Déjà le titre est particuliérement suggestif: à l’instauration de la “théosophie orientale” fait pendant le “Récit de l’exil occidental.” Dans la bipolarité de ces deux qualifications tient toute l’ “histoire” du gnostique.
Henri Corbin, En Islam iranien (II: 258)1
[1]
“Here, take this little razor blade.” The solution had come to Marjane Satrapi’s grandmother, when she was a young woman, in the wee hours of the morning, having just spent a sleepless night thinking how to help her poor wretched friend who was caught, as it were, in quite a tight spot. Having lost her virginity to a man she loved, this friend of Madame Satrapi was about to be married to another man, and had run to her friend in desperation, seeking solace and advice as to what to do on the famous night to protect her good name. “Here, take this little razor blade,” was the solution. On the night of the wedding, she was to follow Madame Satrapi’s advice, squeeze her thighs quite tightly, start screaming loudly, and then at an opportune moment cut herself just a little bit, enough for a few drops of blood to solve the otherwise quite troublesome problem. On the appointed evening and the precise moment, she reaches for the razor and the task at hand but in her haste and confusion cuts a wrong spot and the poor man starts screaming in horror. “You can well imagine,” concludes Madame Satrapi, tongue in cheek and wily wise, “the poor guy! Not only was he misled about the merchandise, but on top of that he found himself with a sliced testicle!”
Something sharply shaped and yet pointedly imprecise seems to be cutting these days through the hidden secrets of a culture long since left to its own impromptu devices. Publication of three consecutive books by Marjane Satrapi between 2000 and 2005, first in French and subsequently in English, has made it abundantly clear that a body of autobiographical narratives by a small group of young Iranian women living mostly outside their homeland and writing mainly in a language not their mother tongue has now reached the level of an epidemic phenomenon requiring a closer critical attention. If in the 1990s Shirin Neshat had a monopoly over the visual representations of Iranian (Muslim) women, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, that image has become narratively captioned by these autobiographical narratives.
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: A Story of Childhood (2003, original publication in France as Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2 in 2000 and 2001, respectively) is an autobiographical Bande Dessinée that covers her early childhood and adolescent years in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It commences at the dawn of the Islamic revolution in 1979, when the young Satrapi is ten years old and concludes when at the age of fourteen her parents decide to send her to Austria where she can continue with her education and stay out of trouble rampant in her revolutionary homeland, while dodging Saddam Hussein’s missiles, at the time regularly targeting Tehran residential areas. Satrapi’s story, now navigating her young adolescent years between Europe and Iran, is then resumed in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004, originally published in France as Persepolis 3 and Persepolis 4 in 2002 and 2003, respectively). Satrapi’s third book, Embroideries (2005, originally published in France as Broderies in 2003) picks up some of the familiar characters of her previous two books—she, her mother, and grandmother in particular—and takes them for another ride into the volatile vagaries of life in the selfsame Islamic Republic.
These three books are now part of a larger body of literature that places the status and image of Iranian women on a global pedestal far beyond the immediate confinements of their predicament in their own homeland. An examination of this body of literature will open up a vista into a critical aspect of an emerging (Iranian) political culture that includes but is not limited to question of gender, class, politics of representation, and the abuses of human, civil, and women’s rights for imperial designs around the globe.2
[2]
One can arguably propose that the publication of Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah (1997) might be considered a landmark event in the visual complication of the image of Iranian (Muslim) women outside their own historical habitat and in the context of a more global perspective. The massive presence of veiled women in the course of the Islamic revolution of 1979 had alerted the global attention to an apparent paradox of an active or even militant social participation by women, despite (or perhaps because of) their presumed cultural confinements. A nationwide social revolution had happened, and women had participated in it in their millions. In pictures and videos broadcast around the world, most of these women (but not all) were veiled. The phenomenon somehow demanded attention, seemed to require an explanation.
Almost a decade before the appearance of Neshat’s Women of Allah, Minou Reeves’ Female Warriors of Allah: Women and the Islamic Revolution (1989) had seriously considered the phenomenon, but her account had remained very much limited in its circulation to academic circles. Be that as it may, between 1989 and 1997, Reeves and Neshat, one from an academically limited though quite competent analytical angle and the other through a globally noted and visually arresting perspective, pretty much summoned up the state of the art as to the public awareness of Iranian women in their newly acquired Islamist disguise. To be sure, the multiple images of Iranian (and by extension Muslim) women inside their own country were far more complicated and ranged across ideologies and ethnicities, economic classes and social strata. But the generic image had been globally manufactured and demanded attention. The world at large did not know much about this particular manner of veiling. The words chador (Persian for “veil”) and Hijab (Arabic for the same thing)—and later Purdah and Burqa from Afghanistan down to Southern Asia signifying similar veiling habits among women—had suddenly entered the journalistic lexicon.
The thorny issue of representation became almost immediately evident in the immediate aftermath of these narrative and pictorial accounts and visions of Muslim (Iranian) women. Who was representing whom? The range of social and economic forces and factors that separated the represented from the representing was inevitable to note and wonder. Despite the fact that Neshat’s photography in her Women of Allah often pictured herself as the subject of her own creative observations, and despite the fact that at least some of her images were inspired by actual journalistic photographs, her art was (and remains) very much on the cutting edges of highly stylized gestures and thrived on abstractions. They were “autobiographical” though in a highly formalized and aesthetically sublated visual vocabulary. The bread and bone of a personal narrative was very much pale and almost insignificant in Neshat’s art. The more she let loose of her photographic memories in purely visual terms, the more their autobiographical details were lost in translation. So she was both a Muslim (Iranian) woman and she was not. Her pictures were both autobiographical and they were not. They effectively took the autobiographical images of a nation at large and heavily stylized, edited, and choreographed them, sublated them into the creative elements of a highly aestheticized visual lyricism. At the end one could conclude that Neshat was representing nothing and picturing nobody in particular. She was using the visual vocabulary of a cultural habitat as elements of her own artistic preoccupations—placing herself at the center of her own pictures to avoid any thorny entanglement in presuming to represent anything other than herself, and at times even her own son, Cyrus.
Two interrelated factors made the appearance of visual and narrative representations of Iranian women in the United States particularly important: One was an inordinate number of expatriate middle-class Iranians who had left their homeland after the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the other the global reflection of such representations when they appeared in English and published in the United States. For these two reasons, the publication of Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America (1999) might perhaps be considered the critical commencement of an autobiographical narrative genre for a new generation of young Iranian women, straddling between two cultures—born and bred in between Iran and the United States, more or less confidently bilingual, far more culturally amphibian than dually marginal. It is now, from the vantage point of more than half a decade of tumultuous events (embracing the Tersanctus Bell of 9/11), that the appearance of Tara Bahrampour’s autobiographical narrative in the late 1990s has assumed quite a considerable sociological significance. While since 1997 publication of Women of Allah, Neshat has proceeded to produce an extraordinary body of visual evidence projecting the image of Iranian (Muslim) women, the appearance of this parallel track of autobiographical narratives has helped shape a more sculpted vision of Neshat’s subject matters.
In retrospect, the publication of Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America is important for any number of reasons, but most immediately because of the scarcity of women’s autobiographical narratives—not just in Iran or among Iranian women alone, but as a factual phenomenon globally evident.
That a young Iranian women, particularly in the aftermath of an “Islamic” revolution, has written a first-person narrative of her life is something that needs to be considered carefully (the almost complete absence of young men’s memoirs in this emerging genre is something quite curious at this point).3 The peculiar aspect of Tara Bahrampour’s narrative, soon to be repeated by many others, is that ordinarily autobiographies are something people write toward the end of their lives and after their lifetime achievements, and not at the beginning of it, when their reasons and causes to write an autobiographical account of their lives have all become publicly evident. To be sure, Tara Bahrampour is an accomplished journalist with a perfectly competent command over her craft. But she left the revolutionary Iran when she was almost ten, which means at the writing of her memoir she was in her late twenties. So her life story is not the seasoned reflections of a person in the autumn or winter of her life. Moreover, the writing of an autobiography is something of a privilege that people earn by virtue of a lifetime of achievements as a public figure. The private life of a private citizen at the prime of her life does not ordinarily make for a public statement. It is in fact the dialectics between the public image of a person and her own autobiographical account of it that animates the necessary narrative energy in writing and reading of a memoir. The reason that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History (2003), or Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004), as two recent prominent examples, make for an important reading is that as a public couple, whose lives were deeply affected by a particularly traumatizing scandal, their own autobiographical take on various issues is marked by years of having been in public spotlight. Thus the first thing that we notice about this genre of Iranian women’s autobiographical narratives that Bahrampour’s To See and See Again commences is that they are written by unknown young women at the commencement of their lives, people whose public significance and thus the lessons one might learn from reading their otherwise private lives are yet to be lived, experienced, and recorded. So what exactly prompts these people to write their short lives in long autobiographies, and what leads the (primarily) American public to read them remain to be pondered and understood. There is an aesthetic sublation about the works of Neshat, an artistic import, a deeply rooted cultural disposition that leads one to take one of her pictures and trace it to varied layers of visual, performative, poetic, and even metaphysical aspects of her culture that simply do not exist in Bahrampour’s narrative diction or autobiographical prose. There is an aesthetic quality to Neshat’s works of art upon which rides a whole history of visual and performative memories collective and definitive to a people—that is not what we learn about the private trials and tribulations of a teenager subject to public and historical events.
In terms domestic to Iranian culture proper, the most glorious event of modern Iranian literary history, Forough Farrokhzad (1935–1967) never ever thought of writing her autobiography. One might argue (as Michael Hillmann, her biographer, has) that her poetry was “autobiographical,” which is true.4 But nevertheless, she never actually wrote an autobiography. She wrote and published her travelogues when she visited Europe. But not a biography. Her letters to her friends and acquaintances were, again, quite “autobiographical.” But they were meant as private letters and were never published until after her untimely death. One might say that she died quite abruptly and in an automobile accident, when she was only thirty-two years old, and were she to live longer she might have written her autobiography. There are reasons to doubt that possibility—she was simply too self-deprecating and too busy discovering what made her world go around to indulge in anything like an autobiography. Scholars like Michael Hillmann believe that the absence of such autobiographical narratives in Iran is in fact the signs of a deeply rooted cultural inhibition, which might in fact be (at least in part) true.5 But even if one were to consider it probable that Farrokhzad would have written an autobiography had she lived longer, it still falls in the more normal category of a prominent public figure, in this case one of the most gifted and celebrated poets and filmmakers of her country, writing a biography toward the end, and not at the commencement, of her life. Whatever autobiographical urges have existed in prominent Iranian poets and artists like Farrokhzad, and later Rakhshan Bani-Etemad or Neshat, they are in fact aesthetically sublated and artistically expressed in their respective work, in the poetry and lyricism of their art.
None of this is to suggest that autobiographies by private citizens and at a very tender age of late teens or twenties have not much to tell and to teach about the more personal experiences of far more public events. As Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America (2000), which appeared soon after Bahrampour’s To See and See Again, but was not noted as much, also indicates, there is much to be read and learned in such accounts of bipolarity, dual marginality, amphibian lives, and bicoastal biographies. Young hyphenated Americans (Iranians) like Bahrampour and Asayesh have experienced first hand otherwise abstract and generic assumptions of a particularly volatile history and what they say can at times be quite insightful. The model of such accounts may in fact be considered Anne Frank’s Diary, where the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust are seen and narrated from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old youngster. It is in fact quite possible that the public reception of these young Iranian women’s account of their lives in the Islamic Republic and their subsequent “escape,” as usually their publishers suggest in the back cover of their books, into freedom (meaning Europe and the United States) may be assimilated backward into an Anne Frank syndrome, that people are reading them as if they were the Iranian versions of Anne Frank, that they are precocious young women who have witnessed a horrific historical event. There is thus a kind of representation by implication in these sorts of autobiographical narratives, for they seem to be assimilated backward into a known (almost proverbial in the case of Anne Frank) referent. Anne Frank as a globally recognized signifier remains constant and then floats into other domains—in this case signifying young Iranian women writing about the horrors they may have witnessed—and thus by implication placing the Islamic Republic somewhere in the vicinity of Nazi Germany.
Another way of reading these autobiographical narratives is to see how they seem to occupy a vacant space, open a gap, in between two highly formalized modes of representations. The rise of this new body of autobiographical literature by young Iranian women living in the United States or Europe and writing in English (by and large, or any other European language for that matter) is located between the pictorially abstracted work of Neshat on one side and the extraordinary body of scholarship that has existed on the status of Iranian women at large. Almost five years before the publication of Bahrampour’s book, the collection of essays that Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl had edited and published, In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran (1994) had attended to the status of women in post-revolutionary Iran, but of course in a far more limited and circumspect way, attended to by almost no one outside the small circle of Iranists immediately concerned with issues domestic to the Islamic Republic. The audience that Bahrampour’s To See and See Again had attracted was far wider and a combination of competent journalistic narrative and the passionate zeal of a younger generation of Iranians (coming out of the shadow of their parental fears in the immediate aftermath of the US Hostage Crisis of 1979–1980) gave her account a far more universal appeal. What Afkhami and Friedl’s volume had done was updating what Eliz Sanasarian’s exquisite scholarship had already achieved in The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran: Mutiny, Appeasement, and Repression from 1900 to Khomeini (1982). Though born and raised in Iran, Bahrampour and Asayesh were effectively products of a second-generation North American and Western European upbringing and their memoirs are confident claims of (and on) two cultures, though with an emerging penchant for appealing to a far wider market. What exactly the nature of that wider market is ranges from the most innocuous curiosities to the most exotic Orientalia. But still the fact that an exceedingly competent work such as Zohreh Sullivan’s Exiled Memories: Stories of the Iranian Diaspora (2000) is barely noticed, while the personal memoirs of young women who were toddlers at the time of the Islamic Revolution and are now at the prime of their young lives in the United States is something to be noted. The competent scholarly works of scholars like Friedl or Sullivan have a very limited appeal and audience, whereas the (at times quite colorful) memoirs of young Iranian women telling their American audience of the trials and tribulations of growing up bi-cultural had a far wider appeal. The art of Shirin Neshat and the scholarship of Sullivan and her colleagues complicated the public perception of Iranian women, whereas these autobiographical narratives made it far simpler. The binary opposition, and thus the road to salvation, that these sorts of narratives—either explicitly or implicitly—constructed were quite compelling: Going from Islam to modernity, from the East to the West, from rags to riches, from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from doomed fate to open possibilities. These narratives could very well have given their American readers the impression that theirs was indeed the Promised Land, “the shining city on the hill,” as the late President Reagan used to say. They already were where other people from around the globe wanted to be.
While the work of Neshat was pursuing an increasingly abstract and highly stylized disposition, the parallel development between serious but limited scholarship and personal but widely read memoir took a particularly sharp turn after the iconic events of 9/11 in the United States and the commencement of the US-led war in Afghanistan in October 2001 and soon after that in Iraq in March 2003. The status of women in the Muslim world in general and in Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, now categorically assimilated into the domain of Islamism, became a paramount issue in the emerging agenda of the US neocons’ global (war on) terrorism. Compare, for example, the scarcely noted Halleh Ghorashi’s Ways to Survive, Battles to Win: Iranian Women Exiles in the Netherlands and the United States (2002) to Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)—one a competent account of women’s lives in exile written by a scholar teaching in Amsterdam, and the other a memoir commissioned to an employee of the US Secretary of Defense at SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University), and a key neocon strategist, Paul Wolfowitz—one scarcely noted even by the specialists in the field, the other making its way into every suburban kaffeeklatsch from New Jersey to Oregon, and from there to the US embassies in every major Muslim country around the world, while for months remaining on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The case of Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran put a particularly powerful twist to the narrative of poor Muslim women being saved from the evils of their own culture by “Western Civilization”—for in her case, this was the story of an Oriental women (she quite consciously posit herself as a Scheherazade) who was once saved from the constitutional terror of her own culture by being educated in “the West,” but made the bad mistake of going back to her own horrid country and culture, then soon realizing her error, being yet again saved (both she and seven little Lolitas she gathered around her to tell them stories) by the “masterpieces of Western literature,” until such time that she found an opportunity to run away from that hell hole, come back to the bosoms of the Western Civilization in Washington DC, from where she could now write an account of her life and thus save other Muslim women still caught in the snare of their own godforsaken culture. A textbook example of asking “white men [to save] brown women from brown men”—in the brilliant and precise diagnosis of the disease by Gayatri Spivak6—Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran became the definitive example of the compradorial services that an exilic body of expatriate intellectuals could and did provide their white male employers, facilitating their imperial designs on the globe, while in fact abusing (not serving) the legitimate struggles of women around the (Muslim) world for their inalienable civil and human rights. What Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran provided the US neocons was a perfect model, repeated many other times, for having women’s accounts of their abuses in Afghanistan or Iraq coming out precisely at the time that the Bush administration unleashed its predatory attacks on these countries. An avalanche of books, usually featuring a veiled and/or battered woman on the cover, flooded the US market, informing Americans how Afghan, Arab, Iranian, invariably Muslim, women were abused by their own men and by extension their culture and religion and that someone needed to do something about these horrors—as indeed the US army was doing precisely that, liberating these women (one Abu Ghraib torture chamber and Falluja massacre at a time). There is thus a direct, though camouflaged, link between Azar Nafisi and Lynndie England.
To be sure, the case of Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is not entirely representative of this genre of autobiography and is a reality sui generis, for in all fairness not all these authors are the employee of the US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz while writing their memoirs, let alone be on a first-name basis with him (as we discover in the Acknowledgment section of Reading Lolita in Tehran),7 or are endorsed by the solitary remaining patriarch of Orientalism, now the chief propagandist of war on Muslims, Bernard Lewis—nor indeed are they appealing to the not-so-hidden pedophiliac proclivities suggested in the image and narrative ploy of a harem-full of Oriental Lolitas. Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran will remain as one of the most ingenious marketing strategies in the US publishing industry, where the injured ego of an imperial hubris, two of its tallest phallic symbols having just been castrated in New York in one of the most spectacular global spectacles in modern memory, was sought to be restored by offering it the infantilized youth of the enemy on a narrative platter. It was soon after the publication of this book that sexual harassment of Iraqi inmates in the US torture chambers in Abu Ghraib and the subsequent beheading of foreigners in Iraq ensued. Reading Lolita in Tehran is thus a very specific case that requires a different treatment and a far more critical attention, and should not be allowed to crowd and cloud the character of far more innocent items in this genre.
Be that as it may, publishers soon realized the power of such appeals for the US market, and thus on the coattail of Nafisi’s tale of a few Oriental Lolitas appeared Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (2003), Roya Hakakian’s Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (2004), Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005)—and probably a few more that are now on their way to the US market, before the rule of supply and demand kicks in and/or perhaps the strategies of the US neocon global (war on) terrorism turns its attention to Somalia or Korea, in which cases Paul Wolfowitz may ask another of his employee (now at the World Bank) to write about reading Lolita in Mogadishu, Seoul or somewhere else. Leaving the rather specific case of Reading Lolita in Tehran aside, the prototype of Anne Frank’s Diary seem to be the guiding motif of these books, which in the case of Roya Hakakian’s Journey from the Land of No assumes an even more specific disposition, for it is ticketed precisely as the case of a young Iranian Jewish girl and her family suffering through anti-Semitic atrocities of the Islamic Republic—“so reminiscent of the experiences of Jews in Nazi Germany”—as the Publisher Weekly puts it—and finally running away to freedom and safety in the United States.
The paradox of exceedingly competent but scarcely noted scholarship on one hand and widely popular but entirely private narratives made public proceeded apace after 9/11. Parin Dossa’s Politics and Poetics of Migration: Narratives of Iranian Women from the Diaspora (2004) and Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005), coming after another major work by Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (1998), are among the most impressive works of scholarship recently published, again by and large very much limited in their public appeal. Over the last two decades, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Farzaneh Milani, Hamideh Sedghi, Nayereh Tohidi, Nasrin Rahimieh, Mahnaz Afkhami, among many other scholars writing in English, have done an extraordinary work linking a serious consideration of the status of women in Iran to the work already done by such scholars and activists as Fatima Mernissi, Nawal El Saadawi, Deniz Kandiyoti, and Assia Djebar in adjacent regions and contexts. But none of their works came anywhere near the phenomenal commercial success of the more personal accounts of young Iranian women writing of their personal experiences before and after the Islamic revolution in Iran.
Whatever the ultimate merits or demerits of this body of literature may be, at the very outset two immediate observations are quite self-evident: (1) given the scarcity of such autobiographical narratives among (Iranian) women, this is an altogether welcome event and one must hope that it will continue eventually to include a larger, more diversified, samples of the genres (particularly by women whose politics is rather radically different from those of Nafisi and her ilk); and (2) these narratives are inevitably and perhaps beyond their authors’ intention (with the immediate exception of Nafisi who is a willing partner in the Oriental regiment of the US neocons) abused by the imperial imaginary of a predatory Empire in dire need of an ideology it badly needs and sorely lacks. One may celebrate this body of literature for all the wrong reasons, or conversely dismiss them for all the right reasons—but ultimately they help shape a more nuanced and complicated vision of Iranian women, and with them the culture and polity they inhabit. One may wish that such extraordinary Iranian women as Shahrnoush Parsipour or Mehrangiz Kar, one the most distinguished living Iranian novelist and the other an extraordinary human rights activist, may be given a sympathetic ear by US publishers to have their exquisite prison memoir (they have both endured the atrocities of the Islamic Republic in jail and as prominent adults) translated and published in English—even though the politics of their narratives does not quite tally with the US Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis’ political and ideological leadership. But in anticipation of such eventualities, one must note and realize that between Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987, later turned into a movie by Brian Gilbert in 1991) and Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003, reportedly being turned into a movie now in Hollywood), there remains a whole spectrum of Iranian women’s stories that still remains to be written.
Of particular significance are the auto/biographical narratives by or about young revolutionary women (such as Fatemeh Amini and Ashraf Dehqani), active in Mojahedin-e Khalq or Cherik-ha-ye Fada’i Khalq organizations (or their various offshoots), and who were killed or else suffered through long and torturous prison terms under both the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic. All such sources need to be included in any legitimate understanding of contemporary Iranian women. But, again, the politics of their narratives does not quite tally with the rather lucrative US and EU markets publishers have in mind. It is impossible to imagine that Torture and Resistance in Iran, the autobiographical narrative of Ashraf Dehqani, a leading revolutionary leader of 1970s, would entice any US publisher having Reading Lolita in Tehran in mind.8 Be that as it may, in film and fiction, personal narratives and scholarship, the former political prisoners under the Shah and Khomeini’s regimes are beginning to produce an important body of work. Masoud Raouf’s “The Tree that Remembers” (2002) is a brilliant film about a number of former political prisoners, mostly women, now living in Canada. Shahla Talebi, another revolutionary activist who endured years of incarceration and torture under both the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic (now a graduate student at Columbia University in New York), has also written her prison memoirs as her Master Thesis.
None of these works, written by courageous political activists, receives much attention outside their very limited circles, because the politics of their narration does not quite serve (and in fact seriously contradicts) the US neocons and their penchant for harem full of teenage girls reading Lolita in Tehran.9 The overtly anti-Islamic tenor of this search for battered Muslim women to justify the US invasion of places like Afghanistan and Iraq has no reason or capacity either to remember that long before the rise of the neocons to power, in 1988, Shusha Guppy, the daughter of a prominent Iranian Shi’i cleric, Seyyed Kazem Assar, had written an absolutely magnificent account of her childhood in Iran, The Blindfold Horse (1988), which reads like a love-letter of a daughter not just to her father and family, but to an entire nation and its lost visions of hope.10 A few years later, Guppy wrote a sequel to The Blindfold Horse, A Girl in Paris (1991), writing with equal grace and insight about her experiences growing up in between two cultures (Iranian and European), and in many ways anticipating much that would be written later in the decade, though nowhere near Guppy’s astoundingly graceful prose, literary diction, and enduring insights into both her cultures.11 But the fact that she was the daughter of a high-ranking Shi’i cleric, while having an equally competent claim over two cultures (and on top of it a splendid lyricist, musician, and vocalist as well) did not quite sit with the image that Wolfowitz, Lewis, and Nafisi wanted to project of repressed Muslim women waiting for the US army to go and liberate them. From radical revolutionaries like Ashraf Dehghani, to gifted writers growing up in a clerical family like Shusha Guppy, to members of the Qajar aristocracy like Sattareh Farman Farmaian, who wrote her memoir, Daughter of Persia (1992), at a time when no one had any political reason to pay any attention to Muslim and Iranian women, a whole range of women’s autobiographical narratives existed in English, all written by accomplished and prominent women at the zenith of their lives, but remained entirely useless to any propaganda machinery and its preferences for helpless Oriental Lolitas.
[3]
The rise of young Iranian women autobiographical memoir in English and primarily in the United States during the reign of the neocons raises a more fundamental question: What about the older generation of Iranian women—women of some enduring public significance and moral authority? Have they written anything worth knowing and considering in their own language, in Persian language proper, the language of Iranian women who by and large live through their joys and tribulations, failures and successes in their own homeland, in their own cultural habitat, unbeknownst to and distant from Wolfowitz and Lewis?
Long before the rise of the US neocons and their political abuses of the status of women in Muslim societies, Afsaneh Najmabadi had edited a fine, though slim, volume, Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran (1990), in which a number of leading scholars reflected on the condition of autobiographical narratives in Iran. Although after the publication of this book new auto/biographical narratives have been written, the genre still continues to be quite limited and scarce. The basic conclusions of Najmabadi’s slim volume was, in the words of William L. Hanaway, one of the contributors, that “Iranian culture has no tradition of biography and autobiography as we know them in the West,” that as a “Western” narrative form auto/biography is not “translatable,” and that “for Persian women” in particular, “there is a barrier to making direct autobiographical statements. Perhaps it is the fear of what might be revealed, rather than the fear of making her voice heard at all, that brings about the veiling and the self-censorship.”12
Irrespective of these generic, essentialized, and entirely fallacious generalizations about a literary culture (systematically privileging “the West” and second-rating the rest),13 one may consider the presence or absence of auto/biographical voices among women as the viable index of two crucial factors—one is the question of literacy and the other the social presence of women in the public domain. The two, however, may not be necessarily interrelated. Being literate has never been the prerequisite of being socially present and politically consequential. In the politics of contemporary mass societies (and the mass education that is contingent on it) this may appear to be so.14 But historically it has not. In pre-Islamic Iranian history, women could be monarchs, such as Pourandokht and Azarmidokht toward the end of the Sassanid dynasty (224–651 AD). In the Islamic period, Khadijeh, the Prophet’s first wife, was a prominent Meccan merchant when she married Muhammad. The prophet’s youngest wife, Aisha, was a major political force after the death of Muhammad and led a major battle, the Battle of the Camel (656), against Ali, one of his immediate successors and the first Shi’i Imam. Ali’s wife, the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima was an equally prominent political figure, as was Zaynab, the third Shi’i Imam’s sister, who behaved valiantly in the course of the Battle of Karbala (October 680). An entire Shi’i dynasty, the Fatimids of Egypt (969–1171), was later named after Fatima. These prominent Muslim women later become exemplary in the rest of Islamic history. In the Seljuqid period (1037–1194), such powerful queens as Malikshah’s wife, Tarkan Khatun, had astounding political power. None of these women, and scores of others like them, is reported to have been literate, or their political power being contingent on their literacy. Many Arab, Persian, and Turkish queens in medieval period had their own separate courts with poets and scribes, attached to well-endowed Madrasah systems—none of which was contingent on their being personally literate.
A related issue is the question of orality. Being cultured and being literate are two entirely different things, only very recently in human history, again as the result of the politics and economics of mass education after the Industrial Revolution, have literacy and a cultivated character been linked. In many societies and throughout history, orality has been a perfectly operative mechanism of creative and critical self-expression. From lullabies to folk songs and folklore to an entire spectrum of oral history map out the memorial topography of a culture in which people (by and large the overwhelming majority of them) partake and expand upon a literary tradition. For every recorded and authenticated quatrain of Omar Khayyam, to give just one example, there are tens of others circulating the creative air of a culture that the advent of literacy in fact curtails and delimits rather than expand and amplify.15 There is also a bodily memory, a corporeal transference of experience about people’s auto/biographies. We are the half-written, half hidden, auto/biographies of our parents—their memories (dead and alive) written all over our bodies and souls.
When, why, and whence: literacy? The rarity of such texts with a pronounced authorial voice as Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), Abigail Adams’ “Remember the Ladies” (1776), or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is clear indication that the scarcity of women’s writings in general—autobiographical or otherwise—is not limited to any particular region or country, religion or culture, and is a far more global issue than the colonial construction of “the West” versus the rest of humanity allows. In Iran proper, literacy itself was very much limited to courtly and clerical classes, by definition a mostly (but not exclusively) male and masculinist enterprise. It was not a case that women were exclusively barred from these masculinist circles—literacy itself was an exclusive function very much limited to professional functionaries—and when these functions required a woman then women were employed.
Two major medieval institutions had the prerogative over literacy, the court and the mosque—the court for clerical, bureaucratic, administrative, and propaganda purposes; and the mosque for juridical and scholastic reasons. At the court, literacy was something of a professional prerequisite, a necessary function mastered and performed for the daily operation of the state. Texts such as Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Katib al-Khwarazmi’s Mafatih al-Ulum (composed circa 980) is a typical example of an early manual of style for the clerical class at the court—known as Dabir, and their function as Dabiri. Another good example would by Ali al-Nizami al-Arudi al-Samarqandi’s Kuliyyat-e Chahar Maqalah (composed circa 1155), the first chapter of which is exclusively on the bureaucratic function of these Dabirs and what they needed to know in order to master their profession. Even in the famous text of Qabus-namah (composed circa 1082), a mirror of princes written by Qabus ibn Vushmgir for his son Gilanshah, the author includes a chapter on the various tasks of these Dabirs and teaches his son how to learn them in case he wanted to follow that career. Either to keep a record of the polity and economy of the kingdom, or to manage the royal correspondences, or write the history of his conquests, or else to sing his praise in prose and poetry and thus propagate the assumption of his justice and magnanimity, literate courtiers—whether a poet or a prose stylist—had specific professional functions to perform. Literacy as a result was not even a privilege, but a necessary professional prerequisite, a tool, that one needed to have in order to be gainfully employed. There is no indication that the elite and the most powerful were in fact literate—and thus the absence of literacy among women is no indication that they could not have been exceedingly powerful members of the ruling elite, as in the extraordinary case of Malikshah Saljuqi’s wife Terken Khatun (d. 1094), who successfully out-foxed and outmaneuvered by far the most brilliant medieval political mind of her time, Khwajah Nezam al-Molk (d. 1092), prompting him to devote a whole chapter against women becoming too powerful in a state in his famous treatise on politics, Siyasat-namah (composed circa 1086). Women, meanwhile, were not necessarily barred from becoming a functionary at the court, just because they were women, as for example becoming a teacher to the female members of the royal family, as in the case of a certain Ostad Khatun (“Madame Professor”) whom Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) knew as a teacher at the court of a local prince in Kunia and to whom he appealed in order to raise a dowry for a poor relation of his, Hedyeh Khatun, the daughter of Salah-Din Zarkub.16
Outside the court, literacy was limited to the Muslim clerical class, the jurists in charge of interpreting the Islamic law for Muslims at large. Centered at the mosque, and written into the fabric of the Madrasah system, literacy was exclusively the prerogative of the jurists and their scholastic interest in jurisprudence and (at most in) theology. There was no reason that women could not be among the clerical class. In fact there are generations of women jurists throughout Islamic history and their biographies are available in many biographical dictionaries.17
Soon after the Abbasid revolution of 749, and the rise of a major cosmopolitan culture in Baghdad, and as the court and the mosque continued to divide both the need for literacy and the production of knowledge conducive to their respective interests, the widespread rise of Adab, or literary humanism (first in Arabic and Persian, and later in Turkish and Urdu) became a more widely spread phenomenon that produced a magnificent literary heritage with wide-ranging and universal concerns.18 While the rise of Adab, as the literary worldview of an urban intellectual elite, considerably widened the social and literary domain of literacy, it still remained a by and large masculinist project—neither necessarily mosque or court-connected, but nevertheless very much limited to the male literary elite—though again, women were not barred from this group by virtue of being women.19
The social condition of women, and with it their ability to become literate on a far wider scale and write with their own voice and potentially their biographies changes with the groundbreaking social movements and political revolutions that in the course of encounter with colonial modernity shake Iran (as the rest of the Muslim world) to its medieval foundations. The spectacular rise of women writers and artists in Iran of the last two hundred years is very much integral to a wider range of social and political developments and the emergence of Iran from the groundswell encounter between three medieval empires—the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals—and three colonial powers—the Russians, the British, and the French: A dialectic that has very much defined the fate of many nations in the region over the last two centuries, and provides a dialectical grid far more accurate than this nauseating notion of “the West” having enlightened the rest of humanity.
Although the critical attention to the status of women in Iran is commensurate with the tumultuous encounter of Iran with colonial modernity, it is analytically wrong to limit the transforming status of women in Iran either to questions of modernity or to women alone. The first people who began addressing the emancipation and education of women were in fact such progressive men as Mirza Fath Ali Akhondzadeh who in his Seh Maktub/Three Letters (1865) specifically raised these sorts of issues. The same is true of Mirza Malkam Khan Nazem al-Dowleh who in his famous journal Qanun/Law (1890) was equally attentive to women’s status in Iran. Two of the most distinguished men poets of the Constitutional period, Taqi Raf’at and Rafi’ Khan Amin, under two pseudonyms, Femina and Feminist, respectively, wrote extensively in progressive journals on behalf of women’s liberation.20 This tradition was followed by many other prominent poets of the period, including Iraj Mirza (1874–1925), perhaps the most distinguished poet of the Constitutional era and an ardent literary activist on behalf of women’s liberation.
Meanwhile, the most spectacular Iranian woman of the nineteenth century, Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn (1817–1852), had absolutely nothing to do with colonial modernity and her heroic character was entirely born and bred within the Babi revolutionary movement of the mid-nineteenth century.21 Qurrat al-Ayn’s revolutionary character extended from her politics to her poetry. As a young woman, she joined the most progressive political revolution of her time, the Babi movement of the 1850s. She unveiled herself in the course of one of her revolutionary campaigns, and in her poetry she was even more daring and defiant.
By the late nineteenth century, and certainly by the time that Bibi Khanom Astarabadi published her groundbreaking Ma’ayeb a-Rijal/The Vices of Men (1894), and Taj al-Saltaneh wrote her Memoir (1914), women themselves were actively involved in writing their history and defending their rights. Of particular significance in the rise of Iranian women’s voice has been the presence of American and European missionary schools that beginning in late nineteenth century had a noticeable presence in Iran and became instrumental in public education of generation of Iranian women. At a time that public schooling for Iranian women was either non-existent or scarce these schools performed an admirable service to women’s liberation in Iran, their missionary zeal or potential implication in a larger European colonial project notwithstanding.22
With the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, women entered the public domain in earnest and joined the revolutionary movement. Soon after the Russian revolution of 1917, Central Asian developments in the revolutionary participation of women had a catalytic effect in Iran, and the first signs of courageous woman unveiling themselves in public became evident, particularly in such northern provinces as Azerbaijan and Gilan, where in these respects were in fact decades ahead of the capital Tehran. The gradual unveiling of the younger generation of Iranian women, for whom habitual veiling of their mothers was now a superfluous and cumbersome habit, was done neither by any pomp and ceremony nor with official governmental sanction, and as a result represented a rather natural and graceful passage from one social condition to another. Among the first to have dared the public and walked freely and unveiled in Tabriz bazaar in 1918 was Shams Kasma’i (d. 1961), one of the most distinguished poets of her time, and a pioneer figure in breaking the millennial power of Persian and Arabic prosody in her free verses.23
What in the Pahlavi historiography (and since then among the Iranian Eurocentric bourgeoisie) is usually attributed to Reza Shah—that he was instrumental in emancipation of Iranian woman with the banning of veiling in 1936—is almost half a century off from the more enduring grassroots movements. The systematic emergence of women in public domain (including the question of veiling) was in fact rooted in a far more gracious and courageous movement rooted in the ideological preparation for the Constitutional Revolution and begun by women themselves, supported by their allies among progressive men, but done as the natural emergence of a new generation of women rather than a thuggish condemnation of their maternal generation, the way that the later Iranian bourgeoisie, their Eurocentric transnational feminism, and their Pahlavi monarchy perceived and performed it. Just consider the extraordinary number of periodicals initiated by women and promoting the civil and human rights of women in the course of the Constitutional Revolution. A certain Mrs. Kahhal is credited for having founded the first Iranian daily exclusively committed to women’s issues. Her newspaper, Danesh/Knowledge was founded in Tehran and began publication in 1909. Soon after that, Maryam Amid Mozayyan al-Saltaneh established yet another journal, called Shokoufeh/Blossom, commencing publication in 1913 in Tehran. This was the first Persian periodical devoted to women’s causes that used illustrations in its articles. This publication was the organ of an organization called “Society for the Struggles of Iranian Sisters.” A few years later, Sedigheh Dolatabadi founded yet another newspaper called Zaban-e Zanan/Women’s Voice in 1919. The significance of this daily was that it was published in Isfahan, a staunchly conservative city. Propagating the progressive ideas of an organization called “Society of Sisters,” Zaban-e Zanan is considered by historians of Persian periodicals as the first newspaper to have used the word “women” in its title. Consider that all these papers were published and the cause of Iranian women’s civil and human rights were eloquently articulated and courageously defended at a time when Reza Shah (1878–1944) was an obscure military man in Qajar army, being dispatched to quell one rebellion or another. Just about the same time that the British arranged for a coup to promote Reza Shah to power at the head of a Cossack Brigade and make him a War Minister, Nawwabeh Safawi, a prominent women journalist, initiated the publication of Alam Niswan/The world of Women in September 1920 in Tehran. Alam Niswan was published for about thirteen years and in each issue systematic reports were included of the progress that women were making in various fields. Soon many other, innumerable, publications followed, not just in Tehran but even in staunchly religious cities like Mashhad. The articles of one such magazine, also called Jahan-e Zanan/The World of Women (began publication in 1921), was so radical and progressive that after four issues it was altogether banned and its chief editor, Fakhr Afagh Parsa, was exiled into a remote part of the country.24
The bizarre notion (propagated by the Iranian contingency of feminism international) that Reza Shah “gave” Iranian women their freedom and then Ayatollah Khomeini “took it back” from them is so fundamentally flawed that it corresponds to no factual history or the lived experience of Iranian women themselves. Both Reza Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini are pathological parameters of Iranian patriarchy, in two complementary ways—one brutally forcing women out of their habitual clothing (whether they wanted or not), and the other ordering them back in (whether they wanted or not)—both against the grain of historical developments gradually and gracefully affecting the increasing social participation of women in their national destiny. In between these two acts of barbarity dwells the fate and fact of Iranian women themselves who have relentlessly fought for their civil and human rights and for their freedom to choose.
A beautiful picture of Parvin E’tesami (1907–1940), a leading poet of the early twentieth-century Iran, taken toward the end of her short life, shows her with a scarf gracefully put on her hair. This is the public image of an Iranian woman who was born in the course of the Constitutional Revolution and was raised long before the so-called emancipation of women by Reza Shah and his violent and vile banning of all veiling in 1936. Parvin E’tesami’s face—just like her poetry—is neither veiled nor unveiled. It is the outgrowth of a normative public decorum at once domestic to her body and integral to the culture she calls home. The confidence and courage of this face is not the result of Reza Shah’s militant modernism, nor those of her progeny can be curtailed by the descendant theocrats of Ayatollah Khomeini. It is the sublation of generation of societal and discursive struggle—just like Parvin E’tesami’s own poetry—to demand and exact a public domain for her inalienable rights.
Parvin E’tesami did not fall from the sky, and had a history of her own. Her father, Yusuf E’tesam al-Molk was one of the most progressive public intellectuals of his time. In 1911 E’tesam al-Molk initiated the publication of a groundbreaking periodical, Bahar/Spring, in which he sought to acquaint his readers with the most advanced ideas and practices around the world. Of particular interest to this extraordinary man was the changing status of women around the world. In the pages of this pioneering journal, we read articles, mostly penned by Yusuf E’tesam al-Molk himself, on a variety of issues pertaining to the changing status of women around the world. In one article, for example, he discusses the global rise of women to demand and exact their civil and human rights, in another he introduces prominent women scientists and gives extended attention to Marie Curie (1867–1934), the most famous women scientist of the time who had just received the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1911 (the year that E’tesam al-Molk had started publishing his journal—which shows how au courant he was in following women’s achievements). In yet other articles, E’tesam al-Molk discusses an appreciation of the status of mothers in society, in another the necessity of education for women, in yet another the need to include women in prominent political and juridical positions. In one article he gives a full report—with facts and figures—of a massive feminist (he transcribes the word “feminist,” for there was no Persian word for it at the time—though the expression horiyyat-e niswan/emancipation of women was at times used) demonstration in London during the coronation of George V in 1911 (again the year of the publication of the journal). E’tesam al-Molk writes a critical report on how Popes in Rome since 1878 were demanding that women be properly attired and completely covered when going to Vatican—which means he thought himself in a position, located as he was in Tehran, to reflect critically on question of veiling in Rome. E’tesam al-Molk’s attention to the status of women is not limited to Europe at all. He writes an article about marriage ceremonies in Japan, another on the social status of women in China. Perhaps one of the most extraordinary pieces that Yusuf E’tesam al-Molk wrote in Bahar is a parable in which he says someone asked a physician why did God create woman from man’s ribs—to which the physician respond:
Woman was not created from man’s head so that she will not rule over him; she was not created from his foot, so that man will not hurt or humiliate her; she was created from his rib for she is an equal to him; she has been taken from under his arm and two hands so that she can sustain and help him, from the closest spot to his heart so that he will respect and love her.25
The gradual emergence of public education in Iran, and with it that of women in particular, soon after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, much benefited from these events. An excellent example to consider in this respect is the extraordinary career of Fatemeh Sayyah (1902–1947), one of the most distinguished Iranian women of her and any other generation. She was born in Moscow to a prominent Iranian family—her uncle, Mirza Mohammad Ali Mahallati, known as Hajj Sayyah (1837–1925), was a major public intellectual of the nineteenth century and wrote an exceedingly important travelogue, which subsequently became an instrumental text in the course of Iranian encounter with colonial modernity. At the age nineteen, Fatemeh Sayyah moved to Iran in 1921, exactly the year of the British coup on behalf of Reza Shah. After a short and failed marriage, she returned to Moscow, resumed her education, and received a doctoral degree in literature, writing her dissertation on Anatole France. She taught in Russian universities for four years and then in 1934 she moved back to Iran, where she began teaching at Tehran University. She became an academic activist of unbelievable range and tenacity, reading scholarly papers on Persian and European literatures at learned conferences, assuming administrative position in Ministry of Culture responsible for the education of women, joining the executive committee of “The Foundation of Iranian Women,” teaching European languages and literatures, and going to Geneva to participate in an international conference on behalf of Iranian foreign ministry. In 1943, she became a founding member of “The Iranian Women Party.” In the same year she became a full tenured professor at Tehran University, and a member of the board of directors of “Iran-Soviet Union Cultural Exchange Institute.” The range of her activities spans from scholarship to politics. In 1944, she was charged by the Iranian Women Party to investigate the status of women in Iranian prisons. In the same year she went to Turkey to participate in an international conference on the status of women. Next year, in 1945 she attended a conference in Paris on the question of “Women and Peace.” The next year, she was elected as part of the Central Committee of the Iranian Women Party. The range of Fatemeh Sayyah’s interest in comparative literature is equally astounding. She investigated the image of women in Persian and European literatures and societies. She had native command of Persian, Russian, and French—and evidently English and German too. This is in part explained by her extraordinarily learned family. Her father was a professor of literature in Moscow. Her uncle was a prominent nineteenth-century public intellectuals. Both his father and uncle knew the prominent Muslim reformist Seyyed Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897) quite well—and Seyyed Jamal stayed with her father when visiting Moscow. Her husband, Hamid Sayyah (whose last name she kept after their divorce), was the first Iranian ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the first Iranian official to have met with Lenin after the success of the Russian Revolution in October 1917. Fatemeh Sayyah wrote on novel, on romanticism, idealism, Persian prose, Iranian contemporary art, and introduced Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Sholokhov to Iranian readers. The list of her activities continues, in domestic, international, literary and social venues—until her untimely death on Thursday 4 March 1948.26
By the early 1940s, and in the course of the Allied occupation of Iran and the subsequent establishment of the Tudeh Party, the social presence of Iranian women in terms domestic, regional, and global to their multifaceted cultures and classes expanded exponentially. The appearance of Forough Farrokhzad, as the most glorious achievement of this period, was thus not predicated on an entirely barren ground. Generations of Iranian women (and progressive Iranian men) had worked ceaselessly to make her achievements possible. Along with the poetry of Farrokhzad in the 1950s emerged a plethora of poetic, artistic, and literary voices and visions by Iranian women—a kaleidoscopic rainbow of colors and music no tyrant could have given and no patriarch could have taken away.27
So yes it is true that we have a relative dearth of autobiographical narratives in Persian (or Arabic, Turkish, or Urdu)—but this is not exclusive to women. Men too have rarely put pen to paper and written their own autobiography. But for every autobiography thus missing, there are volumes upon endless volumes of biographical dictionaries of prominent men and women and their lifetime achievements. Biography in the Iranian (and Islamic) contexts is something that others write about you, not you write about yourself. Why is that so can be subject of all sorts of psychological and social speculations. There is a reticence and (perhaps a false) modesty about the matter. There might be something inhibitive about sharing in public what is believed to belong to the private domain. But none of these means that Iranians—men or women—have never reflected on their whereabouts in their history and culture. It also depends on how we define a narrative as “autobiographical.” Usually traveling around the world has been an occasion for writing autobiographical narratives. One of the earliest such accounts is that of the Isma’ili philosopher/poet Naser Khosrow (1003–1088), who wrote a detailed account of his travels from Khurasan to Egypt and Syria in a first person narrative. The same is true of Ibn Battuta (1304–1368) who at the age twenty began a journey around the world that took him almost thirty years to complete. The entire narrative of his Rihla is autobiographical. There is a whole spectrum of geographical surveyors in Arabic and Persian—like those of Ibn Hawqal (flourished circa 977) and Abu al-Fida’ (1273–1331)—that while traveling around the world to navigate and record its geography, their narratives is full of autobiographical reports. In Persian literature proper, one of the most prominent Persian poets of all time, Sa’di (1194–1292) was known for his extensive travels, which at some point landed him in the Crusader’s jails in Palestine. Sa’di’s Golestan and Bustan are full of autobiographical accounts of his visits and observations. Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi (1154–1191) has a whole series of short treatises that might be termed “spiritual autobiographies,” namely narrative prose in which he gives an account of the inner journeys ha has taken in his (alas very short) life traveling from one station of spiritual awareness to another. Before him Avicenna (980–1037) wrote a straightforward autobiography that after his death his student al-Juzjani completed. Al-Ghazali’s (1058–1111) al-Munqidh min al-Dhalal/Deliverance from Darkness is an equally important autobiography of one of the greatest Muslim philosophers of all time. Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201–1274), a great medieval philosopher and scientist, too, wrote what might be called his spiritual autobiography, Seyr-o Soluk. Later on the most distinguished Sixteenth-century Muslim philosopher Mulla Sadra Shirazi (1571–1640) wrote one of his major works, al-Asfar al-Arba’a/The Four Journeys again by way of a spiritual and philosophical narrative of travels toward truth. The same might be said about the Karamat (“miraculous”) literature, namely texts such as Shaykh Farid al-Din Attar’s (1142–1230) Tadhkira al-Awlia in which he gives biographical anecdotes about Muslim saints; or Muhammad ibn Munawwar al-Mihani’s Asrar al-Tawhid fi Maqamat Shaykh Abi Sa’id (967–1048), entirely devoted to the life and achievements of one of the greatest Sufi masters of all time. There are many other such saintly biographies, such as the voluminous work of Hafez Abu Nu’aim al-Isfahani’s Hellyat al-Awlia. The genre is not limited to Muslim mystics. Kings, Sultans, Viziers, the Prophet’s companions and their followers, philosophers, theologians, jurists, physicians, calligraphers, etc—there are endless volumes of such biographical dictionaries, ranging from sober outlines of people’s lives and their achievements to spiritual reflections on their saintly dispositions.
By the time we get to the nineteenth century, in part under the influence of such genres of auto/biographical accounts and in part under the influence of European travelogues, Iranians (as other Muslims) begin to travel around the world and write extensively on their observations. Most these narratives are specifically autobiographical. The genre very much continues in the twentieth century, where such public intellectuals as Jalal Al-Ahmad (1923–1969) and Gholamhossein Saedi (1935–1985) traveled around the world and throughout their own homeland extensively and published a record of their personal observations. Perhaps Jalal Al-e Ahmad was the most tireless among these travelers, journeying from Mecca to Israel, from Europe to the United States, and going (at times on foot) around Iran and writing extensively on his observations—again mostly in an autobiographical language. If reflection on personal matters were to be considered, Al-e Ahmad’s Sangi Bar Guri/A Tombstone, and his wife Simin Daneshvar’s Hamsaram Jalal/My Husband Jalal are among the most daring and brilliant personal accounts of perhaps the most famous literary couple of their own time (the Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir of Iran). But, again, both these accounts were written long after Al-e Ahmad and Simin Daneshvar had established themselves as the leading public intellectuals of their time.
[4]
The point of this short historical excursion is not to be exhaustive but simply to locate the current condition of young Iranian women’s autobiographical voices and visions in a larger frame of reference, thus to disallow their (perhaps inadvertent) assimilation into an essentialist attribution to any culture or religion, and (above all) to prevent it from being appropriated by the US neocons into the arsenal of their global designs on peoples and their cultures. This bit of a short historical background is necessary here in light of the massive anti-Muslim propaganda that particularly in the United States (though increasingly in Europe as well) has flooded the market since the commencement of this global (war on) terrorism. In this war, not just outdated theocracies such as the Islamic Republic, but an entire people, their multifaceted culture and religion, and the course of its historical vicissitudes are all subject to a systematic propaganda machinery. Because this emerging imperial project is predicated on no bona fide hegemony (yet), its would-be ideologues systematically seek to eradicate any culture of resistance that gives people a sense of dignity and pride of place. The principal function of people like Azar Nafisi is precisely to rob these nations of their own culture by suggesting that had it not been for the “masterpieces of Western literature,” she and the people she represents would be left to their own organic terrors. In this context, it is imperative not to allow the rise of a new body of literature to be assimilated into the dominant language of conquest and consistently frame it in various and convergent frames of references in direct opposition to the way they are ticketed by their conglomerate publishers and read by the bewildered public. Neocon artists like Nafisi and Roya Hakakian (and their respective publishers) can of course write and say whatever they wish, but they cannot be allowed systematically to malign a literary and cultural history they either deliberately distort (Nafisi) or of which they are astoundingly ignorant (Hakakian). Alternative sites of interpretation and frames of reference ought to oppose their lucrative business.
Against the dark background defined by Nafisi and Hakakian, the appearance of Marjane Satrapi on the scene was a luminous cause for celebration. In the context of the social history in which Iranian women have asserted their own vision, Satrapi has something quite unprecedented about her work—namely, her emplotment of her own life and character in a story that she tells about her nation at large, a fact entirely absent from the prevalent indulgence of lipstick Jihadists who are under the illusion that their life story (without being sublated into the story of their people) is of any significance to anyone other than themselves. If Neshat entered the scene of visual representation of Iranian/Muslim women from the most abstracted corners of her visual memories, and thus reached for the moral timber of her ancestral culture, Satrapi does so with a distinctly autobiographical disposition, sharing details with a globalized public beyond her own native culture, but in terms domestically emancipatory to its predicaments. In the safe haven of French and English prose, the entirely alien (to Iranians) genre of Bande Dessinée (BD), and living far from her homeland, she has found a refuge in which she can share the most hidden and private corners of her life, and then narrate them in an emancipatory language, at once severely critical of and yet affectionately rooted in her own culture. This in and of itself is an extraordinary achievement. While Nafisi has invented seven little Lolitas, seven fictitious and unbelievable objects of her own erotic imagination, Satrapi (just like Neshat) places her own body and soul, vision and fate, at the center of her narrative—and from there reaches for the farthest corners of her cultural ailments and the global condition that aggravates it, and yet all of this in an entirely disarming, unassuming, honest, and simple language.
What, as a result, might ordinarily be considered the weakest aspects of Satrapi’s narrative, namely the fact that she has written an autobiographical narrative of her growing up in Iran and Europe at a relatively young age when much of her life and its achievements are still ahead of her, in a rather circuitous way turns around and in fact become its strongest aspects, namely the fact that she writes without the slightest hesitation about the most intimate aspects of her life—her privileged upbringing, her bourgeois preoccupations at a time when her poorer cohorts were being gunned down on the Iran-Iraq battlefronts, her bewilderment in Europe, her premarital sex, her drug addictions (to the point that at a time she even becomes a drug pusher at her school in Vienna), her denial of her identity as an Iranian, her subsequent identity crisis in Iran, her having lived as a homeless vagabond for a few months in Vienna, her bout of manic depression, her attempted suicide, etc. These are not the sorts of stuff of which a young woman of her class and distinction (or any other class and distinction for that matter) writes publicly. The fact that she has broken this taboo and written of these aspects of her life (in a simple and straightforward language that her BD persona has made possible)—for as an obscure person she has had much less at stake—is an exceedingly important event. In this respect, Satrapi is very much like Neshat who too began by picturing and videoing herself at the center of her photographic memorials to her homeland—though in a far more stylized and abstracted visual mannerism. Satrapi, too, begins to reflect on the fate of her nation by placing her own autobiography at the pictorial center of her recollections. Between the two of them, Neshat and Satrapi are generating an entire spectrum of visual and verbal memories of their nation in a manner at once critical and creative, judgmental and forgiving, domestic to the predicament of a nation and yet universal to larger frames of references—one in a consistently stylized visualization of their enduring predicaments, and the other in the microcosmic details of a child and her family trying to make sense of an otherwise senseless violence that has engulfed their nation.
Satrapi represents a whole new generation of young artists, at once Iranian and yet not Iranian, European and American, and yet not quite so—transnational in the most positive and affirmative senses of the term. They do not write in Persian and by and large lack an audience inside Iran. Their audience is not Iranian, not just because they write and publish in French or English, but because the very cast of their creative character is formed outside Iran, and if one were to translate and publish them in Persian, the result may range from being ridiculously obvious to obviously ridiculous. This does not mean that they do not have something quite serious to say to everyone, Iranians included. The problem revolves around the central question of who is their audience. The assumption that the audience is “the West” is equally flawed—because (1) “the West” no longer exists, and (2) because these authors by and large come from the marginal periphery of their host societies, and have rarely an integral connection to their artistic, intellectual, or academic institutions. Their fate thus oscillates between two diametrically opposed audiences: At worst, they are read by bored and boring suburban kaffeeklatsch, while propagated by US neocons for a global manufacturing of consent to an otherwise predatory imperial project, while at their best they claim and appropriate their parental cultures for a larger, wider, and global audience, without forgiving its hidden horrors, and yet with a pride of place, a joy of belonging, a confidence of membership. If the marketable disease that is Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran has now metastasized in the direction of Hakakian’s Journey from the Land of No and from there to a whole industry for lipstick Jihadists and their neocon advocates; the emancipatory vision of Neshat has now spread and sprouted wisely satirical and frivolously serious into the joyous sight that is Satrapi.
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What are the specific terms of this emancipation in the case of Satrapi? Precisely because there is an avalanche of Iranian women’s memoir flooding the market, practically all of them written by young women addressing the US (and by extension the global) audience and in one way or another exposing the masculinist maladies of Iranian culture, it is imperative not to mix them altogether. All of them (even the worst of them) have a certain advantage of generating a critical mass of energy about a subject much globally neglected. True, Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis have planted their own Trojan Horse in this group and can abuse the entire genre to their advantage. But the task of a critical community is to counter those readings and oppose the notion that Iranian women are the functional equivalents of seven little Lolitas trapped in an Oriental harem with a Scheherazade who takes suggestive showers before telling them tales from “the masterpieces of Western literature” and thus seeking to save their poor souls until such time that a European Prime Minister or an American President (or preferably both) finally put on their shining armors, get on their flying horse and go and save these brown women, as Gayatri Spivak would say, from their brown men (an Abu Ghraib torture chamber and a Falluja massacre at a time).
To propose an alternative reading of Iranian women and their struggles, it is imperative to be more patient with this genre and from the very outset make a categorical distinction between an Nafisi and a Satrapi. These are two entirely different phenomena. The easiest way to make this case is to refer to the Op-Ed pieces that Azar Nafisi has written for the beacon of hope for humanity The Wall Street Journal, and the essays and articles that Satrapi has published in Europe, such as in the British daily Guardian. The vast differences between an Iranian debutante joining the US neocons, working hard to facilitate the global domination of their predatory Empire, and a free, independent, and critical thinker and artist who is as much mindful of the atrocities of the Islamic Republic and fanatical Islamism as she is of Nafisi’s employers at SAIS and the Pentagon and their European allies will be immediately evident. The significance of the work of an artist like Satrapi, however, has to be assayed in terms domestic to her art—in this case her highly effective use of the genre of Band Dessinée. For it is in her art, not in her politics, that Satrapi is an extraordinary force in globalizing the noble cause of women’s emancipation in her homeland.
How are we to read Satrapi? I must confess at the very outset that my overwhelming affection for Satrapi’s work has a lot to do with the way I first read her. It must have been almost a year before the English translation of her Persepolis: A Story of Childhood (2003) hit the market that her US publisher sent me a galley proof copy of her book to read and comment. It may indeed have something to do with the fact that I first read Satrapi in galleys, the way we used to read some of the banned book in Iran, that I have developed an almost childlike delight in reading through her work. I read the second volume of her book, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004), and the subsequent Embroideries (2005), soon after they were published in hardcover, but the enduring memory of those galley pages have stayed with me.
As a provincial teenager, having just landed in a bus terminal in Tehran, after a long night journey from my hometown Ahvaz in southern province of Khuzestan, somehow a piece of rumpled up paper found its way into my hands. Who gave that piece of paper to me, what were the circumstances, and who had prepared it I have no clue or clear recollection. I must have necessarily repressed such dangerous details. It was a poor carbon copy of a list of books on top of which a centered line read: “List-e Kutub-e Zalleh” (“The List of Books that Will Misguide You”)! It was a list published by SAVAK, the dreaded secret police looking after the late Muhamamd Reza Shah’s monarchy. That list, to make a four-year long story short, became my Core Curriculum, as they call it in US colleges. I read systematically through that list as if it was handed down to me by a college dean on whose list I happen to have landed. To this day I still remember the non-Persian books on that list with their Persian titles: Jack London’s Ava-ye Vahsh/The Call of the Wild, Ethel Lillian Voynich’s Kharmagas/Gadfly, John Steinbeck’s Khusheh-ha-ye Khasham/Grapes of Wrath, Bertolt Brecht’s Naneh Delavar/Mother Courage and Dayereh-ye Gachi Qafqazi/The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Emile Zola’s Zherminaal/Germinal, Ignazio Silone’s Nan-o-Sharab/Bread and Wine, Maxim Gorky’s Daneshkadeh-ha-ye Man/My Universities, Stendhal’s Sorkh-o-Siah/The Red and the Black, Pearl Buck’s Khak-e Khub/The Good Earth, Shakespeare’s Haamlet/Hamlet. Yes, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Apparently the secret police did not want young impressionable people read about a college student who killed the king!
Most of these books had worn-out or non-existent covers, the frequency of sweaty and nervous hands thumbing through them having left their meditative and probing traces. Something of that street-smart intelligence days of defying tyrannous power is evident about Satrapi’s work, not taking herself too seriously, but with an iron will holding her tightly to a set of tacit principles, personified endearingly in her grandmother, she holds self-evident. This is evident, and thus the significance of Satrapi’s work, not so much in what she says but in how she says it. What she actually says about Iran (its history, politics, culture, etc.) is in fact quite prosaic and rather cliché—and above all pretty much limited to her class-consciousness, incapable as she is to transcend it. You will read page after page of her three books in search of something that might surprise you—but all in vain. Every single detail of her reports has been repeated so many times in and out of Iran that at some basic point Persepolis reads like a catalogue of clichés about the revolutionary Iran. The significance of Satrapi’s work is not in the narrative that carries it but in the form that holds that narrative, the street-wise sharpness that from Iran to Austria held their author morally together.
To understand the significance of her work, it is imperative not to let Satrapi’s art, her deceptively simple narrative, degenerate into an anthropological primer as Contemporary Iranian Politics. The elements of her life story are quite simple and straightforward but they point, through their pictorial narrative, to something different. She was born about ten years before the Islamic revolution of 1979; she was a teenager when it unfolded its wings; she shared her parents initial enthusiasm about the revolution; she saw and participated with her parents in the anti-Shah demonstrations and soon after witnesses the radical Islamization of a national liberation movement—the US Hostage Crisis, the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war, the relocation of war-torn families, the imposition of a strict Islamist code of conduct, dress code and prohibition of alcohol in particular, the persecution of the left, the massive immigration of the middle class abroad, the defiance of the younger generation of those who remind inside, etc.—all seen and recorded through the eyes of an initially sweet little precocious girl and later a rambunctious and angry teenager. Satrapi endured the first four years of the Iran-Iraq war; she got into a quarrel with her school authorities; and soon after that her parents sent her to Austria to continue with her education. She was fourteen years old at that time and that’s the story of Persepolis I—which ends when she boards an airplane and leaves Tehran for Vienna. Nothing about the content of that account is surprising, revealing, extraordinary, or even engaging.
Persepolis II picks up the story from Austria, where Satrapi’s parents have sent their teenage daughter so that she can resume her education in presumably safer conditions. Here she begins to experience the life of a young expatriate teenager first at a friend of her mother’s for a short time, then at a Catholic boarding house, from there to a friend’s (Julie’s) home, after that at a Wohngemeinschfat (communal apartment), leaving it for a room with a Frau Doctor Heller, right before she becomes a homeless vagabond living off the streets and park benches, which eventually lands her on a hospital bed, from which she then packs and goes back to Iran—disheartened, disappointed, forlorn. This is the first part of Persepolis II, where Satrapi tells more or less familiar stories about those who could leave the war-torn Islamic Republic—stories of cultural dislocation, identity crisis, sexual emancipation, exposure to new ideas, experiment with drugs, falling in love, being emotionally abused and left on the verge of mental collapse, and finally a return to Iran with a search for safety, identity, and happiness, all to be dashed out with an even more confused predicament in her own homeland that ultimately leads her even to try to kill herself. This is how the second and final part of Persepolis II proceeds. But she finally pulls herself up, meets a young veteran of Iran-Iraq war named Reza, falls in love and marries him, they both get accepted at art school, her marriage collapses, she divorces her husband, and finally on 9 September 1994, at the age of almost twenty-five, she packs and leaves Iran for good—“This time,” her mother tells her at Mehrabad Airport, “you’re leaving for good. You are a free woman. The Iran of today is not for you. I forbid you to come back!” (PII: 187) Bar that implication of that last political jab—that half the population of an entire nation consists of “slave women”—none of the actual stories of Persepolis II are news to Iranians themselves. They are the walking embodiments of these stories, even more colorful and daunting ones.
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The triumph of Satrapi is in the noble struggle evident in her pages between two mighty nemeses: her class-consciousness on one side and her critical intelligence on the other. The battle is incomplete, inconclusive, undetermined. But to wage it is a sign of a noble soul, to witness it a privilege.
Before that battle even begins, and long before the formal poise and demeanor of Persepolis ultimately rescues its narrative limitations, its fundamental flaw remains Satrapi’s rather run-of-the-mill, anti-Islamist, war-on-terrorism, life-for-women-in-Iran-is-hell, and they should (if they only could) get out of their own country in order to be free, sort of a language, the language of “Islamic fundamentalism” that both in its French original, but even more so in its English translation, is of a textbook, garden variety (war on) terrorism sort. When the text of a work of art becomes a floating signifier that can be communally interpreted then that makes it exceedingly susceptible to systematic abuse by its imposing contexts. The most serious problem with Persepolis is the English translation of Satrapi’s narrative that combines the most cliché-ridden episodes and anecdotes of both revolutionary Iran and post-revolutionary Iranian expatriate experiences with the post-9/11 US war-on-terrorism vernacular. This is not to suggest that its original French is immune to the colloquial lingo of (war on) terrorism. But given the global currency of American English parlance and its attendant anti-Islamic lingo the problem is particularly acute in its American English, where the words “fundamentalism” and “fundamentalist,” as well as Islam and Islamism, have all now emerged as the code-terms of catering to the worst anti-Muslim sentiments of the post-9/11 US political culture. The narrative of Satrapi’s Persepolis I and Persepolis II is trapped in this lingo.
In this respect, the English diction of the prose, catering to US global (war on) terrorism lexicography, becomes jarringly ahistorical. Such expressions as “the fundamentalist students have taken American hostages” (PI: 72) are entirely apocryphal, as is “tomorrow [sometime in 1979] there’s going to be a meeting against fundamentalism” (PI: 76), or speaking of the cause of Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), “the Iranian fundamentalists tried to stir up their Iraqi fundamentalists against Saddam” (PI: 79), or even more vividly the chart that Satrapi puts together (PI: 75) of “the fundamentalist woman” versus “the modern woman” (which looks like her mother) and “the fundamentalist man” versus “the progressive man (which looks like her father). It is in the same context that Islam is reported to be “more or less against shaving” (PI: 75). There are many other similar examples of the anachronistic infiltration of the language of the post-9/11 US (war on) terrorism in Satrapi’s narrative, all leading to such outlandish expressions as “our government wasn’t composed of Arab invaders but Persian fundamentalists” (PII: 139).
All of these expressions speak a post-9/11 English projected back to a pre-9/11 Persian. Such uses of “fundamentalism” are entirely apocryphal, and the English translators of Satrapi catering to post-9/11 American lingo, now globally conjugated in all other languages—including (paradoxically) Persian itself, where the term “usulgara,” of a very recent vintage, is used triumphantly by the religious right. This, perhaps, is the most troubling aspect of what Satrapi actually says, her English prose consistently catering to the American (war on) terrorism vernacular. It is perfectly clear that her English translator/Editor (a certain Anjali Singh at Pantheon) is chiefly responsible for this catastrophe—making Satrapi palatable to the post-9/11 sentiments and lingo that her publisher wishes to reach. But Satrapi herself cannot be completely innocent in the production of this language (She speaks four languages. She knows how language works). The trouble with this exceedingly upsetting aspect of Persepolis is not just that it tends to assimilate Satrapi to her exact opposites among the lipstick Jihadists, but that by extension vastly different historical developments such as the Iranian revolution of 1979, the rise of Taliban in Afghanistan, the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (and their aftermath) are all coagulated together and fed to the US global (war on) terrorism—the single most fictitious ideological camouflage to cover, package, and sell US imperialism around the world.
The problem with this language is not merely the aggressive incorporation of an otherwise extraordinary work of art into the lexicon of imperial domination that has now even verbally very much arrested the political discourse of reading the world. The verbal poverty of this language leads to an even more distorted visions of a multifaceted society. When on a ski trip with her friends soon after she comes back to Iran, Satrapi shares with them the fact that she has had a few sexual encounters while in Europe. She reports them to have become absolutely aghast at the idea. “So, what’s the difference between you and a whore,” she reports her friends objecting (PII: 116). From which Satrapi concludes: “Underneath their outward appearance of being modern, my friends were real traditionalist … To them I had become a decadent western woman” (PII: 116).
The assumption here, predicated on an “Islam versus modernity” or “Islam versus the West” bipolarity, that young woman of Satrapi’s class (on a ski trip enjoying themselves in the richest and most opulent part of the country) have no premarital sex and are absolutely horrified at the idea that one of their cohorts has had a few sexual encounters while in Vienna is of course a joke, which we cannot quite tell if she has played on her French and American editors, or else they have collectively sought to play on her French and American readers. The problem though is that between half way through Persepolis II and the writing of her third book Embroideries (2005) the continuity person in charge of the script has apparently forgotten the storyline, or at least Satrapi and her editors hope her readers have forgotten about this piece of disinformation, and she proceeds to write a whole (rather hilarious) book on how young women of her class in Iran fake their virginity by subjecting themselves to a self-mutilating surgical procedure that presumably restores their broken hymen! If young women of Satrapi’s class are so scandalized in the middle of Persepolis II that she has had a couple of sexual encounters in Europe, then why throughout Embroideries they are having a ball, as it were, talking about the ins and outs of surgically restoring their virginity? The point is the phrase, “underneath their outward appearance of being modern women, my friends were real (sic) traditionalists.” This may indeed be the case, but not because they categorically abstain from premarital sex. They do not. But the fabrication of a “traditional society” full of repressed virgins waiting to be liberated by “the West” is pretty much in full throttle here, as it is when while in Vienna, Satrapi goes to a party (PII: 31), where for the first time she sees young people having intimacies, “and then I was turned off by all these public displays of affection. What do you expect, I came from a traditionalist country” (PII: 31).Yes indeed, all her 14 years of living in a “traditionalist country.” A couple of more years, and things would have been different for Satrapi in the same old “traditionalist country.” Again—the projection of a standardized cliché, “tradition versus modernity,” aggravated by a post-9/11 lexicography, casts a thick layer of old countries full of repressed virgins, all waiting to be delivered, on an otherwise entirely different world is evident in Persepolis.
As all other great works of art, however, the formal power of Persepolis (nested in its narrative tropes) survives its substantive flaws—caught as it is in the nasty and macabre snares of the US (war on) terrorism. Persepolis is an emancipatory work of liberation not because of what Satrapi says, but because how she says it. What strikes me as by far the most significant aspect of Satrapi’s work is her genre, what the French call Bande Dessinée, a narrative ploy almost exclusive to French and Francophone cultures.28 Bande Dessinée (BD for short and BD’s for plural, meaning “Drawn Strips,”) differs in many ways from what in the US is called “funies,” or “superhero comics” with a whole range of underground variations. In France and Francophone contexts, where it is referred to as the “Ninth Art” (la neuvième art), BD has assumed a thoroughly cultic significance, with voluminous copies of Tintin and Asterix (in particular) as the common staple of French and Francophone childhood and adolescence.29 The history, origin, readership, (political) culture, format, design, and altogether the Weltanschauung of BD are all rather drastically different in its European context than they are in its American milieu. As a child and then young adult attending a French school first in Tehran and subsequently in Vienna, Satrapi must have grown up on BD’s.
In its European context, the publication of a Bande Dessinée autobiography about a precocious young girl growing up in an Islamic Republic registers immediately with the historical opposition of the Catholic Church with the genre, leading the Church in fact to produce and distribute its own version of the genre in terms and manners conducive to a Christian morality. In its American context, however, Satrapi is increasingly compared to Art Spiegelman, the author/artist of the extraordinary work Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) and Maus II: From Mauschwitz to the Catskills (1991), which means the selfsame autobiographical Bande Dessinée is here assimilated into the genre of a graphic novel about the Holocaust, and thus identifying the predicament of growing up in an Islamic Republic with the terror of living under the shadow of the Holocaust. Pantheon, the US publisher of Satrapi and also of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, goes so far as in fact manufacturing Satrapi’s book precisely on the model of Maus and Maus II, and re-arranging the original four French editions into a similar set of two volumes, Persepolis and Persepolis II. These are two, rather vastly different, contexts for the same work of art—while in the French and Francophone context, Satrapi’s work attends to the anti-clerical trait in the European Enlightenment; in its US context (now the globally dominant), it identifies the Islamic Republic with the horrors of the Holocaust. As a Francophone Iranian, growing up between Iran and Europe, Satrapi herself is totally attuned to her European reception and readership; but the same cannot be said of her American reception. Obviously, it is a great honor for a young artist to be compared to Art Spiegelman—but what political implications go along with that honor is a whole different story. Whether the systematic extermination of the European Jews under the Nazis can be compared with any other atrocity in human history, or more specifically is it the functional equivalent of an Islamic Republic and whatever range of atrocities it may and it has committed, is a question that in this context will remain politically moot but suggestively marketable. In this respect, Satrapi’s Persepolis becomes dangerously close to Hakakian’s Journey from the Land of No, were it not saved by its innately superior intelligence.
Be that as it may, and with a critical difference between its European and American contexts, Satrapi’s Persepolis ushers into the genre of BD a critical Iranian take rather unprecedented in its cultural provenance. One may of course consider the rich and diversified tradition of illustrated manuscripts as the Iranian (medieval) version of BD. One might even point to the extraordinary work of such contemporary Iranian artists as Ardeshir Mohassess, Nikzad Nodjumi, and Farshid Mesqali, as similar in spirit if not in form. But the genre of BD as it is now globally recognized has a specifically French and Francophone provenance, entirely new to Iranian sensibilities. The creative wedding of that genre with a young Iranian artist’s sensibilities has been extraordinarily successful, and has resulted in a visual narrative of unprecedented beauty, poignancy, subtlety, honesty, and depth. While its European and American contexts pull Satrapi’s work into two rather divergent directions, in her work she in fact generates her own emotive universe, irreducible to either of those two worlds.
Against all these commercial traps and political abuses, however, stands triumphantly, Satrapi’s creative defiance. But how does she do it? One principal narrative anchorage of Persepolis and Embroideries, definitive to their own emotive universe irrespective of and in fact resistant to all its contextual abuses, is the character of Satrapi’s grandmother. The way Satrapi constructs this character, she is principally in charge of holding the narrator’s moral fabric together. There is a scene when the 14-year-old Marjane is about to leave Iran for Austria and her grandmother has come to spend the night with her. As her grandmother gets ready to come to bed, Satrapi notices (PI: 150) how the little jasmine flowers the graceful lady habitually placed in her bra (“so that she would smell nice”) were falling down. This is a scene of idyllic beauty that graces, almost like a dream, the memories of Satrapi’s last night of her childhood (in Iran). After that night she moves to Austria, and beyond Austria she is no longer a child, not even a complete Iranian, anymore. But the central character of her grandmother, visually iconic in this scene, remains definitive to the moral texture of her character. In her darkest days and during her most trying circumstances while away from Iran, at a time that she all but denied and buried her own heritage (PII: 40), this scene of her last embracing of her childhood in the jasmine-scented bosom of her grandmother kept her going. Years later, when Satrapi has grown up and come back to Tehran and is now a student at a college of arts, she once does an exceedingly nasty and obnoxious thing and in order to divert the attention of the morality police she falsely accuses an innocent young man for having harassed her. She goes home and laughingly shares the story with her grandmother, who is not amused by this wicked act and abusive behavior and for days does not even speak to her. Later, the grandmother emerges as the central figure of Satrapi’s Embroideries—wise, witty, flamboyant, the defining grace of a family, and with that family the culture she graciously personifies. By identifying more than anyone else with her grandmother, Satrapi in effect holds the ethical universe of her culture together. This is the central significance and ultimate superiority of Satrapi’s manner of storytelling to that of all these lipstick Jihadist. Satrapi’s characters, all real and tangible people, are at once dramatis personae of the stories she tells and the metaphoric manners of her culture at large.
One of the most astounding aspects of the manner of storytelling of the lipstick Jihadists is how extremely boring they are. They have a moderately competent command over the English prose and write about extremely important and dramatic events—wars, revolutions, cultural dislocation, violent and abrupt changes in their lives—and yet it is a punishing task to read through two pages of their stories. In the case of Satrapi, it is exactly the opposite. It is literally a page-turner, and not only because of her command of an exquisite black-and-white graphic at once darkly humorous and pointedly raw. In the narrative itself, there is consistency in the character of the narrator herself that hovers figuratively around the extended shadow of the grandmother, whether she is in the picture or not. The figure of Satrapi’s grandmother is central in holding her cultural meanderings together, as she moves from Iran to Europe, from Europe back to Iran, and finally packs and leaves Iran (after a short and failed marriage) for good. Central to Satrapi’s zigzagging in and out of her homeland is the memorial evidence of a moral universe, code-named “culture,” that is a reality sui generis, upon which then it makes no difference where one is hanging her hat and calls it home. Home is where the canopy of that jasmine-scented shade graces the corner of a confidence. What Satrapi thus universalizes is not exactly “Iran,” but the hope that has always sustained the figment of that particular imagination. One may consider Satrapi bicultural or multicultural, but there is something consistent about the normative habitat of her whereabouts that holds her character and culture together, beyond her shifting borders and through her colorful passports. Europe and Iran thus cease to be two absolutist claims to two exclusive cultural universes in Satrapi’s narratives and commingle to become two corrective lenses of a complete and sculpted vision—from which she then commences to see not the world of her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, but the global configuration of a world now categorically cast away from the bosom of any peace and serenity. That kind of wisdom does not come with age. It comes with a critical intelligence in creative conversation with the universe of one’s lived experiences—and Satrapi commands it with detailed precision.
One may try to account for the solidity of this emancipatory vision by pointing to a very strong progressive tradition in Satrapi’s family—particularly his uncle Anoosh, a leftist revolutionary imprisoned under the Pahlavis, released from jail temporarily, and then executed by the Islamists soon afterward—a figure with whom Satrapi politically most identifies (PI: 70). One may also trace her no-nonsense political sharpness to her years of affiliation with a group of anarchists in Europe—Enrique, her first boyfriend, was a half-Austrian, half-Spanish anarchist (PII: 54–55). Between her uncle Anoosh and her first boyfriend Enrique, Satrapi covers the range of her progressive politics, which is neither completely Iranian nor exclusively European, but instead revives a kind of transnational solidarity that was once definitive to generations of leftist activist around the globe. That kind of cosmopolitan radicalism was an integral interlocutor to everything that politically happened in Iran and its environs—everything, including the radical Islamism that ultimately outmaneuvered it in the course of the Islamic revolution. “What will you do if you succeed,” a pious Muslim activist once in the late 1940’s asked a radical Marxist friend of his who later became very near and dear to me. “We will hang you all Muslim fanatics by your balls from these lamp posts,” the aging Marxist revolutionary remembered having told his Muslim friend and classmate, only half in jest. “What will you do if you succeed,” the Marxist revolutionary asked the genteel Muslim activist. “We will educate you,” the soft-spoken Muslim had answered—and they would both burst into uncontrollable laughter whenever they jointly told this story to their younger friends, their graying hair and fragile bodies shaking in reminisces of their fiercer dispositions. There is a tacit trace of that enduring dialogue, later degenerated at large to atrocious battles in the street, in the wise gaze and joyous intelligence of Satrapi. But such traces are ultimately integral to a more solid narrative character that shoots sharply through all her trials and tribulations, in and out of her homeland, in and out of Europe, at home nowhere in particular, and yet at ease with the tested timber of her own character. It is the straight-arrow disposition of that character that ultimately holds the narrative formality of Satrapi’s work together—rough hew it how she may in the vernacular of her unfortunate US (war on) terrorism lexicography.
There is a forgiving intelligence about Satrapi’s attendance upon her culture, fully aware of (even critically conversant with) her own class and parentage, and yet consistently resisting demonization of others. In a book inundated with the categorical (and perfectly justified) condemnation of a brute and brutal theocracy, Satrapi still posit a particularly judicious, kind, and caring cleric who is in charge of making sure she is ideologically correct before she is admitted to college. This particular cleric turns out to be a descent man (PII: 130), who despite the fact that sees Satrapi as an entirely irreconcilable secular non-believer raises no objection to her college admittance. The entirety of the book is so full of just and legitimate criticism of the theocracy that this one case amounts to nothing more than an exception that proves the rule of the horrid clerical class now ruling over the nation. But the case is so perfectly timely that it is sufficient to prevent the radical demonization of an entire people, and with them the nation that has given birth to them. Compare that singular act of redemption in Satrapi’s work with the systematically, consistently, and unfailingly demonic disposition with which Nafisi describes in her Reading Lolita in Tehran not just the ruling elite in the Islamic Republic but with them the nation at large—thus paving the way for the argument that Paul Wolfowitz should go and liberate them. The same exceptional cleric later enters the scene again when Satrapi raises yet another spectacle by objecting to the dictates of clothing at her college. Again, without twisting the truth or forgiving any indecency, Satrapi shows how between her and the exceptional cleric, she sets to design a manner of veiling that is both acceptable to the turgid authorities and yet convenient for the students (PII: 144). Before the chapter is over, the prophetic figure of the grandmother appears in a frame to assure her granddaughter how justly proud of her she is. Are Azar Nafisi and Marjane Satrapi from the same country, writing about the same people—one so vindictive, vicious, fanatical in every item of her utterances about her own culture, conspiring against her own people, sitting side by side global warmongers and ignoble liars; the other so straight in her moral rectitude, unforgiving of her own cultural malaise, and yet a caring intelligence written in every sentence and drawn in every picture of her story?
Satrapi’s moral and political triumph in striking her balanced perceptions becomes particularly poignant if her narrative vision is placed within her consistently evident class-consciousness, a location from the midst of which she is yet to escape—for which she has to go to a different flying field than Tehran Mehrabad airport. Persepolis is inundated with a myriad of poor and ordinary people who appear in Satrapi’s stories as sealed and signed villains—villains with no history, no origin, no purpose. They are bearded and veiled, and as such seem to have no claim to any location in their own homeland. These are projected as the ideological enemies of Satrapi, people in position of power, the Islamists, the ruling elite. But the fact to which these attributes and Satrapi’s vision are both blind is the fate of the urban and rural poor and the downtrodden. The Islamic revolution was the revolution of the poor, not the revolution of the ideologically sophisticated, politically multicultural, and culturally cosmopolitan—all of which categorically and miserably failed to be conversant with the poor people. The legitimate hostility of Satrapi toward the ruling elite glides ever so imperceptibly over into the class disdain that she and her family harbor for the poor, identifying their veiled bodies and bearded faces with evil. It is not just the ruling elite that dons those icons. They took it from the poor. That the ruling elite demanded and brutally exacted veiling from everyone was in part an act of class warfare and historical revenge—the revenge of the poor against the obscenely rich, the class that used its European dressing tastes as the single most socially visible manner of publicly registering its class privileges and economic distinctions. The revenge of the poor was as brutal, horrid and tyrannical as the parading of the wealth that preceded it—one atrocity following another. To gloss over this brutal class warfare, and posit a progressive, modern, and liberated figure (for all Iranians to look like Satrapi’s family—PI: 76) on one side, and a backward, vicious, and fanatical class on the other reads very well with bourgeois international and its (war on) terrorism, but not with lived reality. Satrapi was and remained within an exclusively privileged family—and she wrote her memoir for the whole world to read from the bosom of that privilege, unable to transcend her class and transgress her own consciousness.
Like most other members of her class, Satrapi grew up in a family that had an in-house servant, her name was Mehri (PI: 34–39)—and no dignity of a last name here. This Mehri, born and raised in a village and then with unsurpassed cruelty separated from her own parents by being effectively sold into slavery to the Satrapi family, is only ten years older than Satrapi and is in fact principally in charge of raising her—feeding her, changing her diapers, bathing her, playing with her, washing her clothe, and putting her to sleep, altogether a personal slave. Mehri once had the audacity of actually falling in love with a young neighbor, and in order to impress her potential suitor she pretends to be the daughter of the Satrapi family. Satrapi’s father, like his wife quite diligent in the moral and political upbringing of their own daughter, finds out and goes straight to the young man across the street and tells him that Mehri is not his daughter but in fact his maid. The man returns Mehri’s love letters to Mr. Satrapi. One look at the letters and Mr. Satrapi realizes they are in the handwriting of his own daughter Marjane, helping the illiterate Mehri write her love letters. He takes them to Marjane and demands an explanation, and then adds, by way of truth and admonition, “in this country you must stay within your own social class” (PI: 37)—(as opposed, one is left to surmise, to other countries where people are provided with a vast system of social services to rise above their social classes). What Mr. Satrapi attributes exclusively to his country is exclusive to his class across all nations, cultures, and continents— and it is the opposite class, the class of Mehri that (in search of their last name) launched that revolution, wore that veil, and grew that beard. There is a scene where Marjane forces Mehri to take her out to participate in a demonstration. Mehri first objects and says that they are not allowed. “Don’t worry,” says the little Marjane, oblivious to her class privileges, “we are going anyway.” (PI: 38). They go anyway, and when they come back, Mrs. Satrapi is very angry and slaps Mehri in the face for having taken Marjane to a political demonstration. Well—other Mehri’s who were not slave to any Satrapi family did go out to demonstrations, sacrificed their lives, and toppled the regime that had secured the Satrapi’s their class privileges and their progressive political ideas—and the privilege of raising a progressive and creative daughter.
No one is ipso facto guilty by virtue of having been born into a certain class and its privileges or disadvantages, its latent potentials or evident banalities. The question is when and how one transcends them. As evident from the very first two pages of Persepolis I (before the illustrations start), in which by way of a prolegomena, Marjane Satrapi gives a history Iran of the last 4000 years in two pages, to every other page in Persepolis I and Persepolis II, she gives an account of Iranian history straight out of the upper middle class, bourgeois anxieties of her sentiments, to which she is of course entitled with perfect reason and justification, claiming, as she does, the entirety of her homeland, now domestically dominated and globally maligned. The class privilege of her perspective, however, opens up her vision to things that she does not see and things she does not say. Consider her schooling. There were two major French lycée in Tehran. Lycée Jean D’Arc in downtown Tehran (in Manuchehri Avenue) and Lycée Razi in uptown Tehran (Pahlavi Avenue—all these names have now changed to the names of Shi’i saints and Muslim martyrs). Lycée Jean D’Arc was an all-girl school, run by French nuns, with an extraordinarily demanding and superior curriculum. Lycée Razi was a mixed school, located in the posh uptown area called Shemiran, with a far inferior curriculum, and much easier to get accepted if you came from the right (wrong) family and/or had enough money. Students with a superior academic credentials went to Lycée Jean D’Arc. Students with less scholastic ambitions, but from the upper middle class Northern Tehrani neighborhoods went to Lycée Razi. Students of Lycée Razi used to be taken to the Pahlavi court to play (soccer for example) with then Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Well-to-do families in these parts of Tehran used to debate whether to opt for a mixed school where their children could grow up with the opposite sex and the future ruling elite, or else opt for a superior curriculum but a single sex education under the strict control of French nuns.
Marjane Satrapi went to Lycée Razi (PII: 122). This speaks much less of her academic status than her social class—and thus the location of her class-consciousness. The row of Rolls Royce’s and Mercedes Benz’s that crowded the Pahlavi Avenue at the time that students were discharged from Lycée Razi were in sharp contrast to the exceedingly modest but hardcore Catholic learning environment of Lycée Jean D’Arc in Manuchehri Avenue and the hustle-bustle of its neighborhood. Not all the students who went to Lycée Jean D’Arc were poor either. But suffice it to say that Atusa Rushdipour (a pseudonym for someone once very near and still very dear to me) who went to Lycée Jean D’Arc later became a revolutionary activist upon her arrival in Paris in 1976, abandoned her promising career as a brilliant architect studying at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, joined the most radical branch of the Fada’ian-e Khalq organization, became active in armed resistance against the Islamic Republic, was arrested by the French police and spent many precious years of her life in jail, always fearful that she might be extradited to the Islamic Republic, in which case she would have been instantly executed. It is sociologically safe to suggest that no Atusa Rushdipour came out of Lycée Razi.
So, does this mean that former students of Lycée Jean D’Arc and their poorer cohorts in regular Iranian public schools make history and then former students of Lycée Razi and their extended relations among the Iranian secular elite write it? To be sure, there is plenty of history being written in Iran by the propaganda machinery of the Islamic Republic itself, penned by the ideological custodians of the Islamic Republic in Persian and for domestic consumption. Is the writing of a history by an autonomous artist like Marjane Satrapi also part of machinery, of perhaps a different kind? No ministry of Islamic or anti-Islamic anything has commissioned Satrapi to write a book. What threatens Satrapi’s work, instead, is its aggressive mutation in the US market into a miasmatic mass of an entirely different commerce, and thus its predicament is integral to the production, publication, and reception of a book like Persepolis. There is a symbiosis of presumed common interest among the major US publishing conglomerates like Random House and Pantheon, the market they wish to reach, and the vast network of a propaganda machinery that best represented by Fox News is in the business of manufacturing consent. Vastly different—in both its politics and its poetry—from all the lipstick Jihadists put together, Satrapi’s work is always in the danger of being assimilated into that lucrative crowd. The difficulty, however, that this propaganda machinery faces with Satrapi is that her creative and defiant disposition, opting for a visual medium of creative frivolity, does not completely allow for a fixated signifier and teases its anarchic disposition from the midst of the inanities of the American journalistic barbarism. That barbarity may see Satrapi as a trophy and seek to appropriate it. But in that respect, she is a Trojan Horse.
If class privileges of an author/artist were not narratively anchored and formally challenged, then there is a rather unfortunate trajectory that links any story of national liberation to a transnational, whitewashed, bourgeoisie that at the time of (war on) terrorism feeds right into a global emancipation for the predatory capital and all its beneficiaries. It is at this point that a conglomerate press like Pantheon will see to it that Persepolis caters to a readership that accommodates those sentiments rather lucratively. But once the transnational bourgeoisie pulls one particular class out of its national configuration and takes it for a global spin then a whole different operation is set in motion. Within the limits of any national liberation project, disenfranchised by and thus opposing the transnational capital, any class privilege is integral to the formation of the larger societal reconfiguration of people—people in transition, people in flux, people subject to waves of labor migration, and then above all people who fall in between, escape categories, defy designations, run away from the systematic reification, as George Lukács called it, of their consciousness.
[7]
Thus the global configuration of transnational bourgeoisie is directly linked to the thorny issue of the readership of Satrapi. Who actually reads Persepolis? Whoever the readers of these books are—either in its European or in its American context—they are certainly not Iranians living in their own homeland. Not just in their language (French or English) and the location of their publication (France or the United States), but in the very cast of their narrative character, the tone and tonality of their storytelling, these books are written for non-Iranians. In the absence of a clear and definitive Iranian audience that neither reads English or French nor lives in New York or Paris, the evident tendency is to call this thing called “the West” as the audience—that people like Shirin Neshat or Marjane Satrapi are representing certain Islamic (or Iranian) realities “to the West.” Beyond that empty abstraction, though, stands another world.
If a work of art is left to its commercial handlers—Pantheon in this case—then it produces a reading compatible with the most lucrative market available to it: the transnational bourgeoisie and its $17.95 (hardcover, 11.95 paper) a piece of global solidarity with those caught in an Islamic Republic. Perhaps the most important aspect of Satrapi’s Persepolis is that it is conducive to the generation of a whole new audience. The assumption that author/artists like Satrapi are writing for “the West” is wrong for it is vacuous. Artists like Satrapi or Neshat emerge from within spatial crevices in between two or three cultures and address emerging communities of sensibilities that are neither Western nor Eastern, Northern or Southern, Christian or Islamic, Jewish or otherwise. Aesthetically, works of art generate their own audiences—even beyond the class origin of their sentiments. Politically, the hybrid disposition of artists like Satrapi or Neshat further corroborate that aesthetic element with generating and addressing a cross-section of varied and mobile societies that have already transcended national and civilizational boundaries. To oppose and resist the manufactured readership of artists like Neshat and Satrapi, it is imperative to see how works of art themselves generate a whole new demography of spectatorship for themselves—working as they do, toward a transaesthetics that matters.
A considerable component of the audience of artists such as Neshat and Satrapi are in fact expatriating Iranians. These expats (neither ex-ed really nor particularly patriotic) represent and symbolize the miasmatic formation of a newly reconfigured audience. They are neither completely Iranian nor are they completely European or American, nor indeed are they completely anything. But as soon as one utters that sentence one realizes that the very assumption of “completely Iranian” and completely European or American (or anything else for that matter) is itself deeply flawed for it glosses over a whole series of innate and acquired variations within these societies and regions—divided as they are across ethnic, religious, class, regional, national, and communal identities. The presence of hybridity, as a result, disintegrates the metaphysical assumptions of its essentialist attributes and brings out its innate constructedness. This leads back to the work of art itself, which, as Gadamer noted, generates its own hermeneutic circle, its own sensus communis. “The work of art,” Gadamer said, “transforms our fleeting experiences into stable and lasting forms of an independent and internally coherent creation. It does so in such a way that we go beyond ourselves by penetrating deeper into the work.”30 There are Iranians who have no clue who Neshat or Satrapi are or do, as there are American and Europeans who share the same vacated space. Those who know, read, watch, and talk and write about these artists gradually form their own community, which is reduced to none of their received and unexamined communal referents—having all been already admitted (transformed) into the site of the work of art itself. The spontaneity of the sensus communis thus generated defies every and all received and registered identities. The work of art generates its own affinities, its own communal gathering, beyond and through the politics of labor migration and the transnational disposition of a global market that forms and deforms national economies, regional polities, and ancient cultures.
In the global market of that space, autobiographical fiction inevitably points to the limits of language, measures of memory, and modalities of transgressing one’s own class-consciousness. It is no longer possible to tell the story of one nation to another, of one people to the world, for one can never tell which is which. The only telling that now maters is a telling that anticipates and emancipates the world to come, the world already upon us. The dialectic between the local stories that Marjane Satrapi tells and the global audience she gathers and addresses is replicated by the dialectic that is between her verbal and visual give and take. Her verbal is far more colloquial, idiomatic to the globalized English, partaking in the idiomaticity of its politics of a mass society; while her drawings persist in a far more emancipatory vernacular. Her English translations, particularly at fault for systematically Americanizing her diction and thus catering to the globalized idiomaticity of (war on) terrorism, must ultimately yield to the joyous frivolity of her drawings. The denoted and connoted messages want to control the pictures—but they fall too short, putting Roland Barthes theory to a new test.31 The grace of the visual narrative surpasses the snare of the verbal trap.
Throughout her three magnificent books, Satrapi has a penchant for mis/translating Persian proverbs. Toward the end of Embroideries shines a particularly charming mistranslation. The ever wise grandmother is admonishingly advising a friend, to whom she concludes, “That’s life! Sometimes you’re on the horse’s back, and sometimes it’s the horse that’s on your back” (Embroideries, no pagination, seven pages to the end of the book). How in the world, someone in Pantheon should have asked, can a horse be on a person’s back? The original Persian is gahi posht beh zin-o gahi zin beh posht, “sometime your back is against the saddle and sometimes the saddle is on your back,” meaning that there are ups and downs in the life of a person. In the misreading of a proverbial wisdom there is yet another wisdom—that the creative confusion of a market in which no one catches your mistranslation of a beautiful proverb is also the fertile soil of uplifting the proverbial truths of that culture into greener pastures. For a work of art thus thriving on the mistranslated outskirts of an ancient land, located in the globalized, transnational, market-made civil society, transgressing its inherited limitations and targeted audiences is definitive to its endurance beyond the transitory logic of the capital—and here an enduring lesson of how art defies the reification of consciousness, class-based or territorial to a nation of sentiments, is quite timely and handy. The barriers of class-consciousness are not insurmountable. Satrapi was born in 1969, and she was thirty years old when she published her Persepolis in France in the year 2000. Thirty years old also must have been Forough Farrokhzad, when she composed her poem Kasi Miayad/Someone is Coming, first published posthumously soon after her death in a tragic automobile accident in 1967, just about two years before Satrapi was born. Kasi Miayad/Someone is Coming is also written from the point of a view of a young girl almost identical with Satrapi’s creative persona in Persepolis and Embroideries—a bright, nosy, precocious, and wily little girl. Both Farrokhzad and Satrapi have written their childhood memories—one poetically, the other pictorially—when they were both grown up adults, in their early thirties. But consider the way Farrokhzad transcends her class and reaches for a humanity beyond all borders, and thus measure the distance that her prophetic soul in Satrapi still has to traverse (with best wishes and a bon voyage!):
*First published in Publio, 2006.
1Récit de l’Exil Occidental” is Henri Corbin’s translation of Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi’s (1153–1191) visionary recital “Hikayah al-Ghurbah al-Gharbiyyah” (“The Story of The Occidental Exile”). For the original Arabic text see Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi’s “Hikayah al-Ghurbat al-Gharbiyyah” in Henri Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Ed.), Majmu’eh Musannafat-e Shaykh al-Ishraq. Four Volumes (Tehran: The Iranian Royal Academy of Philosophy, 1977), Volume Two: 273–297. For Corbin’s French translation and commentary on this text see Henri Corbin, En Islam iranien. Four Volumes. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1971; Volume II: 258–334; For an English translation see W. M. Thackston, Jr. (Tr), The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi (London: The Octagon Press, 1982): 100–108.
2An excellent example of how the question of women’s rights in Islamic countries is linked to the US (war on) terrorism is to be read in Chris Cawood, Islam’s Threat to Women, Christianity, and America (Kingston, TN: Magnolia Hill Press, 2002).
3Abbas Milani’s Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Washington, DC: Mage Publications, 1996) is one such exception. But Milani is a generation older than that of Tara Bahrampour and her cohorts.
4See Michael Hillmann, A lonely woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and her poetry (New York: Three Continents Press, 1987).
5Ibid.
6See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 296–297.
7See Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (New York: Random House, 2003): 346, where she thanks a certain “Paul” for having introduced her to Persecution and the Art of Writing. That this “Paul” is none other than Paul Wolfowitz we have it from none other than the renegade radical and born-again neocon Christopher Hitchens—see Christopher Hitchens, “The Captive Mind Now: What Czeslaw Milosz understood about Islam.” MSN, Slate: Fighting Words: Posted Monday, Aug. 30, 2004, at 10:57 AM PT; available as of 21 September 2004 at http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2105821. As for Persecution and the Art of Writing, it is a famous essay by the posthumous guru of the neocons, Leo Straus, included in a collection of essays with the same title (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980/1952): 22–37. For more on Leo Straus and the cult of neocons that eventually gathered around him at the University of Chicago and then went to dominate and define the imperial agenda of the US under the Bush administration see the exquisite book of Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Equally revealing about Leo Straus and his cult is the excellent essay by Earl Shorris, “Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception;” Harper’s, June 2004: 65.
8Copies of Ashraf Dehqani’s Torture and Resistance in Iran are available on various sites in the Internet. See, for example, http://www.ashrafdehghani.com.
9The politics of knowledge production is obviously not limited to the US neocons and their publishing subsidiaries (for which connection see the mind-boggling essay of Lewis Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill—A Brief History,” Harper’s (September 2004): 31–41. During the Shah’s time Fakhri Qavimi Khashayar Vaziri edited and published a book, Karnameh-ye Mashhur-e Zanan Iran (The Balance Sheet of Famous Iranian Women) (Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1973), in which she gathered quite a long list and short biographical sketches of some leading Iranian women, beginning of course with the mother, sisters, and wife of the late Shah of Iran. The book does of course include quite an array of perfectly legitimate and distinguished women.
10See Shusha Guppy, The Blindfold Horse (London: Heinemann, 1988).
11See Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris (London: Heinemann, 1991).
12See William L. Hanaway, “Half-Vices: Persian Women’s Lives and Letters,” in Najmabadi, Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990): 56. In his essay on Forough Farrokhzad in the same volume, Michael Hillmann shares identical views with Hanaway’s. Hillmann extends his anecdotal recollections about his attempt to write a contemporary Iranian poet to “the dearth of biographies of Iranian literary figures” in general, and quotes a reviewer (Soraya Paknazar) who has said of his biography of Farrokhzad as “the first biography of an Iranian literary figure ever published” (Ibid., 34), which is of course a joke one never knows who is playing on whom. There are myriads (literally millions of pages in countless volumes) biographical narratives in Persian and about Iranian literary figures, all the way from Rudaki (858–941) to Nima (1895–1960). These people are all out to lunch. Just for one example, see the monumental work of Allamah Mirza Muhammad Ali Modarres, Riyhanat al-Adab (Tehran: Khayyam Publications, 1990), Eight Volumes. This is a magnificent biographical encyclopedia of poets, literary figures, scientists, jurists, mystics, philosophers, and artists, which is itself based on more than 73 previous biographical encyclopedias! It is absolutely astounding how one’s ignorance of a literary culture is turned into phantasmagoric theories about its disposition.
13So far as this nonsense of auto/biography being a “Western” narrative, “untranslatable’ into other cultures, is concerned, almost a decade before the publication of Najmabadi’s Women’s Autobiographies (1990) and these assertions by William Hanaway, Amireh Zamiri translated from Arabic into Persian a brilliant volume by Muhammad Abd al-Ghani Hasan, Zendegi-nameh-ha (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1983), in which we read a masterful coverage of the monumental body of auto/biographical narratives (divided into various genres) among which of course Iranians are featured prominently. An equally superior volume was later edited by Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor and Stefan Wild, Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writings in Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi Books, 1998), with an entire section (three essays) devoted to women’s autobiographical narratives. I give these by way of example, wondering if auto/biographical narratives are indeed exclusive to this chimerical thing called “the West” and thus “untranslatable” into other (literary) cultures. It would be ludicrous even to list hundreds of titles, covering thousands of volumes, and millions of pages of auto/biographical narratives in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, all of them comparable to what Hanaway calls “the Western sense.”
14For details, see William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959).
15The relation between orality and writing has been the subject of extensive scholarly and theoretical insights. For the most recent work on the subject see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2002).
16Ostad Khatun immediately complied and raised a huge dowry for Hedyeh Khatun at the court where she taught. On the occasion of Hedyeh Khatun’s wedding, Mawlana composed one of his most beautiful ghazals. For details, see Mawlana Jalal al-Din Muhammad Mashhur beh Molavi, Koliyyat-e Shams ya Divan-e Kabir. Edited and annotated by Badi’ al-Zaman Foruzanfar (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1340/1961), Volume 6: 32–33.
17See for example Mirza Muhammad Ali Mudarris, Riyhanat al-Adab (Tehran: Khayyam Publishers, 1369/1990), Volume I: 173–175, and II: 438–440, where under the title of Umm (“Mother, Madame”) and Sitt (“Lady, Madame”), and scattered elsewhere in the text, the biography of numerous women jurists, judges, Qur’an and Hadith scholars, mystics, saints, poets, professors, prose stylists, philanthropists, etc., is given.
18For the most authoritative account of the rise of literary humanism under the Abbasids see George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
19One of the most distinguished Persian poets of the fifteenth century, Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414–1492) in his Nafahat al-’Uns min Hadharat al-Quds (Tehran, Mahmoudi Publishers, 1336/1957): 615–634, for example, gives the biography of some thirty-four women poets, mystics, and literary scholars. Jami also reports that Shaykh Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 1021), one of the greatest Sufi masters of all time, had composed an entire book exclusively on the biographies of women mystics. See ibid., 615.
20See Yahya Aryanpour, Az Saba ta Nima (Tehran: Jibi Publishers, 2535/1976), Volume Two: 456.
21On the extraordinary revolutionary career of Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn see Abbas Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844–1859 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989): 295–331.
22The presence of women instructors in these schools is also noteworthy. When Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, one of the most prominent political figures of the constitutional period, wanted to learn English in his early youth, he attended an American school in Tabriz in 1899, where he studied English with a woman instructor. See Iraj Afshar (Ed.), Zendegi-ye Tufani: Khaterat-e Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh (Tehran: ‘Ilmi Publishers, 1368/1989): 31. Taqizadeh himself, as early as 1896, was totally committed to the cause of women’s emancipation (see Ibid., 32). By 1904, Taqizadeh writes of a certain Muhammad Aqa Shah Takhtinski, a progressive public intellectual who was publishing a journal in Tbilisi in which he was advocating the unveiling of women (see ibid., 40).
23For more on Shams Kasma’i, see Yahya Aryanpour, Az Saba ta Nima: 457–458.
24I take this short account of periodicals devoted to the cause of women’s emancipation from the introduction of Muhammad Golbon to his edited volume on one of the most distinguished Iranian women of the early twentieth century, Fatemeh Sayyah. See Muhammad Golbon (Ed.), Naqd va Seyahat: Majmu’eh-ye Maqalah wa Taqrirat-e Doctor Fatemeh Sayyah (Tehran: Tus Publications, 1354/1975): XXIX–XXXVIII.
25See Yusuf E’tesam al-Molk, Bahar/Spring, 22 March 1911: 440. I am grateful to Hossein Kamaly, the Middle East Librarian at Columbia University, for locating this rare journal for me. Similar attention to the emancipation of women is evident in other prominent journals of the period published mostly by progressive men, such as Daneshkadeh/College (1918, published in Tehran), Gol-e Zard/Yellow Flower (1918, published in Tehran), Armaghan/Gift (1920, published in Tehran), No-Bahar/New Spring (1922, published in Khorasan), Farhang/Culture (1917, published in Rasht), Adab/Literary Humanism (1919, published in Tabriz), Azadistan/The Land of the Free (1920, published in Azerbaijan), Kaveh (1915, published in Berlin), Iranshahr (1921, published in Berlin), Farangestan/Europe (1924, published in Berlin), and Pars (1920, published in Istanbul). For more details on these journals and many others see Yahya Aryanpour, Az Saba ta Nima, Volume II: 223–235.
26Much work needs to be done on unearthing the work of this extraordinary woman. The only book extant on her is the one edited by Muhammad Golbon, Naqd va Seyahat: XXIX-XXXVIII.
27Iranian Women’s literary achievements in Persian are thoroughly examined by Farzaneh Milani in her exquisite book Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1992). As for works originally written in English and published in the US, long before the rise of the neocons, see Nahid Rachlin’s Foreigner (1978), Married to a Stranger (1983), The Hearts Desire (1995) and Veils (1993).
28For more on the origin of Bande Dessinée see Rodolphe Töpffer, L’invention de la Bande Dessinée (Hermann, 1994).
29For more on the significance of Bande Dessinée in French and Francophone contexts see Matthew Screech, Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes Dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).
30Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The relevance of the beautiful: Art as play, symbol, and festival,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 53.
31See Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in A Barthes Reader. Edited, and with an Introduction, by Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982): 194–210.
32In Persian folklore if a person’s eyelids keep jumping and her shoes keep pairing (when one takes them off to enter a room), then these are taken as signs that someone dear to that person is about to come from a long distance.
33In Persian language there is no gender specific pronoun. I have opted for “he” in this English translation for many internal references in the poem may thus be interpreted. But nothing in the poem prevents a legitimate opting for a “she.”
34One thousand was popularly believed to be the number of people in the Iranian royal family, and twenty million was the population of Iran at the time.
35Mohammad Ali Fardin (1930–2000) was a very popular film star at the time.