Nava Ebrahimi

Literary struggle with origins and identity

In her new essay "Who I would have become if everything had turned out differently", Graz-based author Nava Ebrahimi explores the significance of her origins - for her identity and her writing.

You can't escape your origins. The author Nava Ebrahimi, who has lived in Graz for many years now, was born in Iran and migrated to Germany with her parents at the age of three, realized this as early as elementary school: it was her religion teacher who drew conclusions about her origins and made her a token Muslim - wrongly, because: "As a communist, my father had no interest in religion, and my mother, a monarchist and supporter of the overthrown Shah, saw Islam as the cause of all evil," recalls Ebrahimi in the fall of 2023 in her lecture "On the Art of Writing" at the Graz Literaturhaus, which has now also been published as a book under the title "Who I would have become if everything had turned out completely differently".

"Something was tense inside me"
Perhaps this fundamental misunderstanding is also the reason why Ebrahimi felt drawn to literature and writing at an early age: "I felt something tense inside me that wasn't tense in my friends, and it wanted to be noticed, named, described."

Nava Ebrahimi(Bild: Clara Wildberger)

And so began a career as a writer - initially just for herself, later as a journalist and ultimately also as a writer. But with her first manuscript in hand, Ebrahimi was once again caught up in her origins: "And so a major literary publisher turned me down, saying that they had just bought another German-Iranian. There can only be one," she writes.

"There can only be one"
Success came anyway - albeit in a roundabout way: Her first novel "Sixteen Words" was honored as best debut at the 2017 Austrian Book Prize, and in 2021 she received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. Time and again, Ebrahimi's texts focus on characters who ultimately struggle with their origins and are in search of a possible essence of their being that is independent of origin, socialization and political systems.

Nava Ebrahimi, "Wer ich geworden wäre, wenn alles ganz anders gekommen wäre" (Droschl Verlag, 96 pages, 15 euros).(Bild: Droschl Verlag)

And this reflects not least a struggle of the author herself, which she processes in literature, as she explains in her very readable essay: "For me, writing is possibly an attempt to find out who I actually am via the detour of fictional characters. How far can I go with my imagination, how far does my empathy extend, who can I still empathize with and who can I no longer empathize with?"

The result is an essay that goes far beyond Ebrahimi's individual story and tells of a struggle with identity that is familiar to everyone who does not fit into the norm where they live.