The Last Migration

by Vincent Cronin

This is a book so out of the common run that it defies comparison. All that I can say of it is that it is tragic and beautiful, and obviously authentic in every finely drawn detail of its background, like a Persian miniature on ivory.

It is a Failure Story on the epic scale, though the enemy that destroys Ghazan, the Ilkhan, or hereditary leader of a tribe of 100,000 Falqanis, is 'progress', as enforced by the corrupt politicians of Teheran at the insistence of dollar-happy foreign missions, determined to enforce settlement, if need be at the point of a sword, upon those who have been nomads for seven centuries.

The story, though its undertones are intensely moving, is all the more effective for being told passionlessly, and the sense of the thin, sunny air of the mountains, set above the cypress-lined valleys that are the very essence of the Persia I remember, is here captured with a magical skill and power.

- Cedric Salter in the Broadsheet. From the World Books edition flyleaf.

Genres: Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Vincent Archibald Patrick Cronin FRSL (24 May 1924 – 25 January 2011) was a British historical, cultural, and biographical writer, best known for his biographies of Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, and Napoleon, as well as for his books on the Renaissance.

Cronin was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, to Scottish doctor and novelist, A. J. Cronin, and May Gibson, but moved to London at the age of two. He was educated at Ampleforth College, Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and Trinity College, Oxford, from which he graduated with honours in 1947, earning a degree in Literae Humaniores. During the Second World War, he served as a lieutenant in the British Army.

In 1949, he married Chantal de Rolland, and they had five children. The Cronins were long-time residents of London, Marbella, and Dragey, in Avranches, Normandy, where they lived at the Manoir de Brion.

Cronin was a recipient of the Richard Hillary Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award (1955), and the Rockefeller Foundation Award (1958). He also contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, was the first General Editor of the Companion Guides series, and was on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.

He died at his home in Marbella on 25 January 2011.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent...

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Persians distinguish between afsaneh, which means story, tarikh, meaning history; and dastan, lying somewhere between these two: the form in which imagination casts near-factual history - almost myth, but without the English word's implication of falsity. Much of the Persian past is preserved as dastan[...]

Many of the incidents recounted of Bahram Gur and against his enemies did not happen exactly as they are told, but they are not thereby considered false - at least in Persia, for they are held to embody particular situations more effectively than those which did happen, just as of two ballets made to a single piece of music, one by the composer, the other by a choreographer, that of the choreographer may more faithfully express the music.

A form which Persians apply for choice to their own past seemed to me not inappropriate to a book about Persians in the present day. I have adopted it, and recast the information obtained from Rohim and his tribesmen, such as the deeds of Bahram Gur have been recast by Persians themselves. The result follows: a single year from Falqani annals.
- Vincent Cronin, The Last Migration (1957), 18

I read a great line in an TTRPG sourcebook recently in which the author, while describing some fantastical Amazonian faction, suddenly sniggers at the lore he has just constructed by mischeviously casting doubt on the authority of his textual construction of these tropes:

Who says this? The Amazons. But then: they will say anything. To you, anyway. I know because you can read this and I wrote it and I wrote it in a language of cities and so if you can read it you are not one of them. So they will lie to you. or tell you the truth. Whichever is more likely to frighten you away. (Zak Smith, Frostbitten and Mutilated, 2018, 17)

The joke is funny, but it's also alludes to a common postmodernist critique of literary representations of pastoral, nomadic, or otherwise stateless/state-resistant life. Lest we forget, writing was probably invented for the purposes of accounting - the earliest surviving records of proto-cuniform from 5500 years ago are all numerical lists. How much grain was stored; what debts were owed; what transactions could be confirmed via an audit trail so strong that they survived long past the very civilizations that carved them. For this, and a few other reasons, state societies and stateless communities have always had a certain hostility to one another. Sam Kriss memorably describes the division between pastoralists and farmers as "the longest war in human history" since:

Shepherds and tillers can’t share the same land. Farmers slice it up, section it off, and then intensively scour their sustenance out of their small patch of earth. Pastoralism is low-intensity, but the spaces it requires are vast. Acres and acres to move around in, winter pastures in the lowlands, summer meadows in the hills. The history of the world is the history of farmers inching into the steppeland, building their terraces, digging their irrigation canals, nibbling away at the great plains, dividing them into units of private property with paperwork attached—and then pastoralists pouring in on horseback to tear down the fences, churn up the fields, raze the towns, and slaughter every single farmer they find. (Sam Kriss, 'What is the world's oldest hatred?')

Settled societies tend to regard nomads with either horror or pity; 'those savages cannot read, they cannot be reasoned with' sometimes giving way to 'those savages cannot read; we must save them from their ignorance.' But humanity has had a lot of history to test out different methods of social organisation. Nomadic, stateless communites in the modern world aren't some atavistic throwback to human primitivism that exists as some historical anomaly in the modern world: they are part of the modern world. Communities make choices. Some choose not to submit to states, if they can help it. Or if not that, then to at least to negotiate some autonomy that keeps settled rulers at a safer distance. If James C. Scott's analysis is to be believed; some even go so far as to deliberately refuse to develop literacy, having acquired a generational awareness that to do so is the first step on the path to becoming ensnared by a state that wants to make their lives legible for the purposes of controlling their land, their labour, and their taxes.

Liberalism, because of the teleological, humanist, universalist ideology that underpins it, can never see it that way. Proponents of the liberal dream will point to the poverty, the strangehold of religious irrationalism, and the claustrophobic patriarchal domination of women that frequently characterises nomadic societies as evidence for their unsuitability as a method of human living. For that reason, the rise of modernist ideologies (be them capitalist or socialist) frequently sought to suppress and settle nomadic populations around the world, for their own good of course, and would kill them if they resisted, which was coincidentally for their own good as well. Strange how these things happen.

The classic tension in telling stories about these conflicts is that literacy itself was developed as a tool for the winning side. You might think you're being empathetic in writing a story about stateless people, but the very medium you use to translate their experiences may very well be antithetical to the very phenomenology of their culture. But if you don't tell it, and the farmers win, it hardly feels sympathetic to have remained silent about their precarious reality. As something of a lifelong humanist I've always been skeptical about this argument, suspicious about the way it seems to create barriers between inter-cultural understanding through a posture of performative, sensitive hesitancy, but this would be a short review if I rest on that feeling and I think this book is peculiar enough to merit its attempt at intercultural bridging more seriously.

Vincent Cronin's conservative leanings as a historian, which make him emphasise the role of great men rather than movements, placed him in an interesting position for this question. A conservative can almost always muster up more unambiguous venom for the trajectories of liberal statebuilding than even the most ardent radical leftist can, since the latter are always pricked by liberalism's ability to appeal to their concern for the wellbeing of the impoverished and the marginalised. A reactionary with a sense of sympathy who nevertheless completely believes in the glory of rank, in lineage, in hierarchy, is not quite so hamstrung. The aristocratic bent of the nomadic populations around the Zagros mountains, particularly with the authoritarian charismatic rule of their individual leaders, offers a strong hook for him to romanticise. These were populations that gained immense influence in Persian politics by conglomerating into large tribal confederations to exploit the weakness of the central government during the Qajar period, but Cronin focuses on the psychological angst of its leader, not the wider currents across the confederation.

According to the preface, Cronin claims that he went to Iran during the Shah's white revolution, interested in learning more about the heavily underresearched nomadic tribes before they were settled and wiped out forever. After wrangling with the byzantine bureaucractic misdirections that I can personally confirm are still very much a reality to any traveller venturing there, he managed to interview various members "of a people whom I shall call the Falquani" (9), but who were almost certainly the Qashqai, to hear their account of how the Shah had forcibly settled their population. Since nomadic life is not one that produces a lot of documents, and the atrocities committed by the Shah's troops weren't the kind that get recorded in state archives, that left Cronin in the deeply strange and fortunate position of being able to produce a coherent, sympathetic, and potentially invaluable record of this soon-to-be lost moment in world history.

Cronin... didn't really do that. Instead he wrote what might be called a non-fiction novel, centering on the Qashqai's ilkhan, who he calls Ghazan, which he claims is informed by what he was told by the man's followers, but which is necessarily spiced with his own imaginative recreations that are blended silently alongside the inventions of his Qashqai informants.

The result is... strange. As a novel, it's a pretty good book. The central conflict, between the struggling nomadic Falqani and the oppressive forces of the Shah's modernisation programme, makes for an excellent tale. The prose is lovely, if a bit tiresomely Richard Francis Burton-esque in places. The central character (one hesitates to go along with the 'biographical' claim of the blurb) is compelling, and I appreciated how the novel completely eschews any action for 150 pages to just dramatise Ghazan's existential crisis over what system of knowledge he should use to make the decision about whether he submits or resists the government's plans to forcibly settle his people. It makes for intelligent, culturally-driven drama that allows the reader to be taken on a whistlestop tour of the various overlocking layers of history, religion, philosophy, geography, inter-tribal bonds, realpolitik and cultural taboos that structure the Qashqai way of life and place constraints on its leader, who is himself torn between his own idealisation of nomadic life and his rationalist education abroad in Europe that leaves him excruciatingly aware of the alternatives.

As a novel, it also has some wonderful scenes - the chapter where a group of development specialists visit the tribe and are horrified by their way of life is the highlight of the book. Ghazan's diplomatically inflappable patience with the technocrats' outrage powerfully throws into relief the naivity of top-down developmental programmes by illustrating their mutually alien conceptions of the good life:

"Rank superstition" [the teacher] exclaimed. "In my country every adult here would be put in prison."

Ghazan decided to treat this lightly. "I have heard that a man may acquire great wisdom in prison."

"Not to be educated - to be punished."

"Why?"

"For neglecting their children."

"But they do not neglect them. They love them. And teach them, too. What did you parents teach you?" he asked [a nearby] cameleer.

The answer came slowly with a lift of pride.

"They taught me to ride, to shoot and to speak the truth. They taught me the history of the old kings in Abolqasem Ferdowsi's poetry, the battles we have won, the famines and droughts we have suffered. They taught me the ninety-nine names of God. they taught me my prayers and much poetry."

"Poetry! What use is that to a man like you?"

The bronze face broke in a smile.

"Without poetry how should I have won my wife?"

The conversation was taking unscientific lines.

"Did you learn no geography, no mathematics, no physics? How far away is Tehran?"

After some thought, Mansur replied, "I am an ignorant man. Certainly it lies very far. But since I do not wish to make the journey, is there need to reckon the day's provisions?"

The teacher entered this in his notebook. (61-62)

That said, Cronin makes an effort to not completely idealise the tribes. There are a few moments were the narrative voice casts Ghazan's superstitions, his indecisiveness, or even his simple aversion to social transformation with a more ironic slant:

The expert on hygene [was] less indignant than excited at the extraordinary things he had seen. his brow gleamed with sweat, and he brandished an atomizer. "Milking sheep from behind!" he cried. "By all the laws of medical hygiene there should not be a single Falquani alive."

"A little dirt spices the milk," said Ghazan lightly." (63)

But how is it as a history?

To get the obvious out of the way, yes, this is orientalism. But that label is flat and in many ways reductive. There's orientalism and there's Orientalism. One kind is the weird, Othering literary mode that reduces foreign provinces on an author's imperial periphery into a phasmagoric projection of weird, violent, psycho-sexual fantasies for escapist wish-fulfilment within a constructed barbaric playground. But then there's the other kind of Orientalism: an analytical mode that assumes that humans are diverse and that they perceive and experience their culture through frameworks that are not immediately obvious to outside observers. This Oriental gaze is one that wishes to identify and map out a way to see the world through those perspectives, whether for nefarious administrative purposes, or else from a legitimate curiosity about other people and a sincere humility about the inevitable boundaries of one's own intuition and empathy across experiential divides.

The thing is, humans are too playful to maintain the piousness of that second, less problematic mode permanently. The temptation to oscillate into the first form is always there, and I can't say Cronin really dodges this accusation with complete success. Cronin definitely did his research, and he never treats the nomadic tribal worldview with anything less than complete seriousness, but there are still weird features that stick out awkwardly from the text. There's the flatly airy, affectedly pseudo-poetic prose-style, which necessarily situates every scene in a heightened register of psycho-geographic Otherness. There is the elevated register of speech which reduces every character who isn't Ghazan into a stock archetype (the shamelessly corrupt soldier, the gallant fool with a head full of stories, the capriciously wise sheltered young bride, the stubborn warmongering uncle, etc etc). There are the amusing, but inescapably artificial scenes of political intrigue that shift the entire tone of the book into Kafkaesque comedy as Ghazan enters Tehran and gets caught up in bizarre pseudo-revolutionary meetings and sneaks his way into elite dinner parties to meet government ministers face to face. Then again, Cronin himself admits that when he went to Tehran to verify those episodes, "The pattern changed. Epic began to run a three-legged race with the ludicrous." (17)

It never quite adds up, but it never completely falls apart either. Cronin admits that his book is not history, but also claims that it is not fiction, and for such a rare moment to record a suppressed episode of ethnic cleansing, it feels annoying that he cannot commit to one or the other in a more orthodox manner. What is one to make of the book? It's too sensitive and maybe even pedantic to be entertainment, but too fickle to be factual. While looking for information about the book, I found one academic article on the political organisation of nomad societies which cited Cronin as an unproblematic source, and a contemporary publication notice that a little too-straightforwardly described it as a "True story of the last migration of one nomadic tribe of Iran." But the book seems to have received little attention beyond this - even his obituary skips right over it without mention.

I spent this whole book wondering how much I could believe it. That question bugged and vexed me, since there were times when I half-wondered if Cronin had ever been to Iran at all, and that the prologue wasn't one of those elaborate unverifiable literary pranks that Orientalist authors were always pulling back in the day. But there are details here that I don't think someone would make up, or at least, they wouldn't make them up unless they were already very well-informed about how these things tend to work. Everything he writes about the behaviour of the Shah's government and his troops corresponds closely to Ryszard Kapuściński's masterfully impressionistic (and similarly unverifiable) sketches in Shah of Shahs in a way that unexpectedly makes me more comfortable with both of their indeterminate factualities. Meanwhile, an unnerving offhand reference to the Fada'iyan-e Islam in one chapter, published 21 years before revolutionary Islam was brought onto the world stage by Khomeni's unexpected victory, certainly sent a frisson of surprise through me. Even Fred Halliday famously, and embarassingly, overlooked the radical religious undercurrents about to explode in his Iran: Dictatorship and Development, published just before the Revolution, but Cronin caught a glimpse of the green flash and made a place for it in his landscape.

As a way of writing about nomadic culture for a settled readership, I have to conclude that the book's successes outweigh its failures. Cronin writes in the language of cities. Whether or not he really cleaved to the sources he claims as provenance, at the very least he learned to lie, or tell the truth. Whatever connects us, however tenuously, with what was lost. The tribes are a tourist attraction now. The government nationalised their land and strictly controls the remaining migrations. There are package tours that let you sit in on a tribal hut, and get a photo of the locals leading you around on a camel's back.

Because of course the farmers won. They had the tanks. They had the manpower. And they had the contempt, the arrogance, the sadism, and the paranoia necessary to use them.