Truth and history. There’s the adage that says winners write the history books. It’s obvious that this follows: the winner controls or tries to control what is known. Fabrication, distortion, and lacunae are at the same time tools of control and outcomes of the power the winners yield. Sometimes one will try to see through the mirage or be able to see down into the dark troughs between the waves’ crests. Is seeing possible? Truth is powerful. Power wants to be truth. In subjecting us, perhaps power is a kind of truth. True experiences of violence, repression, oppression.
The last few sentences might be full of clichés, but what’s not a cliché is the way that Babak Lakghomi writes about power. In a letter included with the galleys of his second book, South, Lakghomi writes, “I was thinking about truth, its relationship to history, and the possibility of accessing what is real in the presence of censorship and rival narratives. During the same period, I observed the political events under a totalitarian government in my home country of Iran, and I was taken by the parallels between what was going on there and in the United States.”
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