Will Stand, We

  • Will Stand, We
  • Author: Mahsa Mohebali
  • Publisher: Zaryab Pub., Persian
  • Publication Date: 2016
  • 240 pages

From the Book

The sound of falling dices disturbs you. Why are they pleased with no game other than backgammon? Why don’t they play chess? Because you should shut your mouth up when playing chess, should think twice, should plan. You should make progress on different fronts to blindside your opponent. So that if he moves his knight, you can take his bishop, and if he moves his queen, you can take his rock, and so on until you gradually reach your goal. On the backgammon, however, all you can do is throw dices and boast and dawdle until your opponent is distracted and cannot decide, cannot risk it…You should keep throwing dices and move without thought . Half-chance, half-boasting. Your mouth should keep mumbling and your hand moving. You cannot stop for a second and think. You should crawl from one decision to another, and your hand always relies on the dice and checkers.

You shouldn’t have opened up your mouth. It’s always like this. When you open it, you cannot shut it up on your own. Your mind gets as loose as your mouth.



About the Book

An account of a girl struggling with the present, thinking of the past, and awaiting her downfall in the future. As a young schoolgirl, one day she is called to the principal’s office. The security forces have found photos of family members and acquaintances amongst her books, but she does not know who has put them there. The incident leads to the disappearance of those people. And now she has only one goal: to find about the one who betrayed her. She is living with her family now and all her previous boyfriends are still residing there and are on drugs. At work, she had an affair with her employer – a jerry-builder, although she also meets a few others to benefit from them. Suddenly after twenty five years, the mystery is disclosed.

It is a narrative of a parasitic life, a narrative of determinism – which throws mankind in a void loop of existence where man is granted nothing except by force. In such a society, situations are imposed on man.

Mohebali’s language, like the first volume of the trilogy, “Do not Worry”, is perfectly iconoclastic of female experience. It is a rude, strident, and rebellious language that has long been undercover in Persian literature, especially when it comes to women’s narratives. There are virgin spaces and situations in which one cannot say whether the characters are revolting, disintegrating, or revolting and disintegrating at once. The inevitable disintegration is a result of betrayed and deferred ideals of the previous generation. The tangible urban characters are suffering in a space in between reality and delusion where their concerns and affections only make them suffer more.

‘Will Stand, We’ is a story of all members of the society who is struggling with their isolation, about to fall and drown, their loneliness extended to their freedom and desires. The people we know from her previous volume, ‘Do not Worry’, are here as well: sick people exposed to deception, betrayal, misuse, assault, and narcotics. And the reader is left with a question: where does these people’s sickness originate. How could people who only play with thrown dices win the game? A game that is already doomed and downfallen.

>>Excerpt translated by Farzaneh Doosti
About Mohammad Ahmadpour 6 Articles
A graduate in sociology from the University of Tehran, a book reviewer and literary critic based in Tehran.

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