Photo by Shirin Neshat, director of "Women Without Men."
Azar Nafisi was the first to make me aware of what kind of life the Islamic Republic created for women in Iran. For a couple years, she formed an illegal book club for women, meeting in secret weekly to read and discuss classics of Western literature which had been forbidden. These included novels by Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Any work of art which spoke of a possible world outside of the one being constructed by the Republic was considered a threat to national security and religious sin. And what the Republic was constructing was a particular dream of what Islam should be, imposed upon all without shade or nuance. In this dream, a woman could be beaten or stoned to death on the street for revealing even a wisp of hair from her head scarf. On the other hand, the colors of her scarf could be seen as a symbol of Western decadence and a plot to bring down Persian culture. All gestures, even the most private (including dreams), were interpreted in political terms, and few women could feel at home in their own skin, whether a devout Muslim in her chador, or an agnostic without one.
In one of the surreal twists that history is so fond of, the exact opposite had previously been true: the 20th century Pahlavi ruler Reza Shah banned the chador and all hijab in 1936, as incompatible with his modernizing ambitions. Women could be persecuted and arrested for wearing a chador and head scarf. They prejudiced their chances of advancement in work and society, and women could be refused from restaurants, hotels, and universities for wearing them. Many refused to leave the house in fear of being assaulted by Reza Shah's police. This policy outraged Shi’a clerics, and ordinary men and women, to whom "appearing in public without their cover was tantamount to nakedness." For many, a chador and headscarf was an expression of religious freedom and a protest against losing their culture to Westernization. It would be remiss to assume that religious law and the chador are simply oppressive from our particular cultural vantage point in the West. The Islamic Revolution was, after all, a revolution. People fought for it, and for good reason.
But in Azar’s memoirs of her underground literature club (“Reading Lolita In Tehran”), she vivdly captures a central problem with both sides of this history: the complications that emerge when religion, politics, and imagination collide, especially when any combination of them attempts to represent all people in a community. It’s no wonder that the women in Azar’s literature group formed a special bond with Nabokov’s novels. “Take Lolita,” Azar wrote, “This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl...Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is NOT the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man, but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another. We don’t know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her.” The Islamic Republic was obviously right to fear the power of literature, through which Azar and her reading companions could see their own lives reflected back to them with such profound clarity. How fitting that Nabokov once said the “first little throb of Lolita” went through him around 1939 when an ape in the Jardin des Plantes of Paris produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal, after months of coaxing by a scientist: the sketch showed the bars of the creature’s cage.
In a remarkable Iranian film “The Apple” (made by Samira Makhmalbaf in 1998 when she was only 17 years old!), a man keeps his daughters confined at home for the first 11 years of their life to keep them “pure,” which effectively makes them quasi-retarded. Remarkably, the girls and their father are all playing themselves in the film; Samira had read about them in a newspaper and convinced them to let her make a film about them, starring them, which she began shooting only four days later. It’s not exactly documentary or fiction; like a lot of Iranian cinema, it involves people playing themselves in a movie about themselves, as the events in the movie unfold in their real lives. In other words, cinema is used as a kind of mirror to see just how malleable reality can be. At one point, Samira has the girls lock their father behind the same gate which has formed the border of their world since birth, and hand him a saw from the other side, while a welfare worker tells him he’ll get his daughters back if he can manually saw himself free from his own prison. Somehow the gesture does not come off as revenge, but as a radical experiment in empathy. While I don’t know what has become of the father, I do know that one of the girls, after seeing her life reflected through the film, decided to leave her father’s house and go to school. She is now working toward becoming a filmmaker herself.
Interestingly, the real force keeping the girls in captivity was their mother who, somehow appropriately, is blind. I can’t help but wonder if, in this film already resonant with so much symbolic commentary on Iranian society, Samira had in mind that the chief film censor in Iran, up until 1994, was also blind. An assistant would try to communicate what was happening on the screen, so that he could dictate what should not be seen. After 1994, this censor became the head of the new television channel, where he demanded that scriptwriters submit their scripts on audiotape. Writing about him in her book, Azar observes that “more interesting, however, is the fact that his successor, who was not blind - not physically, that is - nonetheless followed the same system.”
Azar’s underground literature group “was shaped within this context,” she reflected, “in an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor for a few hours each week.” There, no matter how repressive the state became, they could create their own “little pockets of freedom” where they “took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self.” They could detach from the waltz with their jailers which the prisoner in their favorite novel (Nabokov’s “Invitation To A Beheading”) was forced to do [see footnote for more on “Invitation To A Beheading”].
At Hibbleton Gallery’s “Introduction To Iranian Cinema” series, we devoted one full night to films about women in Iran. Each shows women in different spaces (a movie theater, a car with a variety of passengers, and a sports game) where they may feel more or less able to be fully themselves. We followed this up with several nights of films made by Iranian women. As Azar says, quoting Humbert from “Lolita”: “I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won’t really exist if you don’t.”
FOOTNOTE: Azar explains that the women of her underground literature group were instinctively drawn to Nabokov’s “mistrust of what we call everyday reality, an acute sense of that reality’s fickleness and frailty.” A favorite novel amongst the group (and coincidentally one of mine as well) was Nabokov’s “Invitation To A Beheading,” which begins with the announcement that its fragile hero, Cincinnatus C., has been sentenced to death for the crime of “gnostic turpitude” (an imaginary crime that defies definition): in a place where all citizens are required to be transparent, he is opaque. His cell is decorated like a third rate hotel with instructions on the wall, such as “A prisoner’s meekness is a prison’s pride.” The moon from the window is fake; so is the spider in the corner, which, according to convention, must become the prisoner’s faithful companion. The director of the jail, the jailer and the defense lawyer are all the same man, and keep changing places. The executioner is first introduced to the prisoner as a fellow prisoner under another name. The executioner and the condemned man must learn to love each other and cooperate in the act of execution, which will be celebrated in a gaudy feast.
The principal characteristic of this world is its arbitrariness; the condemned man’s only privilege is to know the time of his death - but the executioners keep even this from him, turning every day into a day of execution. This reflected, perhaps too intimately, a literal reality Azar knew. Her own father, the mayor of Tehran, was imprisoned for receiving honors from the French government for his poetry. For this, he was kept in a “temporary” jail - in the jail’s library, adjacent to the morgue, where he was alternately told that he would be killed or set free almost at once, for four years. He was eventually exonerated of all charges except one: insubordination. “Much later,” Azar remembers, “when I read a sentence by Nabokov - ‘curiosity is insubordination in its purest form” - the verdict against my father came to my mind.” Rule number six, written on the wall of Cincinnatus C.’s cell, says: “It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape.”
Cincinnatus C. is continually invited by his jailer to dance a waltz together. “The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets,” says Azar, “is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.” But when Cincinnatus lays his head on the scaffold for his execution, he begins to repeat the magic mantra: “by myself.” Deciding to ignore the executioner’s count down, he asks himself “why am I here? Why am I lying like this?” And having asked himself these simple questions, he answers them by getting up and looking around. He sees that: “The spectators were quite transparent, and quite useless, and they all kept surging and moving away - only the back rows, being painted rows, remained in place...the last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl, carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms...and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.”
