Neocon intellectuals only promote the Iranian voices that suit their political agenda. Does that remind you of anything - Iraq, say?
Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens are among many neocon commentators and orientalist warmongers who have a soft spot for the Iranian writer Azar Nafisi. They regularly remind us - as in the special text box in the Observer's generous preview of Cohen's What's Left? - with some glee that the dedication in that book "to Paul" salutes none other than the newly semi-repentant neocon stalwart Paul Wolfowitz.
Shock! Horror!? Hardly. This is no surprise to those who know a little of the history and rise to prominence of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and the role of Bernard "clash of civilisation" Lewis as its promoter and supporter. This may be a reason why the book is so much less popular among Iranians than it is among foreigners, a point raised with sharp insight by the Columbia academic Hamid Dabashi.
The book's literary merits aside, the potency and resonating power of its title are worth a note. The combination of those two nouns, two signifiers in close proximity, is indeed most marketable. For "Tehran", read barbaric Muslims and sexual repression; for "Lolita", read illicit sex. One can speculate about the relative marketability of a book called Reading Lolita in Copenhagen or, indeed, Reading Tolstoy in Tehran.
The sexual charge it delivered to Messrs Wolfowitz, Cohen and Hitchens can only be guessed at, but if pornography is stimulation of sexual desire through reading or writing, then Reading Lolita is politics-flavoured porn.
This narrative draws from a well-tapped spring. For hundreds of years, the story of empire offered young men of the west the "eastern promise", which, from the very earliest days, meant sexual adventures of the most exotic kind, as well as economic rewards - two kinds of booty call. Civilians and artists, whose legacy of orientalist art almost exclusively focuses on sexualised fantasy visions of the eastern woman, followed the soldiers of the Imperial armies of France and Britain. The oriental woman is seen as being more "up for it", "hotter" - sexually proactive and more available than her frigid European sisters.
In his elegant study Orientalism, the late Edward Said deals with that stream of European collective imagination, its sources, meanings and consequences. I would add only that the creative output of the guards at Abu Ghraib prison are the digital descendant, if somewhat less artful and subtle, of the same imagination playing the same drama. The moulding, arranging and shaping of conquered brown bodies into forms that excite the authors' erotic imaginations, and the recording of same for later use, have the same depravity, dislocation and self-delusion as the more pricey and better-crafted canvasses gracing our institutions of official high culture.
If we take the new empire's desk generals at their word and believe in their support for the cause of Iranians' democratic ambitions, it would be natural to assume that they would want to celebrate and encourage its principal actors. The fact that there is an internal democratic opposition is something of an inconvenience to the neocon agenda of "bomb first, ask questions later".
The inconvenient truth is that not only there is a viable homegrown democratic movement, campaigning on everything from the environment to workers and women's rights and to freedom of expression, but also it is a fact that women staff these groups disproportionately.
Women have more to gain from openness and democracy in Iran, having lost more than men in recent times. They have gender-specific claims against tradition as well as the theocratic regime, to do with the criminal justice system, family law and much more besides. They peruse these with heroic steadfastness, and at much personal cost. The women activists hail from a wide range of political opinions and tendencies, representing reform-minded gradualists and revolutionaries. Women are active in local councils as journalists, filmmakers, writers and lawyers. Some, like the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, are well-known and vocal abroad.
In fact, despite (some say, because of) the restrictions imposed on the life of the women of Iran, they are by far the most active and emancipated women in the Muslim world. Iran has female literacy rates that are the envy of the developing world - double those of India or Egypt, for example. Not only is the rate of women workers the highest in the Middle East, but in many professions, they have overtaken men. Just this week, it was announced that Tehran now has more female than male dentists. Female university entrants have been in the majority for a while, but are gaining such disproportionate advantage over male entrants that the government is thinking about introducing quotas in favour of men, to ensure they don't fall too far behind. These are conditions that women in Saudi Arabia, that bastion of American-style moderation and freedom, can only dream of. In fact, Saudi women are still awaiting permission to drive cars.
In the same week in which Azar Nafisi was mentioned once again, Shirin Ebadi took part in public denunciation of Ahmadinejad's record on censorship, as spokesperson and legal council for group of concerned intellectuals and writers. Strangely enough, there was no rush to support her by the intellectuals who are so excited about the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.
Shirin Ebadi is a remarkable woman whose bravery and steadfastness for the cause of freedom for all Iranians - men as well as women - is well documented. She is remarkable but not unique. The problem is that the indigenous movement for democratic change does not conform to the templates favoured by the neocons.
Shirin and her like don't make good pin-ups for the neocon agenda because she is no smouldering, dark-eyed Lolita; she isn't as sexy because she isn't simple. In fact, she is quite complicated: a former judge, and the country's most celebrated human rights lawyer, she has tasted prison herself. She isn't sexy because her criticism of the system in Iran isn't within the terms of the new imperialists' agenda. Most of all, she isn't sexy because she isn't asking US to bomb her country to pieces or slaughter her menfolk. She is on record as saying she will defend her country against foreign aggression. Her opposition to the regime doesn't extend to the importation of Iraqi-style democracy - she is at once fighting traditional patriarchal sexism of formalised into institutional oppression, and the external aggression and ambitions of the imperialists.
Lovers of true freedom and democracy should celebrate, support and even actually listen to women like Shirin Ebadi, who live in the conditions they seek to change, and others who are at the coalface of daily struggle with despotism - and not the likes of Azar Nafisi, who are supplicants in the corridors of power in Washington, peddling their wares and claiming their status as paid-up experts for so-called thinktanks.
The same white-collar warriors, intellectuals and writers who gave us "Iraqi freedom" are poised to deliver (perhaps by spring) operation Iranian Democracy from above. In doing so, they delve into a barrel and once again pull out rotten apples (remember Ahmed Chalabi) to feed their twisted imagination and their blood lust.
This piece was re-edited at 16:45 on March 2 to remove the factual error about "novel" referred to in the thread.
Masoud Golsorkhi is the Iranian born editor of Tank, a fashion, arts and ideas magazine.
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