Jason Elliot Interview

this article appeared in Wexas Traveller magazine summer 2006

When Jason Elliot decided to write his new book on Iran, he had no idea how it was going to turn out: ‘I didn’t know what I would write about. Not at all,’ he laughs. The result of five years of work and extensive travelling, Mirrors of the Unseen, Journeys in Iran, is an ambitious combination of travelogue and examination of the soul of Persian art which, along the way, illuminates the history, literature, religion and nature of modern life in this little-understood country.

After his first book, An Unexpected Light, Travels in Afghanistan, Elliot confesses that ‘there was a certain logic’ to continuing on to neighbouring Iran. ‘Also, there hasn’t been a first hand account of travel in the country for a long time’ he points out. ‘There’s been very little by way of personal encounters with this culture. And at first I didn’t know if it was possible. But when I went there I was surprised to be left to my own devices. I didn’t expect travelling there to be so easy – it was one of the many misconceptions I had.’

The ease of travel shaped his journey: ‘I had to completely rethink my ideas about the book. I had imagined Iran would be a slightly less wild version of Afghanistan but it’s a completely different culture, the manners and aspirations of people are completely different.’ These considerations influenced the way he actually wrote the book. ‘I went in with a rather archaic vision which gradually had to be undone and I tried to reflect that in the book, to share this process of having to rethink.’

In the course of his travels the answer began to present itself: ‘I was rather shocked by how modern Iran was, but it gave me the liberty to write about more abstract things, to make an intellectual journey into the structure of this culture and some of the things that underpin it.’

Elliot settled his theme on art, although the book has such a wide scope that to categorise it would be to do his achievement an injustice. As he tries to explain: ‘I kept coming back to this theme of art, which is not the same as our idea of art, so I had to go into the definition of what art might mean and then I found it has resonances in all the branches of the arts which here in the West we divide up. In Iran this divorce has not happened, so music and poetry and calligraphy and the visual arts and architecture are linked much more tangibly than they are here…’

In the process of communicating his discoveries ‘there is a certain amount of artifice – imagine you are writing a novel, you already know the end of the novel so in a sense you are concealing as you write. And that’s difficult to do. Descriptions sometimes draw on more than one visit and writing about it is like taking the average. There’s a sort of false continuity though I tried to tell the story honestly.’

And finally, it was his enthusiasm for the culture and art of Iran that drove him on. ‘This long love affair with beauty, it goes back to the beginning of time; in Iran you can’t escape it. All the great periods of Persian art are simply exceptional and you can’t go to Iran without becoming hypnotised.

‘The book provides a window into this world and I want to encourage people to look through that window.’

© Kamin Mohammadi