This paper asks how the management of death enabled the British in Alexandria to negotiate an everyday role as both local residents and a foreign community after the 1882 occupation. It demonstrates how regulations surrounding the bureaucracy of death helped delineate boundaries of governance and belonging immediately following the British occupation of Egypt. Using the records of postmortems performed on British subjects from 1882-1914, my paper shows that the postmortem process simultaneously included the British community under Egyptian governmental control while excluding it within a separate, specifically British domain. Moreover, by focusing on the management of death, I challenge historiographic understandings of the British occupation and subsequent decades as a time of rupture in Egypt. Instead, I uncover the continuity of Egyptian government encroachment on and control of the lives (and deaths) of all residents of Egypt, including the British, even after the 1882 occupation. The bureaucracy of death served as a luminal space through which the living population could demonstrate loyalty and belonging. Although the colonial ruling community, British court records show that British subjects included a large, mostly poor Maltese community as well as Britons from all social classes. Rather than rely on Egyptian governmental surgeons, the British community – both before and after the 1882 British occupation – performed its own autopsies and issued its own death certificates. While the British consular surgeon reported to the British consulate, he also reported to the Egyptian national and Alexandria municipal governments. Through the consular surgeon, the British community both fulfilled the public health requirements of the Egyptian government while accounting for and processing their dead in specific communal space. I argue that these processes and choices were not self-evident. The handling of the post mortem was of the utmost importance, not only in terms of the medical or criminal knowledge gleaned from the corpse, but also due to the living left behind. Having the postmortem handled by members of one’s community was a guarantee that the community would continue to provide for its members, both in the case of helping to bury one’s loved ones and in burying oneself. At the same time, the post mortems were often at the request of and always under the regulation of the Egyptian government, ensuring that the population at large, whether considered foreign or local, fell under the same rules and regulations in the state’s monitoring, processing, documenting and preparation of its dead.

The garden is an ancient and revered trope in Persian storytelling, simultaneously a literary and religious convention, celebrated in Iranian letters even before the advent of Islam and given renewed signification in the Islamic identification of paradise as a lush garden populated by h?ri and gh?lm?n (lovely girls and prepubescent boys, both of whom are eroticized in Islamo-Persian poetry). The beloved, too, is often associated with the garden—a place of lushness and release for the male poet or writer. In the imagination of the Sufi poet, the garden is the site of union with the divine beloved, God. It is set up in opposition to the world outside the garden, where nature vanquishes man; in the garden, the situation is reversed: here, nature is subdued by man. The remaking of the garden in postrevolutionary Iranian fiction like Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men and Tuba and the Meaning of Night develops a line of feminist argumentation begun in the poetry of For?gh Farrokhz?d. Farrokhzad’s transformative use of the garden in the iconoclastic poems “Another Birth” and “Triumph of the Garden” make the garden a site of non-hierarchical, mutual pleasure and of feminine regeneration, not exploitation. For Farrokhz?d as for Parsipur, the garden remains a place outside of society, as in the classical tradition, but they develop this theme differently: Farrokhzad by proposing it as a place of radical equality between the sexes; Parsipur by positing it as a homosocial, feminine space, but at the same time, a place where women abused by the conventions of an oppressive patriarchal tradition are literally and metaphorically buried—making the garden simultaneously a graveyard. Though not unproblematic, Foucault’s reading of the garden helps us see how in Iranian postrevolutionary fiction, then, literary space itself functions as a kind of heterotopia—a mirror space that is nowhere and everywhere at once.

In Bahman Farmanara’s Smell of Camphor, Scent of Jasmine, the autobiographical protagonist (Bahaman) is making a documentary about funerary rites. Obsessed with his own mortality, and mourning his wife's death, Bahman travels to possible locations. The film and his journey are divided into three parts: “A Bad Day,” “Burial Ceremony,” and “Rebirth.” Each part is introduced by a diegetic fade-to-back as Bahman's train enters a tunnel. The film deals with death as a threshold (like the tunnel), and plays visually and symbolically with interiors and exteriors, here and there. As a threshold, death becomes a metaphor for other categories: art as a way of making sense of death and the nation as a state of being. An analysis of Farmanara’s other films, A Little Kiss (2006) and Shazdeh Ehtejab (1974), reveals similar concerns. Shazdeh Ehtejab, an adaptation of Houshang Golshiri’s novel, plays with thresholds between the photographic image and reality, and A Little Kiss deals with thresholds between fiction and reality. Moreover, in A Little Kiss, death is personified, as in Zoroastrian tradition, as a beautiful woman offering the dying man “a little kiss.” While it seems that I use the term “threshold” in a strictly formalist way, I want to argue that this understanding of the poetics of death in Farmanara’s work can lead to a broader understanding of the poetics and politics of death imagery in Iranian literature as a whole. In his Poetics of Cinema, David Bordwell reminds us of the important work of the Russian formalists. While Bordwell’s work is somewhat polemical, in his challenge to ideological readings, his formal analysis can, in fact, bring us back to a richer understanding of the politics of cinema and literature. Because of the importance of mourning and burial ceremonies in both Iran’s Shi’ite and Zoroastrian traditions, the poetics of death in literature and film resonates with these broader ceremonies and dramatic expressions of death in the wider culture. In fact, Farmanara’s films extend and revise earlier uses of the image in works by Sadegh Hedayat, Simin Daneshvar, Gholam Hossein Sa’di, Houshang Golshiri, and other writers and filmmakers. In many of these works, death is not a closure or an ending, but a threshold rife with possibilities for rebirth and transformation. In Farmanara’s work, especially A Little Kiss, death and illness even mark national identity and the condition of exile.