Everyone has reached the very far end of revulsion here … But this revulsion has assumed a different form among us. Having lived under the sharp edge of inquisition for too many long years, we have given our revulsion a surreptitious color.
Mehrangiz Kar, Moqaddas’ Necklace1
[1]
In November 2004, the southern German state of Bavaria joined a number of other federal states to ban Muslim schoolteachers from wearing headscarves. According to news reports, Bavarian parliament approved the ban after Culture Minister, Ms. Monika Hohlmeier, argued that the headscarf was a symbol of the repression of women. Bavaria thus joined three other German states—Lower Saxony, Baden-Württemberg, and Saarland—imposing similar bans. In the state of Hesse, the headscarf ban had already been applied to all civil servants. None of these German states extended a similar ban on displaying Christian or Jewish symbols in public. Estimates are that more than three million Muslims live in Germany. Many of them have complained that the laws restrict their freedom to express their religion. Ms. Hohlmeier is reported to have said that the headscarf had become a political symbol, abused by Islamic fundamentalist groups and as such was not consistent with democracy, equality, and tolerance. “It’s true that the veil of Islamic fundamentalist groups as a political symbol has been massively abused,” she told German television.2
Meanwhile Ms. Shermine Sharivar, 22, a young Iranian living in Germany, was crowned Miss Europe 2005 in Paris on Saturday March 12, 2005. “The dark-haired Miss Germany of Iranian origin,” news agencies reported, “who has just finished her university studies, speaks German, Farsi, English and French. Her hobbies are horse-riding and swimming.”3
Miss Germany, Sharivar, a 22-year-old of Iranian origin, won the title of Miss Europe 2005 in Paris. The following May, she attended the Cannes Film Festival and was enthusiastically welcomed by the press.
Between legislating a ban against Muslim women appearing in public with their scarf, if they choose to do so, and a young Iranian woman becoming both Miss Germany and Miss Europe stands a normative distance, an aesthetics of dissonance, where Shirin Neshat has over the last two decades hanged her pictures, shown her films, staged her drama, navigated through the strange geopolitics of a globalized transaesthetics—where veiling might be the patriarchal pandemonium of a theocracy here, the sign and symbol of an identitarian politics there, the battle banner of white-washing Europe somewhere else, and still the see-through, invisible, shade and shudder of an emerging trans-erotics of the forbidden everywhere.
The continued (and much deserved) celebration of Neshat’s art in Europe coincides with an increased public and official hostility toward the iconic symbols of Muslim piety—a historically valanced cultural practice entirely autonomous of what Europeans call “Islamic fundamentalism,” though certainly susceptible to all sorts of political abuses: Islamic or otherwise. It is not just “Islam,” having lost its historic interlocutor “the West,” that has a crisis of identity. “Europe” too shares that precarious predicament. While its leaders want to Unionize (no pun intended, but nevertheless the irony stands), its citizens, from France to Holland, from Austria to England, say otherwise. “Europe,” a wise man once said, “is the invention of the Third World.” Today, “Europe” is where women do not (are not permitted to) veil—it will make it look like Turkey, thus the problem of Turkey joining, and thus the appeal of Neshat showing her art—placing inside European museums, galleries, biennales, and festivals the aestheticized version of that which is forbidden in European streets. The success or failure of Neshat’s art—its celebration or dismissal—has become the barometer of something other than itself: something that it shows, not something that it sees.
The assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, on Tuesday, November 2, 2004, two months after the public screening of his “Submission” (2004), has much intensified the evident European hostility toward any sort of Islamic iconic referents throughout Europe. In a rather bizarre turn of events, Theo van Gogh’s “Submission” has also been considered a rip off of Neshat’s work. Soon after the release of “Submission,” quite a number of observers accused Theo Van Gogh of having plagiarized Neshat, so much so that the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the inspiration behind the film, and Theo van Gogh were forced to deny such accusations. The Dutch journalist Francisco van Jole, however, accused the duo of plagiarism, noting that Neshat had exhibited her work in the Netherlands in 1997 and 2000. “Anyone who compares the images,” Francisco van Jole is reported to have said, “automatically gets the taste of plagiarism in their mouth. The worst thing is that neither Hirsi Ali nor Van Gogh acknowledges the debt. As self-declared Muslim emancipators they must be familiar with Neshat’s work. The only reason I can think of to explain the concealment is that Neshat’s message does not tally with their views.”4
Be that as it may, a central question concerning the European celebration of Neshat’s work is whether or not it “tallies,” as Francisco van Jole would say, with the emerging public censure of Muslim women’s choice to wear or not to wear a scarf? How would one reconcile between the increased celebration of Neshat by the European art establishment and the incessant official harassment of Muslim women, particularly when it comes to their choice to wear a scarf? Has Neshat’s work not visibly and poignantly employ the themes of veiling, femininity, violence, eroticism, piety, and politics? Does her work amount to an aesthetic distancing, an iconic detachment, a manner of therapeutic museumization of Muslims and their faith, so that her European audience can go and visit one of her exhibitions, assure themselves that they remain aesthetically open-minded, and then come out and support their elected officials in their banning and censuring of Muslim veiling—which seems to be fine in Neshat’s aestheticization of it, but bad on the head of real women walking the streets and alleys of European metropolis?
What is about this thing called veiling—that if women choose not to wear it in an Islamic Republic they are in trouble, and if they opt to wear it in Europe they are still in trouble. What is the difference between an Islamic Republic and Europe, and why are they settling their differences on a piece of garment that women may wish to wear or not to wear? What is it about Shermine Sharivar’s body—in or out of any garment at all—that can oscillate between the highest, most celebrated, body in entire Europe to one condemned not even to appear in public? Compare the number of cameras pointing at Shermine Sharivar’s body as she ascends the red carpet at Cannes to the condemned, concealed, and denied body of a scarved Muslim woman who is (by law) banned from appearing in European public. What is the difference between Islamic Law as it is practiced in an Islamic Republic, and German law as it practiced in a free, democratic, and secular Republic? Whatever happened to the Enlightenment? “Was is Aufklärung,” an enterprising German magazine may wish to put the question once again to a contest.5
An over-politicization of a work of art is as damaging to its internal integrity as its under-politicization. Looking at Neshat’s work only in terms of the politics of her aesthetics is as flawed as disregarding the evident paradox in the politics of her reception. Over the last half a century there has been an increasing pattern of labor migration form Muslim countries to Europe. There are reports that the Muslim population of Europe will increase from around 13% today to between 22% and 37% of the total population by 2025. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia and public debates over the membership of Turkey in the European Union have also added further momentum to the increased unease that Europeans feel about the unwanted Islamicization of the very (Christian, though camouflaged as secular) idea of their continent. In a recent article, “Eurabia,” Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of international history at Harvard University, has summarized his fear for Europe in his observation that looking at the prospect of “a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower” at Oxford, he confessed, “the phrase that sprang to mind was indeed ‘decline and fall.’”6 Why decline, whence the fall? Is that a reference to Edward Gibbon’s famous book, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1794)? “The Holy Roman Empire,” is the phrase that sprang in my mind—indeed.
The public reception and artistic celebration of Neshat in Europe, as a result, has a corresponding context that reflects the innate politics definitive to her aesthetics: Europeans seem not to mind aesthetically to celebrate Neshat while politically they get to censuring the subject of her art—the physical body of Muslim women, which is forced to be concealed in an Islamic Republic with the same metaphysical brutality that it is legislated to be revealed in a democratic republic. Unveiled, a young Iranian woman can be celebrated as Miss Europe; veiled, she is denied a public space; aestheticized, she can be framed and formed in the most prestigious European museums and art exhibitions: Whence the connection, wherefore the paradox?
Political modernism and feminism international, as indeed the very metaphysics of Reason and Progress, have all lost their historic referents today. “Europe” is no longer the domain of Reason and all that goes with it, after Michel Foucault revealed the dark and denied shadow of its Unreason in European asylum houses, Edward Said pointed to the Oriental abode of the Exotic, and the combined effects of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction (Jürgen Habermas’ valiant efforts to the contrary notwithstanding) saw to it that Adorno and Horkheimer’s detection of the terrible dialectic of the Enlightenment will not be forgotten in post-Holocaust Europe. The battle of ideas, once waged between the West and the Rest, has now degenerated into the war of emptied signs—signifiers devoid of any significance: swapping veritas for veiling. The world is up for grab—at the mercy of an amorphous capital, for the World Trade has no Center. The 9/11 assailants went after the wrong targets and brought down two deceptive decoys, with bloody, murderous, consequences. The Twin Towers of New York were the iconic reflections of the two giant Statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, the ones that the Taliban blew up. This is a battle of signs—pictures of Lynndie England torturing Iraqi inmates for videos of Iraqi insurgents decapitating their European and American hostages: The picture exhibitions and video installations of President Bush and Osama bin Laden’s globalized (War on) Terrorism.
In this battle of emptied signs, whence the public art, wherefore a Muslim/Iranian artist exhibiting in Europe? “Degenerate, adventurous, unnatural, distorted, pleasure-prone, hideous, miserable, ignorant, monstrous, despotic, stubborn, and grotesque” are the father of European Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant’s choice adjectives for the absence of sublime and the beautiful in what he calls “the Orients,” which for him begins in China and India and wraps around the world to include Africa and Latin America, bypass Western Europe, and include native Americans.7 “In the land of the black,” as he named a part of his Orient, Kant thought that if a man said something worth considering then it must be thus qualified: “it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”8 Such name-callings (not just by any neo-Nazi skin-head off the streets of Hamburg, but by the very father of European Enlightenment) no longer mean anything. They once did their catalytic function of creating a continental divide between “Islam and the West,” “the West and the Rest.” Today, Europe is in Africa, Africa is in Europe, as Europe is inside the very belly of Islam, as much as Islam is in the very bosom of Europe—and thus Europe is today as much anxiogeneric as Islam is pointless—both lacking where “itself” is.
If feminism international has thus lost its once-European referent, then what’s in a veil?
[2]
Persian is a funny language. Just like German, you can play with various components of a word and come up with differing, but still meaningful, words. The word for “headache,” for example, in Persian is “sar-dard.” If you reverse those two components, and say “dard-e sar,” you get (into) “trouble.” There is a kind of logical correspondence, obviously, between “headache” and “trouble.” But the reversal of the order puts a kind of syntactical inflection to the term and gives its meaning so much more authorial confidence in playful frivolity. I know enough German to know that “headache” is Kopfschmerzen. But I don’t know enough German to know what happens to Kopfschmerzen if you reverse its order and say Schmerzenkopf (I hope it is not something embarrassing). In the disconcerting space of that uncertainty—publicly and in print committing yourself to a pronouncement to which you have no clue how your audience will react—dwells the ambiguity not just of a person with a limited knowledge of German language but also of the cultural translation of a literary work of art into a work of visual artistry, from a very limited local readership to a vast global spectatorship.
The anxiogeneric distance between a local literary work of art and its visual adaptation for a global audience goes deep into the heart of the emerging crisis of a globalized aesthetics where there is much too much to see and yet no evident language to read what one sees. While the aesthetic parameters of art in the age of globalization have their own unfolding measures, the enduring (though vacated) psycho-semiotics of old and yet ossified bifurcations between “The East and the West,” or “Islam and the West” further confound the matter. What happens to a work of art with insignia of the “Islamic” world written all over it when it is exhibited in “Europe,” or even more disconcerting, in “the West?” In a world mapped out by a nexus of iconic violence beyond the control of Neshat, and pulled asunder by a tug-of-war between President Bush and Osama bin Laden, the medieval assumptions of a Christian Empire and a Muslim contention seem to have given a new lease on life to the materially outdated, but still dangerous liaison presumed between, “Islam and the West.”9 The normative topography of that site of contestation makes the disconcerting distance between the work of an Iranian (or Muslim) artist and her European (or North American) audience even more taxing.
Consider the emotive universe between the two polar parameters of artistic creations (such as Neshat’s) and their aesthetic reception (say in Germany): If a German philosopher writes a book and decides to call it “Sein und Zeit,” he does not feel obligated to add a colon and specify: “In European Philosophy.” But when an Iranian scholar writes a book and opts to call it “Truth and Narrative,” he feels obligated to add a colon and say: “The Untimely Thoughts of Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani,” for the specificity of his local dealings with a medieval mystic had to be made known into a language and culture (of the English speaking world) that is not his—for the “possession” of a language or a culture is still negotiated on a global economy of possessive adjectives that divides the market in order to conquer it better. The omission or addition of that colon (:) is where the East and the West—the two polar opposites of the geography of our in/differences—(refuse to) meet, Rudyard Kipling’s Oriental Occidentosis notwithstanding. International art exhibitions, the amorphous impermanence of temporary art installations and biennales in particular, are now at the vanguard of that shifting shape of a homeless aesthetics that neither knows any world to inhabit nor does the changing habitat of humanity at large wait to be creatively inhabited. That inhabitation—the sense of being at home with a work of art—is predicated on the systematicity of a set of inhibitions for which the world is yet to recognize a sacred order legitimate and commanding beyond the dangerous vagaries of “Islam and the West.”10
In between the collapsed domains of the two belligerent aesthetics—one attributed to “Islam” and the other claimed by “the west”—there seems to be no longer any room for a solid sensus communis, the way Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics stipulated it, within which a work of art such as those of Neshat’s can be read, received, interpreted.11 All art is now site-specific—and thus belongs to no overarching, culture-specific, aesthetics except its own transitory location. Place a work of art—say Neshat’s photography or video installations—in Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, then dismantle it and take it to Paris, London, or New York: It is a different work of art. Move it to Tokyo, Tehran, or Baghdad: It speaks a different language, shows a different vision of reality, where it may or may not register with its potential or actual audience. Curating contemporary art, as a result, has become a particularly perilous task. The hippest and most postmodern musings of Euro-American-based, jet-setting curators are checked at the nearest customs and immigration counter of rich Persian Gulf states with a royal decree for a daughter of a Sheikh to preside over a biennial and see to it that her royal father’s wishes to create the necessary credentials of an anxiogeneric nation-states, right in the middle of an oilfield (itself caught in the crossfire of a battlefield), are satisfactorily met. The bewildered and bemused European art exhibitions and US museums of modern art are not any better. In the post-9/11 syndrome of a captured and traumatized imagination, exhibitions are now curated of “Muslim” or “Arab” artists, while they are being told to go easy on the Islamicity of what they call “Islam.” These curators want to have their Islam and eat it too—just like Austrian bakers at the gates of Constantinople who baked their daily bread for the army in the shape of the crescent on the Ottoman flag and thus gave birth to the French croissant. “Muslim” and “Arab” artists and the Islamicity of their art are now consumed in Europe and North America pretty much on the same logic—eating your enemy. The sadomasochistic homoeroticism at the gory heart of the Armin Meiwes’ case speaks not just of the Cannibal of Rotenburg’s psychopathology but of even darker dreams harbored in the subterranean soul of a world where thousands of innocent people jump from the top floors of New York skyscrapers in order to save their lives, while tens of thousands of equally innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq are killed in order to be liberated.
The only sensus communis solidly definitive to narrating a work of art such as Neshat’s is where the vertical origin of its genealogy meets the horizontal accidentality of its whereabouts. Works of art are now itinerant, migratory, a labor of love—and Neshat’s work best exemplifies this manner of art-making. If so: Are we then (when we look at a work of Shirin Neshat, for example) at the crossroad of a transaesthetics that can no longer afford such binary oppositions as “Islam and the West”—have we (not) crossed the imaginary boundary that marked our received cultures and delimited our cherished notions of the sublime and the beautiful: and if so, are we then (really) condemned to what Jean Baudrillard calls a “transaesthetics of indifference,” where anything goes, nothing means anything, and everything has always already collapsed into the merciless shredder of the political—with the politics of identity the Darth Vader of our particular galaxy? Are we condemned to this final fatwa of Baudrillard?
We see Art proliferating wherever we turn; talk about Art is increasing even more rapidly. But the soul of Art, Art with its power of illusion, its capacity for negating reality, for setting up an “other scene” in opposition to reality, where things obey a higher set of rules, a transcendent figure in which begins, like line and color on a canvas, are apt to lose their meaning, to extend themselves beyond their raison d’être, and, in an urgent process of seduction, to rediscover their ideal form (even though this form may be that of their own destruction)—in this sense, Art is gone.12
One thing seems to be certain: The same public domain that remains anxiogeneric about its “European” or “Western” provenance (or speculates over what Julia Kristeva calls “the Crisis of the European subject”)13 and gets nervous at the sight of a scarved Muslim woman (or a homeless colored man selling fake Gucci bags on the streets for that matter), has consistently opted to stage and celebrate that very scarved woman’s visual, performative, and cinematic aestheticization—most notably in Iranian cinema in general and in Neshat’s art in particular. Is there a connection between the two sides of this coin, between a politics of denial and an aesthetics of acknowledgement—and does the link point to a transaesthetics of virtual indifference, or else to a manner of seeing that is deeply consequential and anything but indifferent?
Cultural translations from literary works of art to their visual performances, as from their local receptions to their global audience, is now predicated on a non-existent aesthetics, a theory of the sublime and a reading of the beautiful, that is yet to be articulated. At the forefront of that aesthetics of uncertainty, where the demographic facts and patterns of labor migrations of a changing world run far ahead of its artistic expressions, stands Neshat’s art—and that is why for friends and for foes alike she remains a point of reference. She is anticipating what is yet to come, and that uncanny sense of anticipation of something yet to come at once suspends and sustains the (future) aesthetics of her extraordinary significance as an artist.
[3]
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist who lives in New York and is widely known and celebrated around the world. Her work Women without Men (2004–2005)—predicated on her Mahdokht (2004) and Zarin (2005)—is based on Shahrnoush Parsipour’s novella “Women without Men” (1989).14 Shahrnoush Parsipour (b. 1946) is also an Iranian who lives in New York. The link between New York and Tehran—the United States and Iran—will inevitably bear heavily on the politics of reception afforded anything that Neshat stages, anywhere in the world. At the writing of this essay, the US and Iranian political leaders are engaged in a dangerous war of words, with a fear of yet another war in the region, or even more nightmarish the addition of yet another nuclear power in an already dangerous geopolitics, in balance of their bellicose contentions. When Neshat exhibits her art in North America or Western Europe—and from there anywhere else in the world—the specter of George Bush’s “War on Terror” looms large over the mind and soul of the audience that comes to see and relate to her work. The question is: does the aesthetics of Neshat’s art, in the broadest sense of the term, surpass the politics of her immediate reception—is her art timely or timeless, and will it lose its timeliness in time? Does she attend, in her art, to what is enduring, or what is ephemeral? Will she surpass the longitude of her particular location in history, escape the pigeonhole of a “Muslim” or “Iranian” or “Iranian-American” artists, and transcend the geography of her emotive universe? In other words: will she survive her own success, defy the terms of her own current celebrity in order to map out the measures of her future greatness.
Many of these questions are still up for grabs, and very much contingent on the rest, not the past, of her creative career. Neshat’s turn to Parsipour’s “Women without Men” (1989) marks a critical turning point in her long and illustrious career. Although the marks of Persian poetry, that of Forough Farrokhzad in particular, have been long since evident in her work, with “Men without Women” (2004–2005), Neshat turns her attention to a major novella in modern Persian literature, and uses the occasion not only to make a few more video installations, but (perhaps far more ambitiously) to make her first full-length feature film. This dual turn in her career, requires a critical attention to the most recent source of her inspiration: modern Persian fiction of Iranian women, by and large a terra incognita when it comes to the global audience that Neshat’s work has attracted. Two critical manners of translation come together in this most recent artistic adventure of Neshat: Her translation of a domestically celebrated modern Persian literary work of art into a globally received visual work of art. This dual grid—local/global and literary/visual—is precisely where we need to consider whether or not the aesthetics of Neshat’s art manages to overcome the politics of her reception? For there is no doubt, “Women without Men” is by far the most ambitious project that Neshat has undertaken so far.
Shahrnoush Parsipour (b. 1946), the author of “Men without Women” (1989), had published her first book before Neshat was even born. Parsipour was a prominent Iranian writer long before anyone other than her closest friends and family knew who Neshat was. But today, Neshat’s visual conversation with Parsipour’s “Men without Women” is gently holding the hand of a literary masterpiece and gracefully leading it from a local back alley toward a visually opulent global feast. How will Parsipour fare in this transaction—how will Neshat visually transform Parsipour’s verbal inroad into the making of a magical realism as the best manner of reading the predicament of women in a contemporary Muslim society? This much is certain: In Neshat’s visual lyricism, Parsipour’s magical realism has found a gift of grace it never dreamt, but always merited.
A French film critic, Jean-Michel Frodon, once said of Abbas Kiarostami that just like a locomotive he is carrying the rest of Iranian cinema with him to a global limelight. If that is indeed what Kiarostami has done, one might also suggest that just like the tip of a rainbow, Neshat’s art points to the spectacular arc of a colorful panorama of Iranian poets and novelists (those of women in particular) hitherto unknown to the world at large. A global market at the mercy of a politically manufactured bestseller like Azar Nafisi’s ignominious Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is blessed, though unbeknownst to itself,15 by an exceedingly talented artist creatively conversant with her native culture, while global in her emancipatory reach. Any cursory glance at Neshat’s work and the tracing of its graceful trajectory is bound to reveal the larger picture she has brought to global attention. With Women without Men, Neshat has turned to one of the absolute masterpieces of modern Persian fiction by one of its most gifted practitioners—both of which hitherto unknown to world at large. Parsipour is not exactly a household name in much of the rest of the world. But in her homeland, she has had the illustrious career of more than four decades of extraordinary literary achievements. Had it not been for Neshat’s attention to Parsipour, globally she would have remained an obscure literary figure, no matter how much loved and admired she deserved was among her own compatriots. Parsipour and Neshat come not just from two entirely different generations, but also from two different ends of a spectrum of creative disposition extended from the verbal to the visual, from the domestic to the global. Like almost all other great Iranian filmmakers—from Daryush Mehrjui and Arby Ovanessian to Bahman Farmanara and Amir Naderi—Neshat has reached the wisdom of lending her chimerical camera to a Persian literary masterpiece.
Bold, courageous, defiant, phantasmagoric, with a barely tamed command over her innermost subversive volcano of suppressed emotions, Parsipour attended college in Tehran University, before going to France to study Indian languages and cultures. Beginning in mid-1970s, Parsipour rapidly rose as one of the most gifted novelists and short story writers of her time. “The Dog and the Long Winter” (1976) immediately established her reputation as a major contender in the literary imagination of the late Pahlavi (1926–1979) period; as did soon after that her “Crystal Pendants” (1977) and “Free Experiments” (1978). Her literary masterpiece, “Tooba and the Meaning of Night” (1988), was an overnight success, while her “Women without Men” (1989) landed her in the dark dungeons of the Islamic Republic. Soon after her incarceration and before her exile to the United States, where she now lives, Parsipour was diagnosed with chronic manic depression.16
A masterpiece of narrative neurosis, fictive flamboyance, and creative psychosis all in one, Parsipour’s Tuba va Ma’na-ye Shab (“Tuba and the Meaning of Night,” 1988) is one of the greatest achievement of modern Persian literature. At the center of Parsipour’s works of fiction is a creative implosion that is introverted and explosive. In “Women without Men,” she weaves together the scattered lives of a number of women emerging from various walks of life and converging in a garden—at once real and Paradisial—where one of them plants herself and comes to flower, seed, and fruition—while others begin to give birth to other than themselves. Parsipour’s stories begin innocently, inconspicuously, and with perfect realistic cadence, and then gradually mutate into a surreal disposition borne entirely out of their own innate emotive universe—where she can discretely tease out aspects of women’s lives otherwise hidden behind the banalities of their quotidian chores.
How did Parsipour happen—and what tradition of literary creativity does she represent? Neither Neshat nor Parsipour emerged from a literary or artistic vacuum. From her earliest photographs, Neshat has opted to include calligraphic citations of Persian prose and poetry as visual props integral to her visual vocabulary. If some people cannot read and understand them, it does not mean they are meaningless; and if others (who can read and understand them) think them nativist, it does not mean that they have succeeded to see through the words and witness their visual effects. As a good example, “Speechless” (1996) leaves not a single spot white on the half face of the young woman depicted with the opening of a gun barrel posing as her earrings. One may persuasively argue here that it is entirely irrelevant what exactly these cited passages of prose and poetry say—that they are visual props, and not narrative devices. But one can equally start reading through the lines and put together the words for what they actually say. One can neither totally ignore the literary and poetic provenance of Neshat’s work (for the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad has always been particularly prominent in her work), nor indeed reduce them to these poetic and literary allusions. What matters most in Neshat’s work is her visual conversations with a vast literary tradition—classical and modern.
Neshat’s inaugural attention to a contemporary work of Persian fiction by a prominent Iranian woman writer points to a significant aspect of her art hitherto subsumed, and yet now in need of careful attention, under its overpowering visual presence. It is long overdue for us to see in what particular way does Neshat’s visual vocabulary and creative confidence borrow from and invest in the narrative constitution of a defiant subject definitive to much of the twentieth-century Persian fiction—those of women writers in particular. If Neshat’s art is to transcend its timeliness and become timeless, the visual mutation of the literary work of art she reads and remembers will have to mobilize the same emotive energy in their global audience as their originals do among their immediate audience. Parsipour’s magical realism is perhaps the most natural choice, compatible with Neshat’s visual lyricism. The narrative neurosis at the heart of one may now correspond to and mutate into the visual imaginary on the surface of the other. Will the result reconfigure the defiant (Iranian) subject, once de-subjected at the heart of a colonial modernity, and move toward a planetary re-imaging of the world beyond its postcolonial divides?
[4]
Not even fifty years old and at the top of her artistic career, Neshat has finally turned to a masterpiece of modern Persian fiction as the visual inheritor of a rich and diversified literary tradition. It is thus quite timely to ask what exactly is it that the modernist Persian literary tradition has invested in Neshat. In her first full-length feature film, “Women without Men,” predicated on visual minuets like Mahdokht and Zarrin, which are meant as video installations, Neshat’s visual lyricism expands emotively upon Parsipour’s magical realism, navigated on one of the most potent political events of Iran in the twentieth century (the CIA-engineered coup of August 1953 that toppled the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh),17 and begins to articulate one of the most ambitious artistic projects of her entire career.
Through Parsipour’s novella, Neshat is now connected to a much wider and deeper field of literary imagination. In the immediate vicinity of its origin, Neshat’s interest in Parsipour’s literary prowess must at the very least be traced back to the fertile memory of prominent women writers in twentieth-century Persian fiction, beginning with Zahra Natel Khanlari (Kia)—for to her tireless work is indebted the very alphabet of reading and writing of generations of Iranians. Born in 1916 and raised in Tehran, Zahra Natel Khanlari (Kia) was initially educated in a teacher’s college and began teaching by the time she was seventeen. She had to obtain special permission from the Iranian Ministry of Culture of the time to take college entrance examination with male students. She entered Tehran University Faculty of Literature in 1934, the very first year that this venerable institution had opened its doors to female students. By 1937, she received her BA and by 1942 her doctoral degree in Persian literature. In collaboration with her husband Parviz Natel Khanlari, a prominent member of the literati, Zahra Natel Khanlari was instrumental in establishing Sokhan, one of the most influential literary journals of its time, to which she contributed essays and work of fiction regularly. In 1960, she traveled to Europe where she studied textbooks for elementary education. Generations of Iranian students (that of Neshat included) grew up learning how to read and write on the basis of textbooks that Zahra Natel Khanlari was chiefly responsible for the elegance, grace, simplicity, and joy of their diction. Natel Khanlari became a towering figure in adopting the masterpieces of Persian literary prose for high school education. It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of her Dastan-ha-ye Del-Angiz-e Adabiyat-e Farsi (“Lovely Stories of Persian Literature,” 1958) that (published just one year after Neshat was born) introduced generations of young Iranian students to a beautiful, simple, and elegant Persian prose and through that to a sea of fantastic stories otherwise hidden and buried in the heart of the masterpieces of Persian literature.18 Though she did not produce a major literary work of her own, the simplicity, beauty, and grace of the Persian prose and narrative diction that she crafted became the cornerstone of much that would happen in modern Persian fiction. A gradual narrative constitution of a defiant subject, definitive to Neshat’s maternal generation of Persian literati, is impossible to imagine without Natel Khanlari having first crafted the simple and elegant prose of writing women into modern Iranian history. Very few people even in Iran remember and honor Natel Khanlari as they should. But every time an Iranian of Neshat’s generation opens her mouth or puts pen to paper to utter or write a sentence in Persian, drawing on the very alphabet of their Persian prose, Natel Khanlari is there.
Between Natel-Khanlari in early twentieth-century Tehran and Parsipour in early twenty-first-century New York stands a rainbow of other women writers—its shades and shadows now casting a long gaze on Neshat whose visual memories of her native culture has found a global audience: First and foremost is Simin Daneshvar (1921–2012)—one of the most distinguished woman novelist of Iran. A critically influential literary figure throughout her career, Daneshvar’s principal work of fiction is Savushun (1969), one of the most popular novels in the history of Persian fiction. Set during the British colonial occupation of Shiraz, and from a decidedly provincial angle, Daneshvar’s Savushun became a cornerstone of modern Persian literary prose, with its principal protagonist, Zari, one of the most memorable literary creation of the twentieth-century Persian fiction.19 Generations of Iranians, that of Neshat included, grew up reading the novels and short stories of Daneshvar, in whose fiction the act of writing emerged as the dominant agential exercise of a historically denied and socially segregated subject. Daneshvar’s fiction gave that agency a particularly powerful feminine voice. Without that voice the vision of Neshat would have been inconceivable today.
Next to Daneshvar is Goli Taraghi (b. 1939) whose first collection of short stories, “I am Che Guevara” (1969) established her significance as a leading literary figure of her generation. Her “Great Lady of My Soul” (1979) was widely received and translated. Before the anti-democratic atrocities and gender apartheid policies of the Islamic Republic forced her into exile in Paris (where she continues to write and publish), she taught philosophy at Tehran University and published highly influential works of fiction. Taraghi’s Khab-e Zemestani (“Hibernation,” 1973) is a masterpiece of Iranian urban anomie in the 1960s.20 In the literary voices of novelists like Taraghi, Neshat’s generation of young Iranians grew up confident with the agential autonomy of a creative self-assertion unprecedented in Iranian history. The expanded literacy of Iranian women and the constitution of a public domain in which they had to articulate a social space for themselves became coterminous with a literary consciousness constitutional to their defiant character. Neshat is now extending that literary consciousness in visual terms always evident but never articulated in it.
Next to Taraghi is Mahshid Amirshahi—wise, worldly, witty, political, with an urbane, cosmopolitan, sense of humor the very texture of her defiant diction. She was born in Kermanshah, educated in England, and now lives in Paris. The publication of her “The Blind Alley” (1966), soon followed by “Bibi Khanom’s Starling” (1968) and “After the Last Day” (1969), commenced her prolific writing career. Before the Iranian revolution of 1979, she published one more collection of short stories—“First Person Singular” (1970)—and a selection of others. The publication of her first novel, Dar Hazar (“At Home,” 1987), a masterpiece of post-revolutionary literature, brought to perfection her simple, elegant, and deceptively straightforward narrative disposition. With a radical flamboyance so close and comfortable in her cosmopolitan confidence that combined with her self-effacing character projects a false sense of simplicity, Amirshahi became the creative voice of millions of Iranians living outside their homeland. She soon complemented her “At Home” with Dar Safar (“Traveling,” 1995)—the two of which are now a set of classics about the course of the revolutionary uprising and its exilic aftermath for a major component of Iranian intelligentsia. In Amirshahi, Neshat’s generation of young Iranians read the straddling narratives of their nation once investing its hopes in a promising revolution and soon being brutally cut off from its illusions. Between her two major novels—“At Home” and “Traveling”—Amirshahi has cast the dual disposition of the generation of expatriate Iranians artists like Neshat, neither here, nor there, and thus nowhere and everywhere at the same time in their creative disposition. It is exceedingly important not to see Neshat as an Iranian oddity. The itinerant character of her creative disposition is definitive to generations of Iranian artists and literati.
Next to Amirshahy is Moniru Ravanipour—witty, wild, magician of words and visions, a storyteller from the dark nights of the Persian Gulf, the forlorn soul of drowned fishermen and sea monsters that swallowed them the elemental force of her surreal fiction. A phantasmagoric native neurosis, combined with an inbred magic realism brought Moniru Ravanipour’s peripheral psychosis to perfection in her astonishing achievement Ahl-e Gharq (“People of Gharq” 1989). A year before that, Ravanipour had burst onto the Iranian literary scene with her “With Kanizu” (1988), and two years after that her Satan’s Stone (1991) consolidated her reputation as a major post-revolutionary novelist and short story writer—a reputation consolidated with her other works of fiction that appeared after the Islamic Revolution.21 Ravanipour came to literary fruition as Neshat was discovering her dual citizenship in two opposing sites of a normative set of creative sensibilities. Neshat and Ravanipour thus represent two sides of a global divide that one would have never suspected art could combine. Ravanipour is scarcely known outside her homeland, and yet her fiction is the implosion of her nation’s creative defiance of its history. Neshat is only nominally known in her own homeland, and yet her art is the explosion of her nation’s creative defiance of its geography. Ravanipour and Neshat scarcely know each other—and yet they are the mirror image of each other’s creativity.
Next to Ravanipour would be Ghazaleh Alizadeh (1944–1996), one of the most gifted Iranian writers, whose untimely suicide Iranians in and out of their homeland still mourn. Alizadeh’s masterpiece, Khaneh-ye Idrissi-ha (“The Idrissis’ House,” 1991–1992) became the iconic text of the first generation of Iranian novelists after the cataclysmic events of the 1979 revolution. In “The Idrissis’ House,” Alizadeh narrated the story of her nation through the macabre aristocratic mansion of an old family, presided by an olden maid and her barren children, suddenly invaded by a band of coarse and crude revolutionaries. Alizadeh’s prose is introverted, archaic, deliberately musty and meandered. She writes as if with a searchlight, navigating the hidden corners of an attic full of antic and useless possessions. By the time that “The Idrissis’ House” begins to emerge as a parable of the Islamic revolution of 1979, Alizadeh’s prose has already sublated itself into a trans-historic reflection on the inner terrors of revolutionary violence and the hidden horrors of aristocratic elegance—at one and the same time. Alizadeh wrote and published her masterpiece in Iran precisely at a time when Neshat had permanently opted to call New York home—and began to take her photographic memories of her homeland to task. Alizadeh committed suicide precisely in the same year that Neshat began exhibiting and then publishing her photographs—the demise of one literary voice inside Iran coincided with the rise of a major visionary lyricist abroad.
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Predicated on this literary tradition, and rested on these seven shades of immediate narrative memories, Neshat’s camera is the probing palimpsest of barely visible, barely erased, traces of stories yet to be told. Based on the first character and first chapter of Parsipour’s “Women without Men,” Neshat’s “Mahdokht” (2004) is so far the most mature and accomplished articulation of her extraordinary visual lyricism—a manner of artistic expression unprecedented either in her native culture or in that of her adopted homeland.22 Shirin Neshat’s visual lyricism lends an ocularcentric penchant for visuality to the fluidity of Persian ghazals and registers the result on a widening vista upon reality—making it behave despite itself. Neshat’s “Mahdokht” is by far her most ambitious example of her visual lyricism. It begins with a flowing stream as the narrative device of holding her film together. “Mahdokht” begins and breathes with Neshat’s camera following a stream into a garden, before we chance upon the mutation of that mineral and vegetal world into a feminine body. This is the visual reversal of the story on which it is based, where Mahdokht has a visceral revulsion toward sex and yet yearns for having children—and thus her intention to plant herself in a garden and grow and give birth to new seeds.
The metamorphic intention of Mahdokht to plant herself and grow may appear rather odd but it in fact is not that outlandish at all if we place it in a poetic cast that ranges (at the very least) from the pantheistic disposition of Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) to the material metaphysics of Forough Farrokhzad—two iconically paramount poets proverbial to both Parsipour and Neshat’s creative imagination. The organic link of the human body to its mineral, vegetal, and animal mutations is not something new in Persian poetic culture. In one of the most widely read and remembered passages in his immortal Mathnavi, Rumi depicted a pantheistic (Wahdat al-Wujud) notion of Being that embraced the universe all the way from the mineral to the angelic, and then even the divine:
In another part of Mathnavi, he reiterates the same idea differently:
Some seven hundred years later, Forough Farrokhzad expressed similar ideas in many of her poems:
Or:
That were buried under the relentless pouring of snow:
Or:
Both Parsipour and Neshat are the daughters of this genealogy, and their creative consciousness and camera project the visual memory of this poetic disposition. In Shirin Neshat’s visual lyricism, this pantheistic mutation of the mineral, vegetal, animal, and human into each other populates the paradisial point of a renewed point of departure for itself. The closest that a Judaic or Christian imaginary can come to what we witness in Neshat’s recasting of the Garden of Eden as the domain of Mahdokht’s vegetal dreams of her human failures is a remapping of the Book of Genesis, but not just in its Qur’anic rendition, which is almost identical with the Hebrew Bible—but more immediately in the transgressive space of Persian poetry, classical and modern, informing the literary imaginary of generations of contemporary Iranian (women) writers.
Rumi’s pantheism posits a Universal Intellect from which human reason emanates—“Just like the shadow of a flower stem,” as he says in Mathnavi.28 Ultimately the shadow disappears into the object itself, human reason reflecting back unto the Universal Intellect—all driven by a mysterious force of love that holds the universe attracted and together. There is a cosmic force that pulls the pantheistic universe together, in an upperly mobile synergy—from the mineral to the vegetal, from the vegetal to the animal, from the animal to the human, from the human to the angelic, from the angelic to the divine—and from there “to that which we cannot even imagine.” The principal point of Rumi here is the systematic amnesia contingent upon these stages—an amnesia that shows itself in the form of chronic nostalgia—nostalgia for what we were and have now forgotten. In every higher state of being, we forget our previous state, and yet we have a subconscious memory of it, and by the hidden and inarticulate force of that intractable memory we are attracted to that state, just like when we stare at a beautiful flower—we vaguely remember, Rumi suggests, when we were a flower.
Farrokhzad’s attraction to the vegetal state is of a different sort. Her poetry is quintessentially grounded in a material metaphysics. She is not pantheistic—for she is after a complete reversal of our medieval metaphysics, turning it around and putting it back on earth. If she plants her hands in a small garden, or her gravesite becomes a garden, or she can hold the budding shoots of wheat under her breast and breastfeed them,” it is all because of a material connection with earth that she has creatively cultivated.29 “I have navigated this wondering island,” she says in one poem,
Parsipour’s “Women without Men”—a bride on the branches of acacias—extends Rumi’s pantheistic oscillation between amnesia and nostalgia to Farrokhzad’s material metaphysics and then narrates them into the story of five women, from five different walks of life, who gather in a garden, away from one of the most tumultuous events in modern Iranian history (the CIA-engineered coup of 1953), in order to see one of them, Mahdokht, plant herself, grow, and seed—while they too resume the real or ethereal fate of their own. The historical setting of Parsipour’s novella during the coup of 1953, while men are busy fighting for a (futile) cause, gives it its quiet resolution—in effect telling men to go to hell with the futility of their wars. There is a satirical Rumi wisdom in the way Parsipour extracts her women characters from the midst of a major political upheaval and deposits them all in a garden. “People’s fights are just like children’s battles,” Rumi says at some point in Mathnavi:
Parsipour’s novella is not as much apolitical as it is counter-political. It is political from upstream. It is a quietly flamboyant contemplation on a world (creatively carved within the real) in organic harmony with itself. Men here equal violence—they become the iconic referents of a world at odds with itself. Mahdokht’s fear of sex, her horror at accidentally seeing Yadollah the Gardner and the fifteen-year-old maid Fati having sex in the greenhouse, coupled with her earnest desire to have children are all the evident causes of her improbable wish to become a tree—in organic peace and seasonal harmony with her inner and outer world.
Neshat’s adaptation of Parsipour’s “Women without Men”—as both a series of video installation and a feature film—casts this literary line of metamorphic bodily resurrection into her own visual lyricism. The result is an ocular sublation of a literary masterpiece that collectively links the poetic crescendo of one of the most enduring tropes in Persian culture to a global audience. Neshat’s Mahdokht is the first and visually most cogent entry into Parsipour’s novella—and through that novella into the vast spectrum of contemporary Persian fiction by Iranian women, and through them the vast poetic repertoire that holds Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi and Farrokhzad together: from a poetic pantheism to a material metaphysics.
Neshat’s take on Parsipour’s “Women without Men” is visual lyricism at its best—a Persian ghazal caught on her camera, as always moving melodically, composing with a rhapsodic rhythm, rhyming in color and composition, pastoral in her vision, idyllic in her memorial remembrance of the novella. In her inaugural piece, “Mahdokht”, Neshat has found a subterranean inroad into the creative consciousness of Parsipour’s inspired imagination—how it would look like were we to have an access to its visual topography: A women in organic harmony with universe, an Eve in need of no Adam, a paradisial beginning, pregnant with a multitudinous gathering of her offspring, conceived immaculately, populating the garden of this Eden—in neurotic peace and anxious serenity, both attentive to the tumultuous universe and yet keeping it at bay.
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The literary and poetic progeny of Neshat in her own native land is the single most important factor in both positing and transcending the discrepancy between local cultural traditions and their sublation into a globalized visual performance. The result is a movement, at once moral and imaginative, toward an aesthetic that makes a global difference, at a time when the imaginary geography colonially navigated on an East-West axis no longer makes any difference. The result is the imaginative closing of the normative distance between anti-Muslim legislations that curtail the human and civil rights of Muslim women to dress in any way they wish—outside the purview of both the European legislature and militant Islamism (two sides of the same coin)—and the aesthetic liberalism of the selfsame societies that opts to cite and celebrate the artistic rendition of these cultural practices. The very idea of “Europe,” precisely at a time that its territorial claim is being unified, is now exposed in the multifaceted cultural underpinning of its grass root diversities. The massive labor migrations from Islamic societies into Europe have fundamentally exposed the cultural diversity at the root of the European continent, evident in its own domestic history long before the current waves of labor migrations began demographically to reshape it. Resisting Islam will make Europe much more Christian than it may wish to be, as it will make European Muslims far more militant than they are. Assimilating Islam will make Europe integral to a global fate that is all but inevitable—and in turn will turn European Muslims into an example of a cosmopolitan disposition that has historically defined their culture prior to its systematic mutation into an ideological site of resistance to European colonialism. Within that paradox dwells the politics of Neshat’s aesthetics. The result is a global presence for artists like Neshat that no longer casts them as Muslim (or Eastern) artists exhibiting their work in a Christian (or Western) world—for the binary opposition between “Islam and the West” has itself long since lost its historical usefulness, its power-basing fabrication and thus political uses.
We can thus pose the question again: If all art is now site-specific, then is there a social memory left to a work of art—when it is dreamed, mounted, exhibited, dismantled, and shipped back—is there an aesthetics to its politics, an ethics to its finances, a future significance to its current relevance? All art, thus site-specific, must be seen with a set of bifocal lenses—one layer local, the other global, one native, the other planetary, one emotive, the other commemorative. Such bifocalities become the site of registration for a work of art that is here today, gone tomorrow. A radical contemporaneity emerges in and about such works of art. If art is to remain connected, materially evident, morally imaginative, politically emancipatory, then how can this radical contemporaneity connect with new patterns of misery. Some 870 million people, according to the most recent UN report, go to sleep hungry every night. Meanwhile, the military budget of the United States between the years 2000 and 2008 is the number 32 and eleven zeroes in front of it. Let’s for the moment accept the troubling distance between those two figures as a working definition of “terrorism.” The world suffers from multiplicities of miseries and is in dire need of rights—human rights, civil rights, women rights, labor rights, social security, political immunity, cultural autonomy. How can a site-specific art, with a radical, memory-less, contemporaneity written all over it connect to the material evidence of its whereabouts?
If the Islamic Revolution and the US Hostage Crisis of 1979 made Neshat’s art a global object of curiosity, then the horrific events of September the 11th and its military aftermath have made it the daily diary of our planetary fears and hidden hopes. She sees and projects things at the intersection of fear and hope, angst and emancipation, local dreads and global trepidations, ancient patience and postmodern pandemonium.
Paramount in both Parsipour’s novel and Neshat’s visual adaptation of it is the fate of millions of Iranian, and beyond them Muslim women, and the unconscionable status of their historical disenfranchisement—and of their heroic rebellions, undaunted resistances, of a defiance by now definitive to their character and culture. The history of Iranian (and Muslim) women in modernity is the daring tale of a sustained record of struggle for emancipation—emancipation in terms at once domestic to their own moral and cultural imaginary and yet universal to their specific location in the world. A sustained record of historic abuse is on the trail of Iranian women’s liberation movements: in the 1930s Reza Shah Pahlavi forced them to come out of their normative habit with the same brutality that half a century later Ayatollah Khomeini forced them to go behind a veil they had long since forgotten how to wear.32 The first record of a brave emancipation from forced veiling belongs to Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn, a revolutionary leader in one of the most glorious social uprisings of the mid-nineteenth century, the Babi movement. Before her brutal execution on Tuesday August 17, 1852, Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn had defied her fate and emerged as a major revolutionary leader, after she had received a superb scholastic education and published collections of her exquisite poetry.
The problem with a manner of feminism international that is issued from Western Europe and North America, imperial in its mandates, and unaware of local and regional sagas (of Muslim, Arab, Iranian, Indian, African, Asian, Latin American women struggling for their rights in terms domestic to their own moral and material culture and never articulated in a sustained body of English, French, or German literature) is that it weds the legitimate emancipation of women to the illegitimate cultural colonization of their homeland. From Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn forward, the history of Iranian women’s struggle for freedom from repression has been in terms at once domestic to their own culture and yet conversant with the most progressive and emancipatory movements of their time—ipso facto dismantling the power-basing bifurcation of the global imaginary into an East–West or South–North axis. Domestic tyranny in prolonged patriarchal terms (Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, or otherwise) is not an alternative to cultural colonialism but in fact coterminous with it.33 A terrorizing nexus of reciprocity has thus emerged between domestic tyranny and global humiliation—as if Muslim women had no choice but to choose between the denigration by their own men or a colonial domination of their body and soul. The two examples of Parsipour’s fiction and Neshat’s films show that there is a third alternative: emancipation in terms at once domestic to one’s own cultural specificities and yet conversant with the most progressive and emancipatory movements around the globe.
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Has something happened to Neshat’s work after the horrific events of 9/11—and the apocalyptic eruption of a year zero? The global mutation of 9/11 from Tuesday, the 11th September 2001 into the ground zero of a whole new iconic almanac of planetary reconfiguration of power has already announced the commencement of an historic cleavage around which the East and West and North and South of the globe are no longer allowed to rotate about any imaginal axis. The earth, as it were, is flat again.
The critical moment of a global emancipation from the binary opposition dangerously designed between “East and West,” or “Islam and the West” is evident in the aesthetic fact that Neshat can no longer be considered to be navigating between two worlds, that she is no longer in exile, that she is more at home in New York (which is not her home) than in Tehran (which once was but not any longer), that there is a fundamental homelessness about the flattened world that has categorically collapsed the binary distance between home and exile, between the East and the West, the North and the South, the here and the there. Neither misery nor art, as indeed neither imperial hubris nor terror, any longer recognize any boundaries between them and us anymore—for all of us are them. The US soldiers in Iraq call their military encampments “New Jersey,” “Delaware,” and such, while from New York to Los Angeles, Arabs and Muslims print their Yellow Pages in Arabic, Persian, or Urdu alphabet.
The world navigated around the axis of East and West has ended, but the world keeps imagining itself in terms of selves and others. There is a mutual imagining of the Other that complements (and contradicts) any exilic conception of home that artists like Neshat may harbor—as indeed any nativist conception of the globe that such artists as Marziyeh Meshkini or Samira Makhmalbaf may presume. From New York, Neshat conjures up a homeland as the imaginative geography of her creative soul; while at the very same time Marziyeh Meshkini in Iran (or Afghanistan) imagines a global audience for her cinema, which is nothing but the effervescent impetus of a very similar urge to create. There is a (Freudian) Unheimlich at work here, a sense of the uncanny, a permanent state of un-homeliness, at one and the same time being and not-being at home, that has cast artists and their world outside their presumed home and catapulted them into the imaginative geography of their creative origin and receptive destinations. The Unheimlich derives its power not from not being at home but from being strangely at home—a twilight zone of not/being at home, of not/having been there.
Not just “the East and the West,” or “Islam and the West,” but the localized and the globalized are also trapped in a dialectic of self-negation that prejudice the reading of any work of art: The local cannot but imagine itself in conversation with an imaginary global, and the global cannot but cast itself against a presumed localized interlocutor. Only an art that corresponds with the material evidence of the moment, with people smuggling their dreams across borders in defiance of both their inherited and adopted cultures, can have a lasting significance for the emerging cross-cultures of an uncanny homelessness. Unless art banks on and invests in what people have already dreamt in their border-crossing cross-cultures it can never hope to speak to truths that binds them now and leaves them a belligerent memory tomorrow.
Feeding the forms of that future fantasy yet to come is the formal irreducibility of Neshat’s Unheimlich art—of its being and not being here, of its being and not being from there. The significance of Neshat’s art is that its politics does not exhaust its aesthetics, or, putting it in another way, its manners outlast its matters. When one looks at a picture of Neshat, there is a thematic addressing of issues of political Islam, iconic violence, and body politics that immediately grab the attention of her global audience. But her aesthetic experimentations with form far exceed such thematic concerns. There is a significant formal residue about her art that sustains the imaginal space of her symbolic references, but is by no means reducible to it. If Iranian art in general, Iranian cinema in particular, is to outlive the current state of hype showered on it, it is entirely because of that formal residue than that political relevance.
Islamicized, Orientalized, racialized, and Exoticized, Iranian (as all other Muslim) women show and tell their art from the position of a double denial—once domesticated and then globalized. Abusing the predicament of one to justify the predatory designs of the other will corroborate both; while collapsing the two into a singular site of creative emancipation is what Parsipour/Neshat collaboration entails. Both the localized and globalized are trapped, the mirror images of each other’s negation, in a dialectic of self-negation. Only an art that corresponds to the material movement of people and their dreams across borders can have a lasting significance for the emerging culture of a flattened planetary imagination. Unless art taps on the energy of what people have already dreamt in their defiance of their fate to imagine otherwise, it cannot hope to speak to truths that they will hold dear in their present and precious in their future.34 The auspicious gathering of Parsipour’s magical realism and Neshat’s visual lyricism can culminate into an aesthetic conduit of returning the European repressed twice over as the colonized, exoticized, and repressed European periphery comes back to dismantle and liberate it from the claws of its own prejudices, letting it loose into the domain of a wider vision of the planet.
The ultimate triumph of Neshat’s art is when Shermine Shahrivar can be celebrated as Miss Europe and a working-class Muslim woman can be allowed to wear her scarf (if so she chooses)—and the two will constitute no contradiction, allow for no paradox, make for a liberated imagination. It is that imagination that helped Mehrangiz Kar endure the indignity of her prison, dreaming of the noble cause that had placed her there.
*First published in Berlin, Germany, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum fur Gegenwart, in English and German, 2005.
1From Mehrangiz Kar, Gardanband-e Moqaddas/Moqaddas’ Necklace (Spanga, Sweden: Baran Publications, 2002). Moqaddas’ Necklace is the prison memoir of Mehrangiz Kar, one of the most distinguished Iranian human, civil, and women’s rights activists. She was one of seventeen leading Iranian pro-democracy public intellectuals invited to Berlin in April 2000 by Heinrich Böll Stiftung to discuss the future of democracy in Iran. The proceedings of this conference were interrupted by anti-Islamic Republic activists. Upon their return to Iran, all participants in this conference were faced with anti-revolutionary charges and put in jail. Among Mehrangiz Kar’s charges were “Refusing to follow the religiously mandated veiling in the Berlin Conference,” “Denial and refusal of the mandatory religious law of Islamic veiling,” and “Insulting and denigrating the sacred religious beliefs.”
2As reported by BBC, UK Edition, on Friday, November 12, 2004. For a cogent discussion of the question of Muslim women veiling in Germany and France, and its implications for the larger issues of their constitutional rights, see Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 171–221.
3For more celebratory photos of Ms. Shermine Shahrivar, see “Miss Europa: Shermine Sharivar ist die Schönste,” in Stern at http://www.stern.de/lifestyle/leute/537682.html?nv=fs&cp=1.
4See “Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh deny Muslim film is plagiarism,” in E: Expatica, September 1, 2004, at http://www.expatica.com.
5Immanuel Kant wrote his famous essay, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in response to a magazine inquiry in Königsberg in Prussia, on September 30, 1784.
6Niall Ferguson, “Eurabia,” The New York Times, April 4, 2004.
7See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of Beautiful and Sublime. Translated by John T. Goldthwait. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960): 109–10. In the course of two short pages on the absence of beauty and sublime in “the Orient,” Kant uses the words “Degenerate” two times, “adventurous” three, “unnatural” two and “distorted, pleasure-prone, hideous, miserable, ignorant, monstrous, despotic, stubborn, and grotesque’ one time each.
8Ibid., 113.
9Although the origin of this binary opposition and dangerous liaison goes back to early nineteenth century and the rise of European Orientalism, its most recent proponent and militant strategist is Bernard Lewis, in a whole slew of strategic pamphleteering but most cogently in his Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Bernard Lewis also claims original authorship for the idea much later articulated by Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Gilles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004) updates the same binary opposition articulated by Bernard Lewis for post-9/11 consumption; a task already performed by Bernard Lewis himself in his What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Perennial, 2003). For a critic of such manners of civilizational thinking see my “For the Last Time: Civilizations,” International Sociology. September 2001, 16 (3): 361–68. For a critic of Gilles Kepel’s misreading of contemporary Islamism see my new Introduction to my Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of Islamic Revolution in Iran (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 2005).
10For more on this notion of “sacred order,” definitive to Philip Rieff’s theory of culture see his Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985).
11See Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method. Second Revised Edition. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989): 19–30.
12Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Translated by James Benedict (London and New York: Verso, 1993): 14.
13See Julia Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject. Translated by Susan Fairfield, with an Introduction by Samir Dayal (New York: Other Press, 2000).
14The way that Shirin Neshat envisions this unfolding work is a series of video installations plus (and quite different from) a narrative feature. While the narrative feature will remain more or less attentive to the novel on the basis of which it is build, the video installations are more visual contemplations on the character of individual women she depicts in them.
15For more on Nafisi’s book Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), see “Récit De L’exlil Occidental” in this volume.
16For more on Parsipour and a sample of her writing see Shahrnoush Parsipour, Women Without Men. Translated by Kamran Talattof and Jocelyn Sharlet (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Heshmat Moayyad, Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921–1991 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1991): 437–78; and Franklin Lewis and Farzin Yazdanfar (Compiled and Translated), In A Voice of Their Own: A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women Written Since the Revolution of 1979 (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1996): 42–50.
17For more on the specific of this CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, by far the most traumatic event of modern Iranian history, see the account given by the engineer of the coup himself in Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). For a more recent account of the coup see Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
18For a short biographical note in English on Zahra Khanlari and a sample of her fiction see John Green and Farzin Yazdanfar (Eds.), A Walnut Sapling on Masih’s Grave and Other Stories by Iranian Women. Foreword by Evelyne Accad (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993): 97–112.
19For short biographical sketches and samples of Simin Daneshvar’s short stories, see John Green and Farzin Yazdanfar (Ed.), A Walnut Sampling on Masih’s Grave 1993: 62–82; Soraya Sullivan (Tr), Stories by Iranian Women Since the Revolution. Introduction by Farzaneh Milani (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 1991): 16–35; Simin Daneshvar, Sutra and Other Stories. Translated from the Persian by Hasan Javadi and Amin Neshati (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1994); Simin Daneshvar, Daneshvar’s Playhouse: A Collection of Stories (Washington DC: Mage Publishers, 1989); and Heshmat Moayyad, Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921–1991: 111–128. See also Simin Daneshvar, Savushun: A Novel about Modern Iran. Translated from the Persian by M. R. Ghanoonparvar. Introduction by Brian Spooner (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1990). There is another English translation of Savushun by Roxanne Zand as A Persian Requiem (New York: George Braziller, 1992). For a discussion of Simin Daneshvar’s fiction see Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words, 1992: 181–199.
20For more on Goli Taraghi and samples of her stories in English see Soraya Sullivan (Tr), Stories by Iranian Women since the Revolution, 1991: 58–70; John Green and Farzin Yazdanfar (Ed.), A Walnut Sapling on Masih’s Grave, 1993: 157–72; Franklin Lewis and Farzin Yazdanfar, In A Voice of Their Own: A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women Written Since the Revolution of 1979: 3–22; and Heshmat Moayyad, Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921–1991: 363–80. See also Goli Taraghi, A Mansion in the Sky and Other Short Stories. Translated by Faridoun Farrokh (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003). For a translation of her “Hibernation,” see Goli Taraghi, Winter Sleep. Translated from the Persian by Francine T. Mahak (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1994).
21For more on Moniru Ravanipour see Heshmat Moayyad, Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921–1991: 479–490; and Franklin Lewis and Farzin Yazdanfar, In A Voice of Their Own: A Collection of Stories by Iranian Women Written Since the Revolution of 1979: 51–68. See also Moniru Ravanipour, Kanizu. Translated by Hirad Dinevari et al. Edited with an Introduction by M. R. Ghanoonparvar (Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers, 2004); and Moniru Ravanipour, Satan’s Stone. Translated by M. R. Ghanoonparvar (Austin, TX: Texas University Press, 1996).
22I have seen an early cut of “Mahdokht” (2005), plus a very informative behind-the-scene documentary of its production, as well as a video recording of a conversation between Neshat and Parsipour and the cast and crew of the feature film that Neshat is currently (Summer 2005) making in Morocco. Upon her return to New York in early June 2005, Neshat has decided to re-edit that early draft of “Mahdokht” for its premiere in Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. In the feature film rendition of “Women without Men,” Neshat has cast Parsipour, the author of the novella, in a small role. This casting is the document of an exquisite case of inter-textuality in modern Iranian arts and letters.
23Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, Mathnavi: III: 3901–3906 (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1363/1984): II: 222. All translations of Rumi’s poetry are my own.
24Ibid., VI: 3637–3642.
25From Forough Farrokhzad, “It is only the voice that remains,” in Gozineh-yeh Ash’ar-e Forough Farrokhzad (Tehran: Morvarid, 1364/1985): 227–231. All translations of Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry are my own.
26From Forough Farrokhzad’s “Let us Believe in the Commencement of the Cold Season,” in Gozineh-yeh Ash’ar-e Forough Farrokhzad (Tehran: Morvarid, 1364/1985): 239–255.
27From Forough Farrokhzad’s “Another Birth,” in Gozineh-yeh Ash’ar-e Forough Farrokhzad (Tehran: Morvarid, 1364/1985): 216–220.
28Rumi, Mathnavi: VI: 3643.
29I have discussed Forough Farrokhzad’s material metaphysics in detail in my “Forough Farrokhzad and the Formative Forces of Iranian Culture.” In Michael C. Hillmann (Ed.), Forugh Farrokhzad: A Quarter Century Later. Literature East and West (Austin, Texas: University of Texas at Austin, 1988).
30From Forough Farrokhzad’s “Let us Believe in the Commencement of the Cold Season,” ibid.
31Rumi, Mathnavi: I: 3435–3438.
32For full account of the subject see “Récit De L’exlil Occidental” in this volume.
33Sentences about Azar Nafisi’s book Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) have been deleted from the text as the similar passage has already been appeared in “Récit De L’exlil Occidental” in this volume.
34In this respect the extraordinary art of the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir is exemplary in its wedding the formal experiments of her work to the national liberation of her people. While in her hilarious work “Sexy Semite” (2003), she experimented with the borderlines of satire and catastrophe (Nakba), in her “Where We Come From” (2004), she literally crossed the borderlines of art and politics—smuggling memories of exiled Palestinians back to their occupied homeland.