—Forough Farrokhzad
There is a palpable energy in Shirin Neshat’s photographs, an almost tangible seduction obviating the violence it borders, deeply rooted in the historical culture she would ultimately have to call home. As an Iranian artist living in New York and from there addressing a global audience, Neshat quietly corrodes the most violent metaphysical imperatives about the nature and function of an Islamic femininity. Enduring assumptions of what constitutes an Islamic woman are at once domestic to that culture and colonially crafted on it. With a singular strike of creative genius, Neshat manages to target both of these divergent yet colliding targets. The history of Neshat’s bodily portrayals of this Islamic woman is the unwritten chronicle of a mute and concealed femininity. Her photographs show and tell what has been forbidden to show and tell. That she manages to do this without violating the bodily codes of an Islamic woman marks the site of her creative imagination.
The Iranian women were first veiled through the gradual process of urbanization. To this day, the kind of veiling that Neshat critically characterizes is an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. Women who work in the rice paddies of the North engage in seasonal migrations in the eastern and western parts of the country, or wear traditional tribal costumes in the south, never veil the way women in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, or other major urban centers do. With the transition from tribal and feudal communities into expanded urbanism caused by domestic (commercial) and colonial (comprador bourgeois) capitalism, women were gradually removed from the public scenes of agricultural and tribal communities and placed in the confinements of enclosed households. Following the formation of traditional (bazaar) bourgeoisie, the merchants, the professional guilds, the civil administrators, and the technocrats began to dwell in burgeoning urban centers where women had no public task to perform and thus were delegated to an interior enclosure necessitated by the new division of labor. While men went outside to produce, manufacture, build, buy, sell, and administer, women stayed home to cook, clean, give birth to and raise children. While throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, Mashhad, and a handful of other cities witnessed a rapid domestication of Iranian women, in the same periods rural and tribal communities continued to provide them with ample opportunity to be publicly present in the daily activities of their affairs. The necessity of having two free hands to perform the daily tasks of a public life prevented the development of the urban form of veiling for which women had to use both their hands in order to keep themselves veiled. While in their domestic quarters the urban women did not veil and freely attended to their daily routines, in public they had to resort to a kind of over-all veiling, which required two idle hands. With the increased process of urbanization, Iranian women were thus forced to have two idle hands in public in order to keep themselves properly veiled.
The first modern Iranian woman revolutionary, Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn (1814–1852), throw her veil away and uncovered herself the instant she needed her two hands to engage in radical political activities. 1 But such experiences as that of Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn remained by and large exceptional and the process of urbanization continued to be concomitant with the active isolation of women in their private quarters and their veiling in public. With the advent of state-sponsored modernity, in the early part of the twentieth century, urban Iranian women, now accustomed to their domestic lives, were now forced to attend the public scene unveiled. Directly influenced by the Turkish reformist Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938), Reza Shah (1878–1944) forced the Iranian women out of their veil by mandating a dress code which prohibited the chador.2 Reza Shah’s state-sponsored modernism was concomitant with the active formation of the Iranian comprador bourgeoisie, an increased demand for inexpensive urban labor force (women as teachers, nurses, and even members of the administrative bureaucracy), and a material expansion of the consumer market. While in coastal, tribal and rural areas, Iranian women continued to lead their active lives in the public, their urban sisters were forced to come out of their private quarters unveiled in order to put their hitherto concealed hands to use. The expanded commercial capitalism and the active formation of the comprador bourgeoisie needed ever-cheaper labor and ever-larger markets. Two publicly idle hands could be hired for half the wage in schools, factories, hospitals, and other public places.
The Islamic revolution of 1979 once again turned the table. Once again women were ordered back into the confinements of their chador and behind the closed doors of their private quarters. But this time around, the logic of capitalism could not be compromised. Not even a religious revolution, not even a return of Savonarola could afford two idle hands for women in public. The Islamic Revolution did impose what it now called Hijab-e Islami (Islamic veil). But the ideologues of the revolution soon realized, particularly during the eight years of war with Iraq, that the labor force was in dire need of extra hands. As a result, the newly defined Islamic veil had to be designed in a way that would leave the two hands free to work: To hold a book and read, to tighten the screws on a factory assembly line, to deliver a baby, to draw an architectural blueprint, to hold a piece of chalk and an eraser, and ultimately at the time of war to hold a gun.
Neshat’s art is in capturing the tragi-comedy of a body pulled and pushed by the logic and rhetoric of a transition from the early feudal to the late capitalist, from the premodern to the postmodern, from the colonial to the postcolonial, and all of that through the electrified energy of death and Eros, of a gun and a gaze, of violence and sensuality. For Neshat, veil is a metaphoric fortress from which to wage a different kind of battle.
Between Tahereh Qurrat al-Ayn and Shirin Neshat stands a rainbow of visionary Iranian women. An array of revolutionaries, poets, painters, novelists, aristocratic critics, social essayists, filmmakers, and political activists fill the distance between the origin of Neshat’s visionary ancestors in Iranian modernity and herself. But immediately and most dearly close to her is Forough Farrokhzad, the poet par excellence, the very living conscience of an entire generation of reawakened sensibilities. Through her daring, provocative, and iconoclastic poetry, Farrokhzad radically redefined not only the very definition of femininity but with it the very assumption of masculinity. Many of the inscriptions on the exposed bodies of Neshat’s photographs are Farrokhzad’s poems. She does visually what Farrokhzad did verbally. Their common lyricism—one verbal, the other visual—is an earthly pull of the material sensuality bringing down the crowning masculinity of the Islamic metaphysics.
Neshat, however, is a revolution, a war, and then the distance of an exile far from Farrokhzad. Defining the visual virility of Neshat’s femininity is a fragmented subjectivity now beyond her or anybody else’s control. Militating the postmodernity of her conditions, Neshat’s pictorial subjectivities of a Muslim woman ultimately reflect the fragmented reality of a transnationalism which is the political take of late capitalist economy. What Neshat’s provocative vision reflects is far more important than just a mere pictorial contestation of both a colonial and a patriarchal conception of women. She anticipates the terms of the future revolutions far more than she reciprocates the received parameters of the old ones. The contested body of the Muslim woman which is being here effectively renegotiated is the simultaneous site of how any actively and irrevocably transnational geopolitics can circumscribe the terms of a cultural dialogue. To be sure, Neshat cannot be exhibited inside Iran. It is only in Europe and the United States, or other similarly transgressive sites of her migrant imagination, that she can dream the terms of a future liberation. Contesting the nature and function of the Islamic body redefining sensuality in the dangerous neighborhood of violence, and ultimately mocking, ever so seductively, both the patriarchal and the colonial gaze are among the urgent energies that animate the postmodernity of her photographic visions.
The intermediary site between patriarchy and coloniality is central to Neshat’s re-turning gaze. With one singular gaze, she transfixes the colonial and the patriarchal by pitting them against each other. The veil from behind which she looks back is not just the patriarchal imposition as a guard against modernity but is equally the colonial gaze that by exporting that modernity turned her into an object of desire, an odalisque of dangerous sensuality. To collapse these two impositions against each other is a visual strategy of uncommon power. Evident in that collapse is the fact that for the colonized masculine, colonialism is an innately emasculating project. The longer the gun of the colonial officer, the shorter the phallocentric self-confidence of the colonized masculine. Deep wounds in the patriarchal body, the colonial castration of the colonized masculine is paradoxically liberating for the colonized feminine. Here the intermarriage of the Oriental women and the colonial officers (who could be in the disguise of businessmen or the Orientalist professorates even) is particularly noteworthy. There is every reason for the colonized feminine subconsciously to translate the political powerlessness of the colonized masculine into his sexual impotence, and conversely transmute the political prowess of the colonial officer into his sexual potency. Neshat’s gaze, through the double-bind of her now doubly signified veil, transfixes those dual impositions via a seductive innocence that is at the very same time extraordinarily shrewd. She looks at the patriarchal father/brother/husband with a flirtatious eye toward the colonial officer, while at the same time she mocks the colonial officer via a transparent exposition of the absurdity of his image of her.
That kind of gaze is only possible from the transgressive site of a New York state of imagination, a no-man’s-land, as it were, of migratory dreams. The immigrant artist, or the photographer in exile, can thus never be considered a Gramscian organic intellectual. She can never fully function as the integral force from within a society. But in a late capitalist global economy with its own peculiar kind of fetishism of the artistic commodity that is the only way that the fragmented reality of any artist can be fully aware of itself. The effective role that an immigrant artist thus loses, she doubly gains by the freedom that she cultivates from her angular vision of the cultural center. There is something profoundly liberating in engaging in a dialogue with a culture or two with no immediate audience in either and yet something profoundly important to say to both. To speak two counter-truths to two powers—one colonial, the other patriarchal—is what Neshat does through her silent yet screaming countergaze.
The transgressive force of that countergaze is true to the transnational geopolitics that embraces it. Barely more than half a century after Walter Benjamin wrote his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” we have come a long way from being shocked that a work of art no longer embodies its originary historical presence. Far more effectively than the fetishism of commodity, it is the fragmented subject and the post-Foucauldian death of man that now radically animates the presence of the art in a transnational geopolitics. Artists like Neshat are at once condemned and blessed to work on the margins of two (or three, four, or more) cultures. The creative work on such margins constitutionally corrodes into the very presumed validities of two (or more) adjacent cultures. The more artists like Neshat find a global audience, the more the territorial claims of terms such as Iran or Islam or the West become dubious and meaningless.
On the margins of any two cultures, the effective energy of a work of art borrows and returns the received memories of both their histories. In this case, it is the very idea of a Muslim woman that must be renegotiated. Neshat’s contesting the Islamic body is done within the boundaries of what is to be and what is not to be shown, and there precisely lies the energetic charge of her subversive gaze. There is an ideal of concealed femininity that is invented as the model of a Muslim woman and which is while accentuated, celebrated even, it is taken to rhetorical ends through Neshat’s camera. Through that camera the concealed sensuality of the Muslim woman is exposed via a surreptitious gaze that is at once innocent and dangerous. Through the effective use of that paradox, Neshat takes a succession of assumptions to task: from the construction of the Islamic body to the colonial gaze. In the course of the Islamic revolution in Iran and then beyond, the figure of a veiled Muslim woman became the pictorial code of suppression, imprisonment, and denial in the neocolonial gaze. Neshat returns that gaze with a remarkable combination of poise, poignancy, arrogance one might even call it. There is a quiet yet palpable sense of confidence in that returned gaze, a pride of place, a sheer matter-of-factness of a location in culture.
From the confident corner of that gaze oozes an energy that easily collapses the presumed boundaries of Eros and death, sex and violence, seduction and destruction: the pictorial presentation of a Persian Salome. The seven veils of this Salome, though, are yet to be lifted. From behind the veils, she seduces and subverts at one and the same time, loves and hates, kisses and kills, pushes and pulls the mandated boundaries of inhibitions and transgressions. This femme fatale, however, liberates precisely at the moment that she seems to be dangerous, to pose to be deadly. It is through that effective use of a visual concoction of Eros and death that the contested femininity of the Islamic woman easily borders with challenging its concomitant conception of masculinity. After Neshat’s photography, we can no longer assume that men are to kill and women are to love. The cultural construction of gender, the historical imagining of the sexes, and the social boundaries of the senses are all brought back to effective visual negotiation before we are let go to rethink what it means to be a woman, or what it signifies to be a man.
What Neshat does at the most immediate political level is aggressively visualizing the suppressed historical narrative of a nation. If Farrokhzad’s was the poetic voice of a patriarchally silenced gender, then Neshat’s is the pictorial vision of an equally concealed body. Through her camera is surreptitiously emerging the concealed sensuality of the whole history of a denial. This Oriental odalisque shoots back, looks back, veils to reveal. The naked brutality of the real has nowhere to hide here, no metaphysics to masquerade its politics, no aesthetics to sugarcoat its violence. By daring modernity, Neshat equally challenges and returns the colonial gaze that was set on the Iranian/Muslim woman with the project of modernity. Neshat’s camera freezes a moment of enduring reflection on what it means to be a woman, to be a man, to be modern, to be antimodern, premodern, and all of these by simply picturing the fragmented look of the postmodernity of all our subjectivities. Evident in Neshat’s photography is an entire history of objectification, of being turned into the iconic index of modernity, of a person’s body being denied her while it is used and abused to mark the metaphysical claims of tradition vs. modernity.
Against that history of bodily abuse, Neshat turns the female body into a roaring carnival of quiet yet seductive protest. To fight the received notions of femininity and yet claim a renewed conception of it is what this carnival of visual protest best stages. Body as a theater of protest is where forbidden acts are staged, where suppressions are marked, strategies of emancipation contemplated. From that stage, there is a bodily resurrection, a protest of the living doubts of a body against the dead certainties of a culture.
From the verbal to the visual, Neshat turns the body into the written and photographed page of a banned book. The body of the Muslim woman as the banned book of a truth aggressively concealed in a culture: There lies the contested site of Neshat’s dual encounter, contesting the Islamic body while returning the colonial gaze. Self-portrayal, the fact that Neshat photographs herself, is the active inhibition of gazing, thus forcing, in equal measures, the male body to begin to redefine itself, and the colonial gaze to begin to look away.