The following four texts are selected from an on-going archive we have been developing since 2016. The texts are written description of scenes of opium smoking in early modern to contemporary Iranian fictions. Each text is a third-person account abstracted from the original smoking scene. Reading them together one follows the passage of smoke that runs through different fictional moments in Iran’s literary history of the last several decades. The smoke is what binds a multitude of narrative timelines to the lung as an organ deposited with different residues of histories, events and encounters. This archive aims to capture the ‘longue durée’ of opium inhalation.
