“My sensibility as a writer is to give space for introspection”: A Conversation with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

I first came across Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2018 via the Otherppl literary podcast where she spoke of her tangled identity as an American of Iranian-Dutch heritage and her itinerant life across continents and cities, including Dubai, where I lived at the time. By chance, we met the following year and together attended the National Book Awards readings in New York. On that night, she stepped in to read for Syrian poet Khaled Khalifa, a finalist in the translated literature category, who had been unable to make it to the US due to visa complications. That evening, Oloomi and I talked about Iran-related politics, the simplistic terms the Trump administration used to paint a nation, and how a slew of harsh economic sanctions were stripping Iranians of their livelihood.

Oloomi’s interests make for a somewhat rare, exquisite blend of literature and politics. It is this subtle marriage of the lyrical and the political, of craft and convictions that stands out in her third and latest novel, Savage Tongues, coming on the heels of Call Me Zebra, for which she won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Savage Tongues is about a first sexual encounter marked by cruelty—a trauma the female narrator, Arezu, carries with her and for which she has found herself short of words. Twenty years later, she returns to the site of the violence to “conduct emotional fieldwork” and to “unearth the past, loosen its hold” on who she has become. In this task, Arezu—an immigrant of Iranian descent—is helped by her close friend Ellie, an Israeli-American. The parallels drawn between the powers of patriarchy and colonialism at an individual and political level, as well as the narrator’s obsessive examination of the dynamics that shaped her identity, are what make this novel more than a story of trauma or friendship alone.

Our conversation took place in late July over Zoom. This is an abridged version of the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

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Ladane Nasseri: The title of your book conjures tongues that are, like Omar’s in the novel, an erotic tool, dispensing pleasure but which can also wound with words—“a tongue with thorns” as we say in Persian. Savage Tongues can also be understood as a nod to language that isn’t tamed or mastered, or that is lost (as is the case for Arezu, who loses touch with her native Persian language). What did you have in mind with this title?

Azareen Van de Vliet: A lot of people have asked me about the title, but nobody made the connection you just made about the tongue of pleasure. That erotic dimension was probably unconscious for me. The novel is raising questions about the power of discursive violence and how language can be weaponized to annihilate personalities, to stereotype and dismiss. I was thinking about the language of colonialism and the ways that the discourse of the “barbaric” person or the “savage” person has been applied throughout history to different communities, and how even in our political rhetoric in America, it’s openly used to collectively dismiss and dehumanize Arab communities, Iranians, Muslims. I wanted to reappropriate the term. The title captures the destructive energy and language of colonialism, while speaking to the erotic dimensions of the book where pain and pleasure are combined.

LN: Without summarizing the novel, what would you say Savage Tongues is about?

AVVO: For me, it’s really about the love story between the two friends, Ellie and Arezu. It’s about finding chosen family when you’ve been displaced and about the incredible healing that can come from that. That intense, devotional, female, and queer friendship.

LN: I found a multitude of themes in this novel: identity, memory, patriarchy, domination and dispossession, sexuality, sexual violence, violence against minority communities, trauma—as well as stories we bury and the space that opens with language as we claim our voice. At a broader level, it’s also about race, gender, and nationhood. How did these themes congeal together, and what were the most important topics you wanted to explore?

AVVO: We have been taught to think and talk about sexual violence as something that happens between a victim and an aggressor. Intimate sex, intimate torture, intimate violence. Less often do we zoom out to look at the rhetoric of nationalism and to examine the cultural standard of morality that dictates sexual norms and establishes a protocol for sexual education. I am interested in opening the conversation up to include an interrogation of the ways that political ideology influences, controls, and manipulates our desires. The rhetoric of nationalism and patriarchy—these foundational stories have an effect on our sexual desires. One question that’s important to me is: What happens to our desires, our capacity to love, when we’ve been taught to hate ourselves or other people? How does that learned loathing distort intimacy? That’s a very political question. It’s important, too, to acknowledge that not every incident of sexual violence has that dimension—but the story I was telling does.

How does that learned loathing distort intimacy?

LN: Savage Tongues is timely given the heightened awareness around social justice and the rights of Palestinians and marginalized communities. How important was it for you to highlight the plight of communities or individuals who are not in control of the narratives around their lives?

AVVO: Arezu and Ellie are asking a lot of difficult questions about the violence of political modernity and the logic of the nation-state that serves to protect some communities while leaving others stateless and dispossessed. With regard to Palestine, Ellie, who stands against the occupation and examines her position as an implicated subject in the violence of ethnic cleansing, and Sahar, who is from the West Bank and whose life is shaped by the separation wall, talk often about the Palestinian struggle and their individual struggles with displacement. In general, all of the novel’s characters are distinctly aware of how one nation’s autonomy is predicated on the disempowerment and subjugation of another nation. The characters in the novel are Iranian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Israeli, and American, and it’s impossible for the encounter between them not to be informed by the geopolitical crisis of the Middle East and the dynamics of colonialism that have (mis)shaped it.

LN: I was struck by the metaphors and symbolisms in the novel: the young boar, the yellow Speedo, the main characters constantly cleaning and scrubbing . . . Where is the limit of telling and when to rely on metaphors to let readers do the work?

AVVO: That question is really about pacing. My sensibility as a writer is to give space for introspection, and different readers or writers have different levels of tolerance for that. In Savage Tongues, I was interested in blurring the boundaries between interiority and exteriority. The cleaning of the apartment, the wild boar, the swimsuit—those are all things that carry Arezu’s trauma, but they are outside her body. Trauma puts you in a cognitive state where you can’t tell where the boundaries of yourself end and the world begins. That’s how it disempowers you. Those elements were important to me because I was writing trauma; I wasn’t writing about trauma—for me, that’s a very important distinction. Savage Tongues isn’t a book where a character is reflecting on a trauma long resolved; it is about being immersed in the excruciating process of confronting and healing trauma. The reader might feel claustrophobic at times, but that’s instrumental; that’s the process the narrator and the characters need to go through to decolonize their minds and bodies from colonization, from the logic of patriarchy. That’s where the cleaning comes in as metaphor: removing, stripping away all that learned self-hatred.

My sensibility as a writer is to give space for introspection.

LN: What place, piece of art, writer, or artist did you draw inspiration from while writing Savage Tongues? Was there any material that you kept nearby to help construct that intimate setting or stay close to Arezu’s psyche?

AVVO: Two books were alive to me while I was writing. Marguerite Dura’s The Lover, and an early book by Elena Ferrante called Days of Abandonment, where the protagonist is also trapped in an apartment. It’s like a fever dream. Also, the architecture of the Alhambra in Spain—doors that lead to other doors, passageways that lead to courtyards and more doors, arcades and ponds—informed the way I was thinking about the novel. It’s a space that is enclosed and confusing but that keeps unfolding too. That’s the novel’s structure: You’re trapped in a space, but all these other spaces keep unfolding within it.

LN: In the novel, Arezu finds language “divine because it’s capable of naming that which has been made to disappear, of articulating the unspeakable.” Like her, you are Iranian American and multicultural. You have lived in Spain, Italy, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, and speak four languages. What role has language played in your own life as a writer and a nomad?

AVVO: Because I was raised speaking four languages simultaneously—Farsi, English, Spanish, Italian—and because I lived in an immersive way in those languages, I am very aware of how the boundaries of who we think we are are entirely shaped by language. How much vocabulary a language has for grief, or how much tolerance a culture has for speaking of grief, or love, or happiness affects your emotional landscape entirely, because however much language you have for articulating something, that’s however much space your self has, your imagination has. The boundaries of my identity shift depending on which language I speak and operate in. When I’m writing in English, it’s a work of acrobatics to bring all the generosity and the capaciousness of those other languages, Farsi and Spanish especially, into the work’s emotional charge.

LN: Arezu wants to stay clear of the traditional narrative of victimhood by parsing out the violence against her from the pleasure she had sought. She insists she has “no interest to obliterate the contradictions.” Can fiction and Iranian characters that are layered bring nuance to the simplistic portrayal of Iranians and Iranian politics and society in US media? Can such stories or protagonists help create a space in the tense Iran-US discourse?

AVVO: Arezu is a very intelligent, self-aware (at times to a fault) character and has been tracing the political rhetoric exchanged between America and Iran her whole adult life. She feels hemmed in by that rhetoric and the ensuing ethnic violence it instigates. Her brother is attacked early on in the novel by a white supremacist; she witnesses the attack and is unable to help him. It’s the ’90s in America and the hate crime, which was ethnically motivated, is not recognized as a hate crime by the authorities; the attacker is absolved of all responsibility after completing a few hours of community service. This is the defining event in the novel, the event that primes her for the violence she experiences later on, with Omar in Marbella.

Sadly, we are seeing a lot of similar political dynamics at play right now; the extreme polarization, the rise of white supremacy. The US functions in opposition to an “enemy” nation; it is dependent upon the rhetoric of self-defense, fear, and suspicion, which is especially evident in the way that Iran is addressed and discussed, but has been used in the past to diminish other nations as well. That stance toward the rest of the world comes from its own divided and divisive reality on the ground, from its abundance of unresolved historical conflict and failure. America is a lot of great things, a place of limitless potential, but there is a core part of America that suffers from cognitive dissonance and dissociation, a kind of willful denial and amnesia.

These are complicated subjects, and they intersect with the ethics of representation of brown and Black bodies, queer bodies, female bodies. My ambition with Savage Tongues was to write characters that can exist on the page with all the completeness and dimensionality of a real person. I was very aware of the real dangers of writing characters that affirm the “western” gaze, or the notion that the “East” and the “West” are two distinct and oppositional hemispheres. And I didn’t want to take readers on some kind of literary tourism that is, aesthetically speaking, adjacent to affirming that gaze.

I am very aware of how the boundaries of who we think we are are entirely shaped by language.

LN: Earlier this summer you taught a class on intimacy and setting at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Do you have any advice on building settings that get under the reader’s skin?

AVVO: In that class, we talked about how we are taught to think of setting, landscape, and character as separate elements of fiction. I’m trying to talk about how the self is nested in landscape, and landscape is nested in the self. I teach how the style and voice of a novel, its atmosphere, its mood, is generated from that intense nesting and relationship between place and self. It’s a more visceral, intuitive way of thinking about these questions, rather than thinking of them as elements of fiction, which can make writers shut down because, in reality, we don’t experience space or self as two separate distinct entities—they are always intertwined.

LN: Was there a craft element that you struggled with in writing this book?

AVVO: It was challenging to weave together the political questions in the book with the personal story; likewise, to weave together the historical background with the present moment of the story. We know these dimensions of reality are interconnected, but in storytelling we’ve been taught to separate them, to say this is the backstory and this is the present story unfolding. That worldview—that kind of spatial and temporal sensibility that separates the past from the present—doesn’t speak to me as a person whose identity is plural, who grew up with a more layered and elliptical understanding of temporality. I don’t have a linear sensibility of time and neither do my characters. They are always negotiating the past, forgotten histories, the parts of themselves that were suppressed; they exist in multiple tenses at once.

LN: What writing advice do you often give your students?

AVVO: The only advice I think is useful to give is to show up to your writing every day, because that’s the only way your writing is going to know that you’re there. Language is alive; it has its own consciousness and you’re entering into a relationship with it, so you have to show up regularly. You can’t show up occasionally and expect language to show up. You wouldn’t expect that from a person!

LN: Authors often talk about their writing rituals: wearing a particular clothing item, lighting a candle, using essential oil roll-ons etc. Do you have a writing ritual?

AVVO: I have pets, and I don’t start writing until they are settled and in the room—ready to sleep at my feet or on the bed. That stillness that you can share with an animal, that’s the space I need to be in. So, the dogs will get walked, the cat will get fed . . . and once they’re settled, then I’m ready.

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