The Impossible Gift of Sense in Rahnavard Zaryāb’s “The Snakes Under the Silverberry Trees”

Contributed By: events coordinator
Organizing Institution: The University of British Columbia
Contact email: [email protected]
Start Date: June 18, 2022 (4:00pm PDT)
End Date: June 18, 2022
Website: https://asia.ubc.ca/events/event/the-impossible-gift-of-sense-in-rahnavard-zaryabs-the-snakes-under-the-silverberry-trees/
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Description:

The Alireza Ahmadian Lecture in Iranian and Persianate Studies present: The Impossible Gift of Sense in Rahnavard Zaryāb’s “The Snakes Under the Silverberry Trees” on June 18, 2022.

Date & Time:
Saturday, June 18 | 4pm (PDT)
Location: online via Zoom
This talk will be presented in English.
Free & open to the public. Click the link below to register for the event.

Registration Link:
https://ubc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZXExfQLPTgOFdcCPLbzh8g

Mohammad Azam Rahnavard Zaryāb (August 1944 – 10 December 2020) was one of the most influential intellectuals of contemporary Afghanistan as well as the whole Persianate World. His impact is forever manifested in the realms of journalism, literature, and Cultural-political and religious criticism. In his short stories and novels, he uses the power of magical realism and surrealism to liberate his readers from the confines of the superficial understanding of the issues his people and the Persianate world, in general, are facing. He digs through multiple modes of temporality and knit together past and future to give texture and context to the sufferings of a people in a war-torn region. In this lecture, Dr. Hessam Dehghani alludes to Jacque Derrida’s notion of “the gift” and “the gift of sense” (la donation de sens) to illustrate how Rahnavard enacts such a feat in his work, particularly in “The Snakes …..”. He will provide some more evidence from his other essays and novels to corroborate his account of this story as well.