minorities, Beyzaie celebrates Persian as a unifying thread among the diverse ethnic groups living in Iran.

The occurrence of the war as a collective trauma and Bashu’s presence resurfacing all the gaps in the villagers’ myth of unified national identity is at the core of Beyzaie’s movie. As Gregory Bistoen in his book Trauma, Ethics and the Political Beyond PTSD (2016) writes: “Symbolic identity grants the individual a sense of self, as a citizen of a state…[any] disruption of the social order as a whole…is intertwined with the potential loss of identity and security, both at the individual and the collective level” (2016: 120–21). The hostile treatment of Bashu by the Caspian villagers can be considered as examples of the same disruptions in the social order which Bistoen highlights as the source of the loss of the people’s security in their identifications. The villages pressure Naii to abandon Bashu, they treat Bashu as an abomination, the kids mock and beat him, the local doctor even rejects treating the sick child. When Naii decides to adopt the child the villagers shun her.⁷ All such responses are the results of the communal sense of selfhood and purity defined within the social order and the insecurity they feel when facing cracks of heterogeneity crawling in their collective myths. When the symbolic unity of this social fabric is endangered, the identity and security of the members of this society are jeopardized as well: therefore, the actions of the villagers are, in Freudian terminology, signs of the return of the repressed.

Bashu shows how social traumas have the power to disrupt imagination and work as ruptures that intrude the communal myths and protective fantasies that keep a community together. These myths would “conceal the contingent nature of this community’s particular sociopolitical organization (Andreescu 215). From a Lacanian perspective, the tissues of social life are composed of such constitutive collective fantasies and their associated, shared narratives” (Bistoen 2016: 115). The appearance of Bashu in the Caspian village jeopardizes the communal imagination of an Iranian post-revolutionary fantasy of sovereignty as a state. It imperils the totality of the image of a cohesive nation fighting a shared enemy. It exposes the subjects to the various social and broad political problems that are threatening the symbolic sovereign. The collective fantasies are shattered for the villagers seeing an Iranian who is different in culture, in skin color, in language, and who has absolutely nothing in common with them. Beyzaie projects how war traumas at the borders are transmitted communally throughout a country.

Beyzaie offers Naii as a model to face the traumatic complications (Figure 5). Far from the traditional gender norms of antiquity including sentimentality, passivity, and productivity, Naii is a caring mother figure, fighting her prejudices, and offering support for the dispossessed. Naii becomes like a “sensible reader” who is capable of listening to Bashu’s traumatic narration and therefore relating to the child’s pain (Ghaderi 2021: 3). As Saljoughi notes, Naii “undergoes a dynamic process that reveals mothering as not only an act of care for an other but also a recuperative psychological, social, and political process that extends beyond the mother-child relationship with the potential to forge new collectivities” (2022: 1). Naii extends her nuclear family to embrace the other. Throughout the film, Naii learns to value inclusion as the only remedy for an ethnically diverse society to be able to overcome the challenges.

Figure 5

Bashu (1989, Beyzaie): Naii in the rice farm.

Naii cares about the shared traumas of her society and does her best to communicate to and accept the other in spite of her initial prejudices about Bashu’s dark skin. Despite being poetic and romantic with respect to nature, Naii is strong and decisive as a female subject who rejects the pillars of a patriarchal society. She is portrayed as the true caregiver of the land and its people. Naii is a true humanist who attempts to perceive the political traumas of her land and embrace them. She adopts Bashu as her stepson believing that he is also a child of the sun and the earth. Far from any false claims to sovereignty, Naii’s approach to the new situation is based instead on an inclusive humanist outlook offered by Beyzaie as a panacea for post-war radicalized and violence-driven traumatic Iranian society.

Through the motherly support of Naii and her extension of the family definition to include the other, the film suggests that traumas and their destructive nature can only be dealt with through a communal effort of inclusive empathy and social responsibility irrespective of the diversities. This is what Dominick LaCapra calls “working through” trauma to describe the process of overcoming traumatic neurosis (2014). For LaCapra, working through traumas involves regaining access to the present moment and distinguishing the new condition as a different state from the past traumas. With the support of Naii, as the movie proceeds, Bashu manages to ground himself in the family and accept his new condition and distance himself from his traumatic past. He no longer reverts to the traumatic memories, and the flash backs stop in his memory. Bashu’s successful reconnection with the new condition, with the nature and people around him are all a result of Naii’s attempt to understand his pain, accept him as he is, and give him the opportunity to exercise his agency, to be part of her family.

By narrating different stages of trauma response, Bashu suggests that experiences of trauma, despite their disabling effects, can be worked through (Figure 6). The film underscores the importance of communal efforts to help traumatized bodies of society to translate their wounds into a shared language to create a more sympathetic world. The final scene of the film is highly important in the appreciation of Beyzaie’s approach. When the boar as the embodiment of the enemy of the land rages in the rice farm, all the family together with Bashu hasten to fight it and scare it out of the land. One might read this final moment as Beyzaie’s romantic understanding of trauma having the capability of reuniting the family together. Yet, the film suggests that despite the prevalence of traumas in a society (Bashu losing his family and Qesmat losing an arm), through empathetic inclusion of the other, challenges can be dealt with. The abundance of trauma has led to a multidirectional understanding of the social setting and an embracement of the other’s traumas (Rothberg 2009).

Figure 6

Bashu (1989, Beyzaie): Bashu cries and hugs Qesmat when he see Qesmat’s lost arm.

The film does not show how the villagers deal with the new condition, but the inclusive family starts to function again with the new members. The film narrates the importance of the way a society receives the ruptures of trauma and embraces its members. Despite whatever trauma, the recognition of the new conditions and new subjectivities that are produced as a result of these traumatic incidents is key to the well-being of each society.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.