Iran Book News Agency (IBNA) - A novel on June 5, 1963 demonstrations in Iran

“Nan-o-Ney” (The Bread and the Reed) is a novel on June 5, 1963 demonstration in Iran that is penned by Mohammadreza Sharifi Khabushan. The book will be released by Hozeh Honari’s ‘Revolution Days’ series.

IBNA: Mohammadreza Sharifi Khabushan announced IBNA of the completion of the novel ‘The Bread and the Reed’.

He termed his novel as the first work to narrate the June 5, 1963 incident in the form of a novel and added that the approach of the novel is to highlight the religious aspect of the rise and its concurrence with Bani Asad mournings of Imam Hussain that led to Imam Khomeini’s arrest. People manifested their religious beliefs and so the June 5, 1963 demonstrations became a religious movement.

Sharifi Khabushan added: “The main character of the novel is a teenager who joins the people’s movement and narrates every moment of the events from his own viewpoint. In simple language the novel traces the events and the teen is motivated to the last moment to narrate it for us.

“As for the sources,” he continued, “I started studying on the backgrounds of pre-revolutionary movements years ago, and now I am working on two novels one of which follows the historical events after the Constitution to the triumph of Islamic Revolution in 1979. My familiarity with the subject due to background studies and my stay in Varamin, as one of the main origins of public movements made me write the Nan-o-Ney novel.”

He went on to explain that the event has higher potentials as it is not limited to Varamin and Pishva and actually involves large cities such as Tehran and Qom. On this day important figures accompanied the people. One reason for the public rise was its concurrence with Moharram and on the other hand we still have access to the elderly who had witnessed the historic event that can relate it for us.

Writers can make use of these capacities to narrate such historical movements whose attendants are still present, he added. “I have interviewed a number of these old people along with my study of written documents.”

He asserted: “Nan-o-Ney is a symbolic title as the ‘bread’ and the ‘reed’ are both effective symbols whose significance will be revealed to the reader through the story. On the other hand, the novel is open-ended and the audiences can imagine the ending by their own impression of the story.”

Sharifi Khabushan referred to the difficulty of writing historical novels and said: “Writing such works is more difficult than other novels. The writer should consider a framework for himself along with the imagination in a way not to harm the historical trend. Although difficult, such stories have particular attractions for the readers.”

The main audiences of ‘Nan-oNey’ are the adult as well as teens and the writer asserts that it has the potentials to be screened.