Have you ever come across a close friend’s love letters? In today’s world, this is more akin to accidentally reading private texts or emails open on a roommate’s laptop, but there are still the fortunate few out there who have the time and discipline and romanticism to write by hand and spell out the name of their addressee in pen. This is the feeling one gets while diving into the intimate world of Medusa of the Roses. Albeit fictionalized, typed, and within a novel, Navid Sinaki still portrays this sentiment that the reader is only overhearing a conversation, a slice of gossip, or is over-the-shoulder-reading a love letter not just from Anjir to Zal, but from a writer to a myth.
Sinaki is a video artist, creative director, and author based in Los Angeles with regular exhibitions and screenings across the world. This is clear—one can feel the immense impact of Old Hollywood films, Greek myth, and Persian cinema, poetry, and architecture, that hums right beneath the sentences of his debut novel. It is an artist’s story that glitters with the residue of a life lived in the forward aim of beauty as much as truth.
Medusa of the Roses takes place in modern-day Tehran, where homosexuality is criminalized, yet two childhood best friends-turned lovers, Anjir and Zal, have a plan: they will leave Tehran and start anew in Isfahan. After Anjir undergoes a sex-reassignment surgery and becomes a woman, they will be able to live openly as a couple while passing as cis straight people. Everything is set and ready to go—until Zal disappears and leaves an ominous note that references a younger lover. Anjir embarks to pursue this map of language and to try and find Zal, weaving through the city’s clubs, hotel rooms, museum halls, and library aisles—all in search of freedom and the person he thought he knew best in this world.
This summer, Navid Sinaki corresponded with me, not through letters (unfortunately), but the close second of email where we discussed fortune tellers, genre films, and that secret language between lovers.
Kyla D. Walker: What was the genesis of Medusa of the Roses?
Navid Sinaki: When my mom found out I was gay, she said through her tears: “Maybe we shouldn’t have left Iran.” To her, living elsewhere would have made me someone else. Of course, I’d still have fallen in love with men.
I was born in Tehran, but my parents immigrated to the U.S. when the Iran-Iraq War escalated to a number of bombings that contributed to my fear of fireworks. We would visit often during the summer, but always with the perfume of conjecture. What would it have been like if I never left Iran? How would I live? How would I love?
As a kid, I hated these visits because it meant a summer of hamburgers that tasted like kabob. It felt remarkably different from my suburban California experience. But the older I got, with each visit, I started seeing myself more and more.
Lady Fatima, a fortune teller, might have been the catalyst for my novel. The day before my final trip to Iran, I had a killer first date. The one blip was a visit to a fortune teller that told me I would never find love. “You,” she turned to Luis, my date, “All looks great for you. Good things, good things.” But she turned to me and repeated herself. “You will never find love.” She offered to burn $100 candles to clear the curse. When I told her I would think about it, that I was going to Iran the next day, she gasped. “You mustn’t travel across the sands and seas with this curse on your heart,” she said.
I did. She was the curse, one I was flattered to carry. Again, the recurring thought: What would love look like if I didn’t leave Iran? How would I evade death in a country that criminalizes homosexuality, but somehow still funds sex-reassignment surgery as a solution?
During my trip I saw a noir poster in a window (Laura), and I felt my heart pound for a man working a bread stand. A rogue sesame seed balanced on his top lip. I’d have found a way to touch him, to exchange glances that meant something more, a language that uses tongues but makes no words.
Medusa of the Roses was a braid that incorporated all the strands. I still would have discovered the music of Slowdive if my family hadn’t left Iran. I’d have found the work of Jean Genet and the films of Pasolini. Barbara Stanwyck would have made cameos in my daydreams. If I grew up in Iran, I’d still have my share of bruises, some deeper, some more brutal, all of them blue.
KW: Did the cityscape of Tehran influence the prose and writing style in Medusa of the Roses?
NS: My final trip to Iran was in my early twenties. I went knowing I wouldn’t be back. My artwork was getting more queer by the moment. Though I doubted the military guards would Google me, a fledgling artist, and find anything of worth, I still was aware of the danger.
The purpose of the trip was research. I was writing my honor’s thesis on Persian cinema from before the Islamic Revolution. These movies—exploitation and B-films, musicals and melodramas—shocked me. My favorite was one called Panjereh with a plot I recognized. When the protagonist knocked his pregnant girlfriend off a boat, I felt déjà vu. Wasn’t a similar ploy used to get rid of Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun? It was liberating finding genre films from a place I used to think was so serious.
I was inspired by the Tehran landscape, sure, but I was always trying to memorialize who I was at that given moment. What I thought about life, how I felt about sex, and betrayals that still make me panic. Leaving Iran was always painful. By the time I got used to the time difference, we were already saying our goodbyes. I was always acutely aware that by the time we came to visit again, buildings would be demolished and some loved ones would be dead.
Writing my novel was a reverse Orpheus story. After my final visit, I left the country walking backwards, trying to take in whatever I could, conversations recorded on mini-DV tapes and photographs on a DSLR. I knew once I turned forward, the experience would solidify and there would be the curse that comes when moments end. Memory would become sculptural. It would harden. But I walked around those courtyards, those rose bakeries, the tumultuous bazaars, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and tried to breathe life into the stage set once more. For me, writing is a game of memory and erasure. There’s something wicked about squeezing details out of a moment, wringing the last bit of juice out of a sliced blood orange. Eventually, the sweetness is gone. I don’t mind the bitterness of what’s left. Sometimes pith can be delicious.
KW: How did you decide on the structure (of the narrator’s direct address to Zal) for the novel?
NS: I have been that person. I have had lengthy conversations with a lover who isn’t there. A person I might have seen in passing has become the star (or rather, the subject) of a monologue. Conversations between lovers have an intimacy and logic of their own, layered with inside jokes and resentment. Direct address allowed Anjir to be truer than any truth he would say aloud. If a language between lovers is sacred, then the unsaid is sometimes abject: plotting murders, confessing fetishes, and listing regrets. It was a language within a language.
Anjir began as a portrait of myself at that age, transplanted elsewhere. Eventually Anjir stepped sideways and became his own being.
I wanted his perspective to be brutally clear. I didn’t want to write a clean romance, because love rarely comes cleanly. Talking about Anjir in the third person felt very othering. Having him talk to Zal directly heightened his bawdy, fiery thoughts, but also deepened his melancholy. The one-sided conversation is directed at an absence, not a presence.
The difficult part of writing this novel was returning to Anjir’s voice. I could inhabit the rooms easily. In my pulpy haze, though, I sometimes left too much to the unsaid. In the revision process, I needed to tap into Anjir once more. Returning to the saturated intensity of his world was shocking. When I look back at my writing, scraps that I have kept from that time period, I’m stunned by the intensity of how it felt. I’m sure I’ll re-read what I’ve written earlier today, or last week, or last year with similar surprise. I remember who I am, but sometimes I forget who I was.
After writing, I felt like I was rescuing myself from drowning. In the Vertigo-style spiral, I was Jimmy Stewart. I was Kim Novak times two.
KW: How has your writing process or relationship to your writing evolved over time?
NS: ur too literary 4 this, someone wrote to me on Craigslist back when “no fatties, no femmes, no Asians” was the norm for M2M contacts.
What would love look like if I didn’t leave Iran? How would I evade death in a country that criminalizes homosexuality?
I was outed by my journal, so my relationship with writing has always been complicated. Perhaps it was my fault for leaving the leather-bound mass-produced diary out, but after returning home from a double cafe shift, expired cheesecake still on my lips, I heard my mom weeping. I tried to convince her the journal entry was a work of fiction. It was hard to argue with those three sentences:
My family thinks I’m going to France for a film program. I’m not. I’m going to see a boy I think I love.
I lost that journal on my ill-fated trip to France at the end of an ill-fated love affair that began when I was seventeen. Somehow the journal went missing in Charles de Gaulle airport. Should I start again with a new journal, I wondered. Would the betrayal repeat itself?
Fiction became my diary. I still jot down lists and small memories—look here! I never want to forget where I was in this moment!—but the bulk of my longing, my fantasies, and my observations, I started to bury in my characters. It helps when I’m stuck. If my character is walking down the street, I might remember walking down Sunset Boulevard straight into a spiderweb with the spider landing directly on my eye.
Grief has also changed my relationship with writing. My cousin drowned trying to leave Iran by boat somewhere between Indonesia and Australia. I tried to write about Bahareh, but I couldn’t. Nothing could capture the totality of her presence.
After a particular breakup, I kept a glass of milk on the space between stovetop burners. It’s where he set it down last. He left. I left the cup where it was for days. Out of solidarity, the milk didn’t stink too much. I panicked when I realized the liquid was evaporating. Everything as it was. That was the game. I started marking the cup with a dry erase marker to see how many millimeters it shifted. Next the panic was this: what would I do after the last bit of milk was gone? That is my writing process now. Starting with a full glass and documenting what I can before it’s all gone.