Narrating the Silenced: The 1953 Coup and Post Colonial Storytelling in Marjan Kamali's The Stationary Shop

Abstract

This paper examines Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop as a postcolonial narrative that recovers the silenced voices surrounding the 1953 Iranian coup and its long-term emotional, historical, and political reverberations. By centering Iranian subjectivities and the intimate consequences of political rupture on ordinary lives, the novel challenges Orientalist frameworks that have shaped Western interpretations of Iran and its history. Through an analysis of narrative silences, fragmented communication, and the symbolism of destroyed spaces—such as the stationery shop—this study argues that Kamali reconstructs erased histories and foregrounds the experiences of those rendered subaltern by geopolitical power structures. The paper further explores how diaspora, reflective nostalgia, and intergenerational trauma shape Roya’s identity formation and narrative agency. Employing a qualitative textual analysis grounded in postcolonial, trauma, and memory studies, this research demonstrates how The Stationery Shop functions as a literary site of resistance, reclaiming suppressed memories and foregrounding the emotional truths embedded within displaced lives.