Off
the Grid: Reading Iranian Memoirs in Our Time of Total War
Negar Mottahedeh
(Negar Mottahedeh
teaches in the Program in Literature at Duke University.)
September 2004
Air-conditioned transportation
in Tehran is notoriously difficult to find. For pampered visitors
such as the cultural anthropologists and documentary filmmakers
from New York and Los Angeles who seem to converge on the Iranian
capital every summer, a cool taxi ride to the northern parts of
town recalls something of the charmed life they left behind in
the United States, a life some refer to offhandedly as "the
grid."
Being on the grid,
it seems, is something akin to having a non-Iranian passport or
a green card, multiple credit cards loaded with debt, a laptop
with a 24-hour DSL connection, satellite television in an air-filtered
apartment, impeccably pedicured feet in open-toe sandals, a single
Gauloise cigarette ashing in a saucer next to that daily injection
of coffee and money earned from a steady job. This is not to say
that some of these components of the grid are not available in
Tehran. They are. Apartment complexes in the northern parts of
town, like Shahrak-e Qarb, also provide residents with hilly,
green outdoor spaces where a woman can walk her dog without the
government-prescribed full body covering and headscarf. Such private
complexes come with in-house supermarkets, boxed meals delivered
to your door and a doorman who will call a taxi and announce visitors
just as he might at a one-bedroom pad in New York. In Tehran,
all this comes to about $500 a month.
In our time of total
war, however, Tehran visitors' moniker for the good life also
evokes the frightening world of intelligence gathering networks
and terrorists recently fictionalized in the TNT miniseries The
Grid. In this terrifying world, some of those visitors, wittingly
or no, have acted to embed the particulars of Iranian cultural
and social life -- particularly those related to Iranian women
-- into visions for Iran's future that are generated in a grid
entirely different from their matrix of material comforts.
It cannot be coincidental that the memoirs by Iranian female authors
now living in the West, such as those of Firoozeh Dumas, Marjaneh
Satrapi and Azar Nafisi, have found such phenomenal commercial
success at a time when Washington hawks would like these authors'
country of birth to be the next battleground in the total war
of the twenty-first century.
FREEDOM
AT WHAT COST
It is
entry into the grid -- in both of the above senses of the term
-- that best
describes Firoozeh Dumas's memoir, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir
of Growing Up Iranian in America. Upon her family's arrival
in America in 1972, the young Firoozeh and her mother discover
that Firoozeh's father, an engineer who had studied in the US
some years earlier, has no useful knowledge of the English language
except for the vocabulary he had needed to read pre-World War
II textbooks. Her mother eventually teaches herself how to ask
about the prices of everyday necessities and kitchen appliances
by watching The Price Is Right on television.
Fifteen times, Dumas
counts, the family visits Disneyland, but as is typical of Iranian
cultural patterns, these outings were enjoyed in a tribal fashion.
On several occasions, her father brings along his Iranian colleagues
and their families, sometimes six families in all. The grid is,
within months of her family's arrival, being adapted to old habits
of a life lived elsewhere. The family celebrates Thanksgiving
with turkey and stuffing, but the pumpkin pie is served with Persian
ice cream made with "chunks of cream, pistachios and aromatic
cardamom." Dumas's recollections of Thanksgiving dessert
prompt this insight into world politics: "I believe peace
in the Middle East could be achieved if the various leaders held
their discussions in front of a giant bowl of Persian ice cream,
each leader with his own silver spoon. Political differences would
melt with every mouthful." (75) Sensuality and utopian hope
do not alleviate the sophomoric imagery in this vision of change:
what fools, what diplomatic failures, the reader must imagine
the political leaders of this region to be!
Dumas's family gives
thanks around the holiday dinner table for their new life in a
free country where one can pursue one's hopes and dreams -- even
if one is female. But while, for Dumas, freedom certainly entails
such essential rights as the right to vote, it "also refers
to the abundance of samples available throughout this great land."
True to her nave view of Middle East diplomacy, she contrasts
this abundance with the environment she left behind in Iran. "Here,
a person can taste something, not buy, and still have the clerk
wish him a nice day." (75) Few living in the Islamic Republic
today would see the widespread practice of communal hospitality
known as nasri as somehow less free than Dumas's sampling.
For Dumas, it would seem, freedom in America is the endless possibility
of self-indulgence understood without any self-reflection. This
is freedom, yes, but at what cost? Total war? Occupation? Perhaps.
"TODAY IRAQ"
Driving north on the
Sadr freeway in Tehran in the summer of 2004, I came across a
series of images covering the soundproofed walls of the opposite
lane. The first panel from the left was a painted reproduction
of the infamous photograph of the uniformed Pfc. Lynndie England
holding a leash tied to the neck of an Iraqi prisoner who curls
naked in a fetal position on the Abu Ghraib prison floor. This
image sent shock waves around the world, as did the one reproduced
in the second panel, a hooded Iraqi prisoner balancing on a platform
with electrical wires attached to his limbs and genitals.
Such haunting images
of humiliating torture reinforced for many the admonitions of
Col. Mathieu in The Battle of Algiers, the famous film
on guerrilla warfare now reportedly in vogue at the Pentagon.
The colonel's words impressed on the audiences of the early 1960s,
as they do to the global multitude today, that the continued presence
of an imperial military where it is not wanted requires it to
identify sources of populist agitation by any means necessary.
An ordinary citizen's support of the occupation, whether in the
name of liberation or in the name of progress, implies his or
her tacit acceptance of all the repercussions of military force,
including torture.
Passing these reproductions
of domination on the freeway, I was struck by the imprints of
the hand that had transformed their texture from photographs into
painted images. I was also struck by the words that were written
in Farsi to one side of the second panel: "Emrooz Iraq."
"Today Iraq." It is an auspicious caption that almost
reads like an alert on a mobile phone: "This is Iraq today."
The third and fourth panels in the series represented the site
of pilgrimage in Mecca and the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law
of the Prophet Muhammad. A quotation attributed to Imam Ali appeared
across the fourth image. It calls upon the believer to be the
enemy of tyranny and a supporter of the victim of injustice. Following
a gap on the wall, a final panel captured three soldiers on bended
knee surrounded by smoke and fire in combat.
The last heavy combat
Iranian soldiers saw was the vicious eight-year war between Iran
and Iraq, for which Iran sacrificed the majority of its male labor
force, men who would now be in their thirties, forties or early
fifties. Seen from the perspective of that war, the messages communicated
in the fusion of these five panels seemed ambiguous at best. The
images arrived as both the bearers of the latest news -- "Today
Iraq" -- and a prescription for pious living. "Be a
force against evil and a defender of the good." They carried
both a reminder of a crucial duty for the devout and a powerful
picture of military retaliation. They were a broken phrase, an
unfinished visual exhortation to an end open to question.
There is little question,
however, about the messages contained in images of female bodies
in Islamic cultures circulated by the global media. Appearing
in enlarged photos enveloped by small newsprint, unveiled women
in hair salons enjoy a cut or a manicure. Shots of Afghan women
walking the streets of Kabul without a shroud and Iranian women
in tight, thigh-length overcoats and colorful headscarves made
for Barbie on a camping trip decorate the pages of weekly newsmagazines.
These images and their pointed captions speak, on the one hand,
of the fruits of another US-led war effort and "the fall"
of the Taliban regime. They show, on the other hand, a burgeoning
scuffle for change -- change conceived in terms of an imagined
democracy in which women appear in the public sphere, relatively
unfettered. This fantasy of Oriental women's liberation by Western
intervention, though centuries in the making, goes little further
than the printed page. Liberals have called the images of liberated
women's bodies propaganda, though in a time of total war such
as ours, one would not have expected otherwise.
MARKER OF MODERNITY
It is important to
recall, before proceeding, that women's bodies have long been
politically charged symbols within Iran's national history, not
just in its relations with the West. The decision of Reza Shah,
father of the Shah deposed before the Islamic Revolution, to mandate
that Iranian women remove the veil in the 1930s was the culmination
of one lengthy historical process and the beginning of another.
The Shahnama,
a national epic that versifies the history of Iran from its beginnings
until the Muslim conquest, for example, suggests a vital role
played by women. Mahmoud Omidsalar argues that feminine symbols,
indeed female figures, appear throughout this epic to "arbitrate
all significant instances of transfer of power, be they
royal, heroic or magical."[1] Embodied at times in female literary and historical
characters such as Faranak, Barmaya and the goddess Anahita, the
female body stands at the birth of "all new orders"
and reassuringly watches over moments of transitional trauma.
Reading the periodicals
and records of the Iranian constitutional period (1905-1911) for
the parliamentary debates that focused on the nation's responsibility
for the fate of Quchani women and girls captured or sold to the
Turkomans, Afsaneh Najambadi suggests that gender may be considered
a "uniquely structuring category" for the study of similar
transitional moments. Though largely forgotten in subsequent renditions
of events, the debates concerning the "daughters of Quchan"
were pivotal to the consolidation of the Iranian parliament and
for the constitution of Iran's modern identity. Indeed, the term
vatan defined a nation that was imagined as a community
larger than the familial and the immediate and "inscribed...as
a female body."[2]
In the chronicles, memoirs, modernist tracts and Iranian travel
narratives of the nineteenth century onward, the female body as
mother and as beloved became principally the metaphorical and
ultimately the material battleground for the inscription of the
nation. The female body was, in other words, a pivot in Iran's
historical transition to modernity.
Consider the unveiled
body of the Babi poet Tahirih Qurrat al-Ayn (Fatemeh Baraghani),
who appears in the chronicle of the nineteenth-century court historian,
Muhammad Taqi Siphir, Nasikh al-Tavarikh. Siphir
takes pleasure in an exaggerated description of the poet's unveiled
body, adorned, as he describes it, like a peacock of Paradise
beckoning an audience of desiring men to "kiss those lips
of hers which put to shame the ruby of Ramman, and rub their faces
against her breasts, which chagrined the pomegranates of the garden."[3] The unveiled woman poet is represented
in the chronicle as the object-cause of national desire, a desire
that is then condemned by the force of the law in such a way that
the national subject is hailed to destroy it. Reading this and
other nineteenth-century narratives hermeneutically, it is impossible
to pin down what her particular encroachment on the nation is
about. But in the subsequent recollection of the image of this
prototypical Babi in the next eight decades, it is clear that
"the Babi" is indistinguishable from the modern Iranian
subject itself.
Women's associations
founded in the decades after the Constitutional Revolution of
1906 began publishing newspaper and journal articles in which
they addressed unveiling as a symbol of modernity. Later, in the
1930s, Reza Shah's stringent unveiling policies saw veiling as
a marker of national backwardness and a measure of women's social
retardation. The enforcement of new unveiling laws sparked many
debates about women's education, progress and women's role in
the constitution of Iran as a modern nation. The Babi as an unveiled
female body was recovered again and again in the public and private
documents of this era as a threat to the very constitution of
the Iranian nation and, paradoxically, as the marker of its emerging
modernity. What was at stake, it would seem, is the concept of
namus (honor) "which shifted in this period between
the idea of purity of woman ('ismat) and integrity of the
nation."[4]
Until at least the first decade of the twentieth century, "when
women began to claim their space as sisters in the nation,"
both 'ismat and national integrity were subject to male
responsibility and protection.
"THE VEIL!"
"FREEDOM!"
The
generation of largely upper-class, urban, educated female writers
who were born before the establishment of the Islamic Republic
in 1979 are the inheritors of this history. For them, the compulsory
veiling instituted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his clerical
regime became a key means of illustrating the broader social and
political tensions unleashed by the revolution.One
simple panel in the Paris-based Iranian artist and writer Marjaneh
Satrapi's "graphic memoir," Persepolis: The Story
of a Childhood, stands out as a forceful representation of
this moment of transition and the "cultural revolution"
that began to assume its full force right before the Iran-Iraq
war of 1980-1988.
On the left of the
panel, four women, shrouded in black veils, with eyes closed,
open brows and two arms raised in the air, recite the words: "The
veil! The veil! The veil!" On the right, facing them, four
women, eyes wide open, brows slanting downward in anger, raise
their arms to the words, "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!"
Satrapi's caption to this panel reads: "Everywhere in the
streets there were demonstrations for and against the veil."
(5)
None of the brows
on Satrapi's characters are unfurrowed after this point, with
the exception of the panels in which she draws her young schoolmates
playing with the winter hoods they were asked to knit for Iranian
soldiers (97) or again, when she depicts the girls giggling about
the flatulence factor of canned beans sitting on an empty shelf
in a Tehran supermarket during the war. (92) The eyebrows disappear
entirely on the faces of young Marji and her veiled female friends
when they make eye contact with young men in an upscale hamburger
joint called Kansas. (112) Throughout the book, the furrowed brows
of her characters signal tension and uncertain transition. They
are witnesses to strife.
The hejab (Islamic
dress), made mandatory in the new Islamic Republic to counter,
however nominally, the Western cultural impulses associated with
the former Pahlavi regime, and to protect and preserve the purity
of Iranian women, is described in the biographical texts of Satrapi
and Azar Nafisi as "stifling" and "unnatural."
In their works, the Iranian chador (a black, full-length
veil) appears as a new historical marker that would distinguish
the ideological position of "the fundamentalist woman"
from the position of a woman who stands in opposition to the newly
established Islamic regime.
Another panel in Satrapi's
graphic memoir emphasizes the ambivalence many Iranians felt about
the social change that immediately preceded the Iran-Iraq war.
Indoors, behind a curtained window, a young girl named Marji who
represents the narrator stands between her mother and father,
looking out onto the street. Together, they watch a bearded man
pass by in trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, with his wife, in
a full chador, holding her young son by the hand. Before
the window, looking out, Marji's father is drawn with a mustache.
His wife, standing slightly bent over, as if despondent, is dressed
in a tight-fitting top and a checkered skirt. She speaks the words
that are seemingly on the minds of the other members of the family:
"Look at her! Last year she was wearing a miniskirt, showing
off her beefy thighs to the whole neighborhood. And now Madame
is wearing a chador. It suits her better, I guess." (75)
These images are images of struggle, embodied as principled positions
in a war against two distinct regimes. They are capsules in ink
and paper of a particular time and place.
The numerous memoirs
and biographies written since the 1979 revolution are sprinkled
with notations on female adornment -- alluding to everything from
the mandatory head covering to prohibitions on nail polish
and lipstick. If these references appear superficial and at times
repetitive, their constant presence gets at the crucial question
that has dominated Iranian politics since the nineteenth century.
That question, simply put, asks, "Whose nation is this?"
For the women writers, this is a historical question, one that
surfaces from bearing witness to a nation's transformation. It
stems from the recognition that one's own body -- a female body
-- is a fundamental constitutive force in the coming into being
of a new era in national history. The question is localized in
that it asks, "What effects do the things that I embody bring
about in this nation today?"
GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES
The memoir of Johns
Hopkins University professor Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in
Tehran, which had spent 36 weeks on the New York Times
bestseller list as of mid-September 2004, engages this question
directly. Nafisi acknowledges in the book that her return to Iran
to teach literature during the post-revolutionary period meant
that, by virtue of her gender, she would be at the center of politics.
Her book, in this sense, follows the trajectory of literature
that bears witness to the processes of change during the revolution
and the first years of the Islamic Republic. She shows the ways
in which the female body plays a pivotal and assertive role in
the formation of the new.
Describing a city
battered by war, she writes about the students who attended her
classes during the 1980s and early 1990s to read "the great
books" of the Western canon, including novels by Jane Austen,
Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. Her goal
of describing how her female students, sitting in the private
study circle that she founded in 1995, identify their own plight
with the plights of Lolita and Elizabeth Bennet is enough to capture
one's interest. The writing, too, is gripping. Each of Nafisi's
characters "glows on the page," one reviewer writes,
"illuminated by Nafisi's affection." Most reviews of
the book in the US press are comparably fervent and enthusiastic.
"Reading Lolita in Tehran had a most unusual effect
on me," writes another reviewer. "I didn't want to be
interrupted, so I canceled a dental appointment and a business
lunch and missed a deadline. I read and read and ignored the world.
This is what brilliant books will do; they seize you until the
story is over."
As Nafisi herself
told the New York Times, however, "People
from my country have said the book was successful because of a
Zionist conspiracy and US imperialism, and others have criticized
me for washing our dirty laundry in front of the enemy."
These are certainly unsettling responses to a book that
by all accounts deserves praise for its style, complexity and
all-consuming efficacy. But how is one to
interpret such accusations?
Though some of Nafisi's
study circle participants are children of the revolution, there
is a sense in which Reading Lolita in Tehran is a witness
to a period that has passed. As one of Mahnaz Kousha's female
informants in Voices from Iran: The Changing Lives of Iranian
Women explained in a series of interviews conducted between
1995 and 1997: "The younger generation (born after 1979)
is going to be the agent of change. From the very beginning when
they opened their eyes they saw that women demonstrated on television.
It is correct that all those demonstrators wore black chadors.
What is more important is that they were all women, demanding
something. This generation has seen women playing an active role
and has accepted that.... Veiling is not a problem for those children
who were raised with it. It is not going to stop them. I believe
a piece of material is not going to stop women's progress."[5] Kousha's informant underscores the ability of
younger women to demand and bring about social change regardless
of what the outside world perceives as insurmountable restrictions.
What was encumbering and unnatural to Nafisi's pre-revolutionary
generation is now unremarkable to many, if not all, of the generation
that has grown up knowing nothing but the mandatory veil. The
emphatic outrage over the circumstances of women when Islamic
rule was freshly established has become almost mute.
"When we had
this secret class in Tehran," Nafisi told the Washington
Post in December 2003, "we felt utterly helpless."
But not all Iranian women feel helpless after the limited openings
for social and political activism offered by the period of Khatami's
presidency, and indeed Nafisi is hardly unaware of the powerful
presence of women in Iranian society today. Of the Nobel Prize-winning
women's rights activist and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi,
she wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "As a woman
activist she did not have to look to other countries for role
models: She could rely on the tradition created by many courageous
Iranian women before her, who, for over a century, had fought
despotism, opening political, cultural and social spaces for Iranian
women." In the same interview with the Washington Post,
she said of women living in Iran, "They are persistent. This
is bigger than politics. These women just refuse to give up."
TOTAL WAR
Moreover, it seems
undeniable that Reading Lolita in Tehran and its author
have been promoted, at least in part, to fulfill the ends of total
war. Although human rights violations are an ongoing and urgent
concern in the era of President Mohammad Khatami, whose government
came to power by democratic election in 1997, after the point
at which Nafisi's book ends, the restoration of such rights is
not the driving force of the total war in which Nafisi's book
has been embedded.
Former Marine Adam
Mersereau explains the concept of total war in the National
Review. It is a war "that not only destroys the enemy's
military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely
personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept
a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned the war in the
first place." While a total war strategy does not have to
"include the intentional targeting of civilians," sparing
them "cannot be its first priority. The purpose of total
war is to permanently force your will onto another people."
The purpose of the total war that is the US-led "war on terror"
is to force "the grid" onto a culture that is, at its
best and at its worst, ambivalent to it.
For some time before
and after the publication of her runaway bestseller, Nafisi was
being promoted alongside proponents of total war by Benador Associates,
which arranges their TV appearances and speaking engagements and
helps to place their articles in the top newspapers. Such
neo-conservative luminaries as Richard Perle and James Woolsey,
who notoriously referred to the war on terror as "World War
IV," are still clients of the agency. In September, their
agent Eleana Benador traced the cognitive links the neo-conservatives
draw between the war and Middle Eastern women in a posting "From
Eleana's Desk" on the agency's website: "One of the
most memorable experiences [of the 2004 Athens Olympics] was to
watch the Afghan woman participating in one of the races, as well
as an Iraqi woman. They didn't go far, they were among the last
ones. But, watching them, I couldn't avoid thinking: 'We are winning!'
Yes, we are winning over extremism, whether religious or secular.
More accurately, we are starting to win. The road ahead is still
a long one, but the beginning is already giving results. We have
rescued from the hands of those extremists these women who have
regained their status as human beings, and who are learning now
what it is to be treated with respect and dignity."
In Nafisi's acknowledgements,
finally, Princeton University emeritus historian Bernard Lewis
is thanked as one "who opened the door." Though one
would hope that she testifies here to the gentleman's chivalry
and good breeding, one fears that there is more to it. Lewis is
the eminent theorist of civilizational decline in the Islamic
world who has reportedly briefed Dick Cheney. Books like his own
bestseller What Went Wrong? (2002) are the ahistorical
scaffolding upon which the neo-conservative hard core of Perle
and Woolsey hang their policy prescriptions. Take, for example,
this statement by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz,
a leading neo-conservative inside government: "Bernard Lewis
has brilliantly placed the relationships and the issues of the
Middle East into their larger context, with truly objective, original
and always independent thought. Bernard has taught [us] how to
understand the complex and important history of the Middle East
and use it to guide us where we will go next to build a better
world for generations to come." But what does this complex
and important history amount to? As University of Michigan history
professor Juan Cole observes in a generous review of Lewis's book,
"[Lewis] is not writing analytical history here, with a view
to explaining particular problems by isolating independent variables.
He is writing moral history, which is tautological. He seems to
insist on erasing any successes [Muslims] have had, and to imply
that the Muslims have failed because they are failures."[6] Failures.
MILK ANGER
After my return from
Tehran in the summer, I received a photograph of the panels I
had seen on the Sadr freeway. The fifth of the six panels had
gone up to fill the gap on the wall. There are two men in it.
One is laying face down on a red carpet, and the other, sitting
next to him, looks out of the frame toward the sixth panel depicting
the three men engaged in military combat. The caption on the left
side of the fifth panel reads: "Dirooz Filistin."
Yesterday Palestine.
While the messages
and meanings of the images of torture in US jails in Iraq are
being muted in the global media with visual rhetoric that justifies
the occupation, and does so by promoting images of women's bodies
that have been liberated in hair salons, the Iranian government
is promoting images of prison tortures toward different ends.
These images of humiliating violence in US-occupied Iraq are hung
in close proximity to images that remind the viewer of the inequities
of Israeli occupation in Palestine.
It is likely, to my
mind, that Nafisi's efforts converge on a will to institute a
transnational feminist ethics that is concerned with the lives
and conditions of women elsewhere. But if this is so, a consistently
ahistorical analysis of Iran -- one that does not distinguish
between past and present -- cannot be the rallying call for efforts
on behalf of Iranian women today. In the era of total war intent
on the reversal of cultural trends through external force, Reading
Lolita in Tehran as a representation of the state of current
affairs is an undiscriminating gesture. It performs like
a wound-up metal monkey on wheels as the warmup act for more theater
of unprovoked war and another occupation.
A transnational feminist
practice intent on the Middle East is better served by focusing
on the question that has long kept the region so distraught, and
that has contributed to a colre du lait (milk anger) that,
like milk, boils into sudden rage when heated. This question is
the question of occupation. Modifications in the status of women
in relation to the nation-state are handled more ably by internal
forces of change. That is the judgment of history and a judgment
in ethics.
