These days its easy to find images of the ugly crowd in Iran chanting slogans. But I had to browse the Google image finder for quite a while before I found one that had the right geometric property for a discussion of Iran’s nuclear technology issue.
One placard the crowd is holding says, “Death to America,” as expected. The other two say “nuclear development is Iran’s right,” and “We want our legal rights in NPT (the nuclear non-proliferation treaty).” You’ll notice that I have been able to draw a straight line across the picture separating the two sentiments cleanly. In most other pictures this geometric property is absent. The two issues are mingled in a not-so-easily-drawn demarcation. And if they are separable, the proportion isn’t right. Notice the “Death to America” portion is smaller than the side which says “nuclear development is Iran’s right.”
After I am done painting Iran as a nation of mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, you will see that even these proportions are unfair. The history of Persian civilization is much more about higher intellect than it is about radicalism, and superstitious religiosity. I will then give an emotional dimension to this point of view by presenting one of my short stories, “The Moon Landing.” An autobiographical account of what went on in my own family the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
The moon is a good place to start this extremely brief overview of Iran’s scientific history because there is a crater on the far side of the moon named after the tenth century Persian mathematician Al Khawrazmi. Why is he so honored? In small part because his influential book on arithmetic taught Europe how to write numbers and do arithmetic in the efficient way we do now. It was extremely cumbersome to do multiplication, division and fractions and advanced mathematics in Roman numerals, and the absence of the number zero was a huge impediment in the development of European science and mathematics. In his book, Khawrazmi compiled the methods of Indian mathematics which Europe then adopted wholesale. This includes our “Arabic” numeral system which is really the Indian numeral system introduced to Europe through Khawrazmi’s scholarly work.
In larger part Khawrazmi is honored today because he is known as the father of algebra-- which is a shortened version of the title of another of his books Al jabr va moghabelat. Today this first of the “difficult math subjects” is a prerequisite to taking calculus, differential equations and beyond. Why? because it was historically the prerequisite to the development of these mathematical tools of science.
Khawrazmi and other Iranian mathematicians like Al-Karaji (10th century), born in a town a few miles west of where I grew up in Tehran, helped develop the easy way in which engineers and scientists set up equations and go about solving them in the algorithmic way that they do now. In fact our word “algorithm” is probably a Medieval mis-pronunciation of the name of the author Al-khawrazmi.
The emphasis of Persian algebra on the use of algorithms is a leap of the intellect roughly analogous to the invention of the computer, because algebra is a machine that lifts a huge burden of thinking from us by reducing analysis to mindless operations—the way we let software do most of the work these days. Prior to algebra, problems had to be reasoned through every step of the way. Using Algebra as a lever, mathematics could now bite off much bigger problems than it could chew in the past. This machine of the mind began what I privately call “the industrial revolution of mathematics.” Because it triggered the invention of many later mathematical machines such as calculus, without which modern science would be impossible.
But mathematics isn’t the whole of science. Let’s see what the Iranian scholar Tusi was thinking in the 13th century. He says, "Look at the world of animals and birds. They have all that is necessary for defense, protection and daily life, including strengths, courage and appropriate tools [organs].” From these observations Tusi went on to describe a theory of evolution where hereditary variability was the leading force of evolution. In words that sound like Tusi is teaching a biology class on mutation he says, “The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable, as a result they gain advantages over other creatures.” 600 years before Darwin Tusi did not spark a Scopes trial, though this Muslim scholar believed that humans are not only related to apes, but that apes are in fact a kind of human. Iran’s 13th century Darwin.
Here’s is another` Persian scientist, Biruni, being a geologist in the 11th century: “But if you see the soil of India with your own eyes and meditate on its nature, if you consider the rounded stones found in the earth however deeply you dig. Stones that are huge near the mountains and where the rivers have a violent current. Stones that are of smaller size at a greater distance from the mountain. And where the streams flow more slowly stones that appear pulverized in the shape of sand. Or Where the streams begin to stagnate near their mouths and near the sea. If you consider all this you can scarcely help thinking that India was once a sea, which by degrees has been filled up by the alluvium of the streams. Iran’s11th century Charles Lyell.
Let’s move on to the astounding genius of the scientist/philosopher Ibn-Sina who lived in Hamedan, the same city my father was born. He proposed that a body stays in the same place or continues moving at the same speed in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. This law of physics --rediscovered by Galileo 400 years later—is known as Newton’s first law of motion. And Ibn-Sina doesn’t stop with Newton, he says “If every single thing throughout the world was motionless, time would have no meaning.” Iran’s 11th century Einstein.
These scientists aren’t unknowns of history among Iranians. Our affection for these men of science is encoded in the myths and legends I grew up with. In a story reminiscent of some we tell today about the antics of the brilliant American physicist Richard Feynman, Ibn-Sina is said to have been such a wonderous physician that he could no longer stand being mobbed by his patients. Instead he had a rope one end of which was in the waiting room and the other in his office. The patient held on to one end of the rope and ibn-Sina, holding on to the other end, would diagnose him. One day, just to test him, a man brought in his cat and put the cat’s paw on the rope. When he opened his perscription on the way out, it said, “There’s nothing wrong with your cat that a less stingy feeding wouldn’t remedy.”
Ibn-Sina, who did not believe in alchemy, studied and severely criticized the works of another great 10th century Persian scientist, Al Razi who was born in a city just a few miles south of Tehran, where I was born. This alchemist is credited with the discovery of alcohol and its use as an antiseptic in medicine. He is also believed to have discovered sulphuric acid. Razi was a genius of classification. For instance he compiled a description of all the glassware and instruments used in standard chemsitry until recent times. The Hollywood image of the mad scientist cackling over beakers, tubes and alembics goes back to Razi. And whenever you say, “animal vegetable or mineral,” remember Razi, because he was the first to classify objects as such.
Then there’s the great Al-Haytham (11th century) , the father of optics. Persians and Arabs fight over Al-Haytham because he was born in Basra, a town that now sits just inside the border with Iraq not very far from Bushehr where Iran is building a nuclear reactor. Basra went in an out of the Persian empire as the empire expanded and shrank throughout history. When Al-Haytham was born, Basra was in Southern Persia, so Iranians claim him. It is highly likely that the ethnicity of this great physicist was Arabic-- unlike the other scholars I have mentioned, who were ethnically Persian. But the very fact that Persians fight to claim Al-Haytham suggests the zeal with which the Iranian civilization collects and protects scientific heritage.
Putting my nationalist hat back on, the great Persian Empire scientist Al Haytham studied the reflection of light by curved mirrors, and refraction by water and the atmosphere. He investigated the magnifying power of lenses, discussed rainbows, binocular vision and so on. He also corrected Ptolemy and Euclid’s idea that vision results from the eye sending out rays to the object. In a thought experiment very Einsteinian in texture he argued that if the eye sends out rays to the object, then nearer objects should become visible earlier than distant objects. Then using the scientific method he simply did the experiment when he closed his eyes and opened them again to the stars. The distant stars of course became immediately visible, disproving earlier theories of vision.
And on and on and on… to show that Iran’s desire for advanced technologies is much less a quest for political power than a desire to preserve an important chunk her national soul.
I hope at this point I have been able to show that the demarcation in the above photograph is not only qualitatively correct—one side is bigger than the other-- but that it is quantitatively unfair. Iranian's legal rights under the NPT are of hugely greater concern for Iran than her beef with the United States or Israel.
So what happened to the iranians? With this tremendous amount of science and mathematics, why didn’t Iran start the rennaisance instead of Europe. I’m broaching the topic even though it is outside the scope of this discussion because the question is such an obvious one it deserves to be mentioned. Too bad it can’t be explored here. Enough to say that Iranians believe the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century which decimated Iran’s population had something to do with it. It’s not the whole story by any means—Iran’s social and political structure , and also its geography were major factors--but whatever the reasons, in July of 1969 when the Americans landed on the moon all of this history caught up with us in a very personal way.
My short story “The Moonlanding,” was written against this backdrop of national soul searching
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Going to Bat for Mossadegh, a books review.
Iranian History and Politics: The dialectics of state and society.
RoutledgeCurzon 2003.
Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran.
I.B. Tauris 1990.
In moments of statistical introspection, I wonder if LA Dodgers fans are generally Pahlavi supporters. The occasional Shah picture posted on huge Westwood billboards, and the handful of TV stations time capsuling pre-revolution Tehran are tempting bits of data. San Francisco Giants fans, on the other hand, are generally pro-Mossadegh, though I lack the evidence of billboards. Needless to say, Giants rule and Dodgers suck, but it is nice occasionally to debate with facts and reason. Two meticulously researched books by Oxford scholar Homa Katouzian hit the ball right out of the ballpark for the Giants.
The first book, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectics of State and Society, develops the author’s theory of “arbitrary rule,” and establishes a foundation for understanding Mossadegh’s uniqueness in Iranian history. The second book, Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran, specifically analyzes the events of the Mossadegh period, demonstrating how he personified a new paradigm in Iran’s civilization.
Arbitrary rule should not be confused with dictatorship, Katouzian says. “The distinctive characteristic of the Iranian state [has been] that it monopolized not just power, but arbitrary power--not the absolute power in laying down the law, but the absolute power of exercising lawlessness.” I believe the umpire is a good example of a dictator. You can’t argue with his decision, but neither can he change the rules of baseball. Katouzian cites the example, Henry VIII of England as a dictator who was not an arbitrary ruler. This dictator had the most unfettered power of any English king, yet he had to use threats, coercion, bribery, and at least one execution to become head of the Church of England, so that he could lawfully divorce his wife (Katouzian does not discuss motivation or methods, just that Henry VIII got the approval of Parliament).
Looking for examples of arbitrary lawlessness, on the other hand, I found this recollection by Farhad Diba of an encounter with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi:
“The Shah asked me what I was doing and I, very proudly, told him about how well NCR [National Cash Register Company] was progressing in Iran. When I reported that to my father the next day, he said "You are a fool. Sure enough, within the year, NCR (which my father had introduced into Iran and, over 25 years, it had grown into a large business) was taken from us and given over to the Pahlavi Foundation.”
In Iranian History and Politics..Katouzian mentions a few of the countless examples of arbitrary usurpation of property by various Shahs. The suspicion that the wealth may have been acquired by unjust means in the first place gives Shahs a certain Robin Hood appeal. But Katouzian’s scholarship exposes the practice as a tragic reason for Iran’s economic backwardness: capital does not accumulate over the generations, making it impossible for any large industrial or financial enterprise to take root.
Under the arbitrary rule of its monarchs, Iran was a “short term society,” as Katouzian terms it, where few social structures were allowed to stand long enough to evolve the sophisticated architecture of modern institutions. In Europe, lords, barons, counts and dukes had the brutal right of ownership to their land, making a feudal system possible. Iran’s khans had no ownership rights, only privileges that could be taken away at the whim of the arbitrary ruler. In such a system even feudalism has no incentive to grow, much less its Western progressions: a powerful merchant class, large scale capitalism, and socialism.
Applying Katouzian’s arbitrary rule theory, I figured out that the spike in the price of oil in the seventies only created the illusion of a modern economy in Iran. This period was in reality little more than a shopping spree by the country’s sole owner, the Shah. In the historic pattern of economic insecurity of the wealthy, nothing had changed.
Applying the simple yet powerful theory again, I realized that freedoms enjoyed by Iranian women and religious minorities during the Shah should not be misunderstood as a modern appreciation of human rights and dignity. True to Iran’s historic pattern, all such freedoms were privileges granted by the monarch, to be taken away at his convenience. The Shah may have been a benevolent soul, but benevolence is no substitute for guaranteed rights under a long term tradition of law. Niceness is a character trait, not a social institution.
The arbitrary rule concept is developed into a solid theory in the book Iranian History and Politics the Dialectic of State and Society. Now the reader is ready for Mussadiq and the struggle for Power in Iran, fully prepared to appreciate this leader’s uniqueness in Iranian history.
The 1906 constitutional revolution was an attempt to put an end to arbitrary rule. At the time Mossadegh was in his early twenties, and for forty-five years he watched as the revolution was torn apart by foreign interference in domestic politics. By the time he became prime minister, Mossadegh knew what to do to piece Iran’s constitution back together. His nationalization of Iranian oil had far less to do with revenue than with eliminating foreign intrusion into Iranian affairs. His recalcitrance in coming to terms with the British should be assessed as serving his grand project—protecting Iran’s newly discovered paradigm of lawful leadership.
Mossadegh himself has been criticized for breaking the law when he temporarily dissolved the majles. “How is that different from the dictatorship of the Shah?” his detractors ask. Katouzian admits the mistake, while explaining the complex mitigating circumstances. Yet his arbitrary rule theory makes it unnecessary to decide whether Mossadegh was a dictator. The reader has already learned that the term “dictator” in the Western sense does not describe our Shahs at all. The Pahlavis were not dictators, but arbitrary rulers. Mossadegh, dictator or not, acted in the modern paradigm of the struggle between various interests of society. For him, the primitive mellat [society]vs. dowlat [state] dialectic was an extinct theme.
As Katouzian explains in Iranian History and Politics..., our numerous rebellions had always been about the mellat overthrowing the dowlat. Everybody vs. the “institution” of the arbitrary ruler. The upheavals led to a period of chaos [fetneh/ahsoub] until a new arbitrary ruler enforced order and began the cycle all over again. In Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran it can be seen that the battles of the Mossdegh era were of a fresh variety. We were fighting over which interests in our society were going to dictate the rules. This gave a totally new texture to the power game, which for the first time could be termed “politics.” Katouzian emphasizes that there was no Persian word for “politics”; the modern connotation of “siaasat” was first adopted during the constitutional revolution.
Though the Shah appeared to win the day after the 1953 coup, he could not hold back Iran’s new paradigm, best archetyped in the Mossadegh drama. In an unmistakable occurrence of Katouzian’s mellat vs. dowlat phenomenon, everyone rose against the Shah in 1979. Not a single major element of Iran’s society defended him. Not the merchants he had made wealthy, not the workers he had created jobs for, not even the women and the minorities he had treated so kindly. This puzzling ingratitude is completely explained by Iranian society’s resolve to put an end to arbitrary rule. An evolutionary force overwhelmed sectarian interests.
Some argue that we should stop dwelling on Shah and Mossadegh. After reading Katouzian, I believe we can safely drop the Shah from conversations, as his species is unlikely to be part of Iran’s political ecology again. The Pahlavis were the last dinosaurs. But Mossadegh was the first mammal. His political genes are alive, evolving and relevant. Iran’s stubborn struggle against foreign dependence, even in the face of sanctions, is straight out of Mossadegh’s book. Western analysts flummoxed by The Islamic Republic’s resilience to regime change should acknowledge the unprecedented symbiosis that now exists between the dowlat and parts of the mellat. The Islamic establishment in turn should consider to what extent the concept of a Supreme Leader contradicts the program that the Iranian nation has set for its long term development. The regime’s leaders should also beware: their power is imperiled whenever they arbitrarily suspend constitutional rights.
The Shahs are dead, but Mossadegh’s legacy remains a colossal factor in Iran’s future. This is why Giants still rule. And the Dodgers? Well, who cares anymore?
RoutledgeCurzon 2003.
Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran.
I.B. Tauris 1990.
In moments of statistical introspection, I wonder if LA Dodgers fans are generally Pahlavi supporters. The occasional Shah picture posted on huge Westwood billboards, and the handful of TV stations time capsuling pre-revolution Tehran are tempting bits of data. San Francisco Giants fans, on the other hand, are generally pro-Mossadegh, though I lack the evidence of billboards. Needless to say, Giants rule and Dodgers suck, but it is nice occasionally to debate with facts and reason. Two meticulously researched books by Oxford scholar Homa Katouzian hit the ball right out of the ballpark for the Giants.
The first book, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectics of State and Society, develops the author’s theory of “arbitrary rule,” and establishes a foundation for understanding Mossadegh’s uniqueness in Iranian history. The second book, Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran, specifically analyzes the events of the Mossadegh period, demonstrating how he personified a new paradigm in Iran’s civilization.
Arbitrary rule should not be confused with dictatorship, Katouzian says. “The distinctive characteristic of the Iranian state [has been] that it monopolized not just power, but arbitrary power--not the absolute power in laying down the law, but the absolute power of exercising lawlessness.” I believe the umpire is a good example of a dictator. You can’t argue with his decision, but neither can he change the rules of baseball. Katouzian cites the example, Henry VIII of England as a dictator who was not an arbitrary ruler. This dictator had the most unfettered power of any English king, yet he had to use threats, coercion, bribery, and at least one execution to become head of the Church of England, so that he could lawfully divorce his wife (Katouzian does not discuss motivation or methods, just that Henry VIII got the approval of Parliament).
Looking for examples of arbitrary lawlessness, on the other hand, I found this recollection by Farhad Diba of an encounter with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi:
“The Shah asked me what I was doing and I, very proudly, told him about how well NCR [National Cash Register Company] was progressing in Iran. When I reported that to my father the next day, he said "You are a fool. Sure enough, within the year, NCR (which my father had introduced into Iran and, over 25 years, it had grown into a large business) was taken from us and given over to the Pahlavi Foundation.”
In Iranian History and Politics..Katouzian mentions a few of the countless examples of arbitrary usurpation of property by various Shahs. The suspicion that the wealth may have been acquired by unjust means in the first place gives Shahs a certain Robin Hood appeal. But Katouzian’s scholarship exposes the practice as a tragic reason for Iran’s economic backwardness: capital does not accumulate over the generations, making it impossible for any large industrial or financial enterprise to take root.
Under the arbitrary rule of its monarchs, Iran was a “short term society,” as Katouzian terms it, where few social structures were allowed to stand long enough to evolve the sophisticated architecture of modern institutions. In Europe, lords, barons, counts and dukes had the brutal right of ownership to their land, making a feudal system possible. Iran’s khans had no ownership rights, only privileges that could be taken away at the whim of the arbitrary ruler. In such a system even feudalism has no incentive to grow, much less its Western progressions: a powerful merchant class, large scale capitalism, and socialism.
Applying Katouzian’s arbitrary rule theory, I figured out that the spike in the price of oil in the seventies only created the illusion of a modern economy in Iran. This period was in reality little more than a shopping spree by the country’s sole owner, the Shah. In the historic pattern of economic insecurity of the wealthy, nothing had changed.
Applying the simple yet powerful theory again, I realized that freedoms enjoyed by Iranian women and religious minorities during the Shah should not be misunderstood as a modern appreciation of human rights and dignity. True to Iran’s historic pattern, all such freedoms were privileges granted by the monarch, to be taken away at his convenience. The Shah may have been a benevolent soul, but benevolence is no substitute for guaranteed rights under a long term tradition of law. Niceness is a character trait, not a social institution.
The arbitrary rule concept is developed into a solid theory in the book Iranian History and Politics the Dialectic of State and Society. Now the reader is ready for Mussadiq and the struggle for Power in Iran, fully prepared to appreciate this leader’s uniqueness in Iranian history.
The 1906 constitutional revolution was an attempt to put an end to arbitrary rule. At the time Mossadegh was in his early twenties, and for forty-five years he watched as the revolution was torn apart by foreign interference in domestic politics. By the time he became prime minister, Mossadegh knew what to do to piece Iran’s constitution back together. His nationalization of Iranian oil had far less to do with revenue than with eliminating foreign intrusion into Iranian affairs. His recalcitrance in coming to terms with the British should be assessed as serving his grand project—protecting Iran’s newly discovered paradigm of lawful leadership.
Mossadegh himself has been criticized for breaking the law when he temporarily dissolved the majles. “How is that different from the dictatorship of the Shah?” his detractors ask. Katouzian admits the mistake, while explaining the complex mitigating circumstances. Yet his arbitrary rule theory makes it unnecessary to decide whether Mossadegh was a dictator. The reader has already learned that the term “dictator” in the Western sense does not describe our Shahs at all. The Pahlavis were not dictators, but arbitrary rulers. Mossadegh, dictator or not, acted in the modern paradigm of the struggle between various interests of society. For him, the primitive mellat [society]vs. dowlat [state] dialectic was an extinct theme.
As Katouzian explains in Iranian History and Politics..., our numerous rebellions had always been about the mellat overthrowing the dowlat. Everybody vs. the “institution” of the arbitrary ruler. The upheavals led to a period of chaos [fetneh/ahsoub] until a new arbitrary ruler enforced order and began the cycle all over again. In Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran it can be seen that the battles of the Mossdegh era were of a fresh variety. We were fighting over which interests in our society were going to dictate the rules. This gave a totally new texture to the power game, which for the first time could be termed “politics.” Katouzian emphasizes that there was no Persian word for “politics”; the modern connotation of “siaasat” was first adopted during the constitutional revolution.
Though the Shah appeared to win the day after the 1953 coup, he could not hold back Iran’s new paradigm, best archetyped in the Mossadegh drama. In an unmistakable occurrence of Katouzian’s mellat vs. dowlat phenomenon, everyone rose against the Shah in 1979. Not a single major element of Iran’s society defended him. Not the merchants he had made wealthy, not the workers he had created jobs for, not even the women and the minorities he had treated so kindly. This puzzling ingratitude is completely explained by Iranian society’s resolve to put an end to arbitrary rule. An evolutionary force overwhelmed sectarian interests.
Some argue that we should stop dwelling on Shah and Mossadegh. After reading Katouzian, I believe we can safely drop the Shah from conversations, as his species is unlikely to be part of Iran’s political ecology again. The Pahlavis were the last dinosaurs. But Mossadegh was the first mammal. His political genes are alive, evolving and relevant. Iran’s stubborn struggle against foreign dependence, even in the face of sanctions, is straight out of Mossadegh’s book. Western analysts flummoxed by The Islamic Republic’s resilience to regime change should acknowledge the unprecedented symbiosis that now exists between the dowlat and parts of the mellat. The Islamic establishment in turn should consider to what extent the concept of a Supreme Leader contradicts the program that the Iranian nation has set for its long term development. The regime’s leaders should also beware: their power is imperiled whenever they arbitrarily suspend constitutional rights.
The Shahs are dead, but Mossadegh’s legacy remains a colossal factor in Iran’s future. This is why Giants still rule. And the Dodgers? Well, who cares anymore?
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Gilgamesh the play
In the thirteenth century A.D. there was Rumi and Shams. In 2700 B.C. there was King Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The heroes, Rumi and Gilgamesh, were civilized masters of their domain, enjoying a small greatness in their time. Shams and Enkidu were untutored outsiders who burst in from the wild to become the heroes’ beloved companions. The same extraordinary spiritual upheaval created by the unlikely friendships launched both Rumi and Gilgamesh out of their time and into legend.
George Charbak’s play, The Epic of Gilgamesh with a long prologue, thankfully ignores the Enkidu-Shams comparison. In fact Enkidu’s god protector is simply referred to as the sun god, sidestepping the god’s real name Shamash, the root for the Arabic word Shams.
The play takes a few moments, however, to update the ancient epic with current events. There are references to the Iraq war—the city of Uruk where the epic begins is in Iraq. Also, in the early scenes, Gilgamesh displays George Bush’s demagoguery in his abuse of the word “terror.” But soon the story’s universality and timelessness overwhelms local concerns.
The most dramatic scene in the play is commanded into being by Bella Warda (Ramazan-Nia) as the goddess Ishtar. Though there is no intermission in the one hundred minute dramatic marathon, Warda’s “hell hath no fury..” rebuke of Gilgamesh effectively splits the play into two acts: the hero’s triumphs before he spurned Ishtar’s sexual advance, and the sorrows he endures after that.
Ishtar’s frustration with Gilgamesh ultimately leads to Enkidu’s death. The loss of his beloved friend transforms the hero from Aristotle’s “speaking animal” to a conscious human being aware of time and mortality. Roham Shaikhani, who plays the handsome Gilgamesh, is all instinct and appetite in the first act. His eyes widen innocently at pleasure. His spry movements full of the confidence of youth. But in the second act Shaikhani’s sensuous bulk is harpooned and bleeding. Gilgamesh no longer adventures for glory, his quest is now for immortality.
Shaikhani and Warda admirably carry the weight of this difficult play. But director Charbak has too heavily burdened Hayedeh Doroudi-Ahi with the role of Enkidu. In the epic, Enkidu is a man-beast of Sasquatchian build, whose roar makes the beasts of the forest cower . Yet Doroudi-Ahi is a slight mezzo soprano with delicate and charming Persian vowels. Why Charbak has Jane playing Tarzan is a question the director must know his audience will explore.
The choice of a woman for the role of Gilgamesh’s male friend creates interesting complications. An absence is felt of a romance between Enkidu and Gilgamesh. If they are so intimate, why don’t they get together? A traditional casting would have brought out the hue of homosexuality sometimes implied in the Rumi-Shams relationship. Is this is what Charbak wished to avoid? Unlikely, because with Enkidu as a woman, her sex scene with a temple prostitute-- played by Samera Esmeir—has now become a lesbian love act.
Some clever comedy by Babak Mokhtari comes to the rescue. Mokhtari plays the messenger sent by Gilgamesh to offer the prostitute to Enkidu in order to tame him/her. In his role as pimp, Mokhtari is so excessively voyeuristic that the audience feels chastised in even thinking about gender affairs that are only the characters’ business. The comic reproach goes a long way; a couple of scenes explicitly call for nudity, yet no one on stage takes their clothes off, and the audience is too intimidated to complain.
Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality ultimately leads him to Utnapishtim, the literary predecessor to Old Testament’s Noah. Michael Green, who plays Utnapishtim, is one of the actors who appears as several characters throughout the play. His demeanor as a biblical patriarch does much to reinforce the sense of ancientness in the narration.
Ancientness brings me to the reason for this review. The Epic of Gilgamesh with a long prologue is an entertaining work that need not suffer analysis to be enjoyed. But when I came home from the show I read a recent article about a 6000 year old archeological site in Qom that has been bulldozed to make room for a construction project. The friend who forwarded me the article prefaced the email with, “There probably was once a Persian Gilgamesh standing on the steppes of this site raging against the gods.”
Here in Berkeley California, Gilgamesh is daily resurrected in a theatre on Ashby street. There in Qom Iran, our ancient rage against the gods is consciously buried along with all the other corpses in that city. Some places it is easier to find immortality.
George Charbak’s play, The Epic of Gilgamesh with a long prologue, thankfully ignores the Enkidu-Shams comparison. In fact Enkidu’s god protector is simply referred to as the sun god, sidestepping the god’s real name Shamash, the root for the Arabic word Shams.
The play takes a few moments, however, to update the ancient epic with current events. There are references to the Iraq war—the city of Uruk where the epic begins is in Iraq. Also, in the early scenes, Gilgamesh displays George Bush’s demagoguery in his abuse of the word “terror.” But soon the story’s universality and timelessness overwhelms local concerns.
The most dramatic scene in the play is commanded into being by Bella Warda (Ramazan-Nia) as the goddess Ishtar. Though there is no intermission in the one hundred minute dramatic marathon, Warda’s “hell hath no fury..” rebuke of Gilgamesh effectively splits the play into two acts: the hero’s triumphs before he spurned Ishtar’s sexual advance, and the sorrows he endures after that.
Ishtar’s frustration with Gilgamesh ultimately leads to Enkidu’s death. The loss of his beloved friend transforms the hero from Aristotle’s “speaking animal” to a conscious human being aware of time and mortality. Roham Shaikhani, who plays the handsome Gilgamesh, is all instinct and appetite in the first act. His eyes widen innocently at pleasure. His spry movements full of the confidence of youth. But in the second act Shaikhani’s sensuous bulk is harpooned and bleeding. Gilgamesh no longer adventures for glory, his quest is now for immortality.
Shaikhani and Warda admirably carry the weight of this difficult play. But director Charbak has too heavily burdened Hayedeh Doroudi-Ahi with the role of Enkidu. In the epic, Enkidu is a man-beast of Sasquatchian build, whose roar makes the beasts of the forest cower . Yet Doroudi-Ahi is a slight mezzo soprano with delicate and charming Persian vowels. Why Charbak has Jane playing Tarzan is a question the director must know his audience will explore.
The choice of a woman for the role of Gilgamesh’s male friend creates interesting complications. An absence is felt of a romance between Enkidu and Gilgamesh. If they are so intimate, why don’t they get together? A traditional casting would have brought out the hue of homosexuality sometimes implied in the Rumi-Shams relationship. Is this is what Charbak wished to avoid? Unlikely, because with Enkidu as a woman, her sex scene with a temple prostitute-- played by Samera Esmeir—has now become a lesbian love act.
Some clever comedy by Babak Mokhtari comes to the rescue. Mokhtari plays the messenger sent by Gilgamesh to offer the prostitute to Enkidu in order to tame him/her. In his role as pimp, Mokhtari is so excessively voyeuristic that the audience feels chastised in even thinking about gender affairs that are only the characters’ business. The comic reproach goes a long way; a couple of scenes explicitly call for nudity, yet no one on stage takes their clothes off, and the audience is too intimidated to complain.
Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality ultimately leads him to Utnapishtim, the literary predecessor to Old Testament’s Noah. Michael Green, who plays Utnapishtim, is one of the actors who appears as several characters throughout the play. His demeanor as a biblical patriarch does much to reinforce the sense of ancientness in the narration.
Ancientness brings me to the reason for this review. The Epic of Gilgamesh with a long prologue is an entertaining work that need not suffer analysis to be enjoyed. But when I came home from the show I read a recent article about a 6000 year old archeological site in Qom that has been bulldozed to make room for a construction project. The friend who forwarded me the article prefaced the email with, “There probably was once a Persian Gilgamesh standing on the steppes of this site raging against the gods.”
Here in Berkeley California, Gilgamesh is daily resurrected in a theatre on Ashby street. There in Qom Iran, our ancient rage against the gods is consciously buried along with all the other corpses in that city. Some places it is easier to find immortality.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Cinema Evin, a film review. Really.
In his film Salam Cinema, Mohsen Makhmalbaf reveals how artfully a director can manipulate non-professional actors into fake states of mind appropriate to his designs. For example the director may ask his actress how long ago she quit smoking. “Three years ago,” she may say to the camera. The off camera question the audience hears could be, “How long ago did your mother die?” The sense of proud accomplishment in the original answer projects a sinister complexity in the mother-daughter relationship that is likely outside the range of even the best professional actors. The prison interrogator who directed Haleh Esfanidari’s "confession" video—we will call him Evinpour—does not have Makhmalbaf’s skills. His attempts at realism fail at the levels of set design and editing. Evinpour has succeeded, however, in manipulating Esfandiari into believing she is speaking to a friendly listener.
In the video aired on Iranian TV, Esfanidari sits in a couch, comfortable and relaxed, surrounded by the earth tones of the furniture. As our minds cooperate with the director to suspend disbelief, the small refrigerator intruding clumsily into the frame suggests that Evinpour himself has been unable to shake off the prison aura. If this prop is meant as an association with food and therefore good treatment, a basket of fruit on the coffee table would have harmonized much better with the intended scheme. In the context of a detainee however, the glaringly sterile white of the refrigerator and its cubic shape draws the mind not to food but to claustrophobia, and stories of trapped children suffocating in old refrigerators. In Farsi the word “yakhchaal” and “siaahchaal” share an ominous syllable meaning “pit”, and even in English, the word “cooler” is a slang for jail.
Critically, the set lacks windows, or other backgrounds to suggest a sense of the spacious outside. Check out the nighttime cityscape background to the American late night shows. These create a feeling connection with the rest of the world, and a sense of time of day, the absence of which in Evinpour’s film strongly creates a mood of confinement. Here’s a feeble director whose sense of illusion is on a par with a child practicing his first coin trick.
To properly edit a film in the confession genre, it has to be made with as few cuts as possible. The audience must be made to believe they are reading into the mind of an ideologically repentant character, not puzzling over a collage of different clippings like the glued newspaper typefaces in a Hollywood ransom note. Evinpour’s sometimes unnecessary editing cuts work against this purpose. For example Esfandiari talks about a UCLA sponsored conference which regularly invites 150 Middle Easterners. She says the participants are encouraged not to discuss the proceedings with outsiders. Then there is a cut to a different camera, where she continues to say that naturally a communication network establishes itself between the participants. Is she talking about same conference? We can’t be sure because of the cut.
We can’t even be sure of the order of Esfandiari’s statements because there are too many editing cuts. Sequence of questions and answers is hugely important in a fake documentary. I folded with a pair of aces, then I realized my opponent held nothing is sad in a poker game. I realized my opponent had nothing then I folded with a pair of aces is stupid. In his primitive work the director has not created an illusory time sense for us to judge motives and actions in proper order. There is no amber glass of tea slowly yielding to dainty sips, no classic cartoon on TV, making ironic fun of the confessor, no window into the progress of the day. Is Evinpour underestimating the intelligence of his audience, or is his own intelligence below an awareness of insult?
Certainly not the latter. As a film director Evinpour is an Ed Wood but as an interrogator he is a Haans Scharpff.
Allied World War II airmen are still grateful to the affable Luftwaffe interrogator Hanns Scharpff for never even raising his voice, and never letting them know what it was they were revealing to him.
Scharpff: “Your forces must be running low on supplies because we’ve seen that the color of your tracers from plane guns has changed from red to white.”
Detainee:[probably trying to discourage the enemy and humiliate his intelligence gathering] “No, the change in color just means they [the plane guns] are getting to the end of the [ammunition] spool.”
Now German fighter planes knew which allied bombers in the formation are ripe for a kill because they have to reload their guns.
Sharpff, who later became an interrogation consultant to the US Airforce, never let his subjects know what information he was after. He was a brilliantly creative practitioner of modern interrogation techniques--the use of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is a manifestation of post 9-11 anti-Muslim vengefulness; it has little to do with information gathering.
The interrogator, Evinpour, is after a way to discredit opponents of the Ahmadinejad faction by showing they are gullible participants in a repeat of the rebellion orchestrated by the United States against Mossadegh. A rebellion now being restaged worldwide, beginning in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union states. The scholar, Esfandiari, on the other hand seems to have been led to believe director Evinpour, like one of her charming young students, is impressed with the “importance” of her position in the Wilson center. He just wants to know how his mentor is defending Iran’s civilization against violent US action.
In a statement that is noticeably left out of the written transcript of the interview (scroll down),
Esfandiari says that efforts to change some elements of Iranian policy making could influence American decision makers.
To a sympathetic ear that sounds like Dr. Esfandiari's motive has been to use her influential academic position in the United States to save Iran from the fate of Iraq.
Why was this crucial statement not edited out of the video? Evinpour is a master interrogator, but when it comes to filmmaking, he is a careless hack.
In the video aired on Iranian TV, Esfanidari sits in a couch, comfortable and relaxed, surrounded by the earth tones of the furniture. As our minds cooperate with the director to suspend disbelief, the small refrigerator intruding clumsily into the frame suggests that Evinpour himself has been unable to shake off the prison aura. If this prop is meant as an association with food and therefore good treatment, a basket of fruit on the coffee table would have harmonized much better with the intended scheme. In the context of a detainee however, the glaringly sterile white of the refrigerator and its cubic shape draws the mind not to food but to claustrophobia, and stories of trapped children suffocating in old refrigerators. In Farsi the word “yakhchaal” and “siaahchaal” share an ominous syllable meaning “pit”, and even in English, the word “cooler” is a slang for jail.
Critically, the set lacks windows, or other backgrounds to suggest a sense of the spacious outside. Check out the nighttime cityscape background to the American late night shows. These create a feeling connection with the rest of the world, and a sense of time of day, the absence of which in Evinpour’s film strongly creates a mood of confinement. Here’s a feeble director whose sense of illusion is on a par with a child practicing his first coin trick.
To properly edit a film in the confession genre, it has to be made with as few cuts as possible. The audience must be made to believe they are reading into the mind of an ideologically repentant character, not puzzling over a collage of different clippings like the glued newspaper typefaces in a Hollywood ransom note. Evinpour’s sometimes unnecessary editing cuts work against this purpose. For example Esfandiari talks about a UCLA sponsored conference which regularly invites 150 Middle Easterners. She says the participants are encouraged not to discuss the proceedings with outsiders. Then there is a cut to a different camera, where she continues to say that naturally a communication network establishes itself between the participants. Is she talking about same conference? We can’t be sure because of the cut.
We can’t even be sure of the order of Esfandiari’s statements because there are too many editing cuts. Sequence of questions and answers is hugely important in a fake documentary. I folded with a pair of aces, then I realized my opponent held nothing is sad in a poker game. I realized my opponent had nothing then I folded with a pair of aces is stupid. In his primitive work the director has not created an illusory time sense for us to judge motives and actions in proper order. There is no amber glass of tea slowly yielding to dainty sips, no classic cartoon on TV, making ironic fun of the confessor, no window into the progress of the day. Is Evinpour underestimating the intelligence of his audience, or is his own intelligence below an awareness of insult?
Certainly not the latter. As a film director Evinpour is an Ed Wood but as an interrogator he is a Haans Scharpff.
Allied World War II airmen are still grateful to the affable Luftwaffe interrogator Hanns Scharpff for never even raising his voice, and never letting them know what it was they were revealing to him.
Scharpff: “Your forces must be running low on supplies because we’ve seen that the color of your tracers from plane guns has changed from red to white.”
Detainee:[probably trying to discourage the enemy and humiliate his intelligence gathering] “No, the change in color just means they [the plane guns] are getting to the end of the [ammunition] spool.”
Now German fighter planes knew which allied bombers in the formation are ripe for a kill because they have to reload their guns.
Sharpff, who later became an interrogation consultant to the US Airforce, never let his subjects know what information he was after. He was a brilliantly creative practitioner of modern interrogation techniques--the use of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is a manifestation of post 9-11 anti-Muslim vengefulness; it has little to do with information gathering.
The interrogator, Evinpour, is after a way to discredit opponents of the Ahmadinejad faction by showing they are gullible participants in a repeat of the rebellion orchestrated by the United States against Mossadegh. A rebellion now being restaged worldwide, beginning in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union states. The scholar, Esfandiari, on the other hand seems to have been led to believe director Evinpour, like one of her charming young students, is impressed with the “importance” of her position in the Wilson center. He just wants to know how his mentor is defending Iran’s civilization against violent US action.
In a statement that is noticeably left out of the written transcript of the interview (scroll down),
Esfandiari says that efforts to change some elements of Iranian policy making could influence American decision makers.
To a sympathetic ear that sounds like Dr. Esfandiari's motive has been to use her influential academic position in the United States to save Iran from the fate of Iraq.
Why was this crucial statement not edited out of the video? Evinpour is a master interrogator, but when it comes to filmmaking, he is a careless hack.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
A Kiarostami Day
At the Berkeley Art Museum a fan blew at one Kiarostami photograph. The rest of his works remained still--like the audience in a theater-- while this projected video of branches and leaves apparently swayed in the turbulence created by the fan. The famed film director had broadened me forever with awareness of the very air between the projector and the screen. Beware, those who would walk blithely into Abbas Kiarostami’s mind, the door you entered through will be too small to let you back out.
I was late for a rendez-vous with friends to see some of Kiarostami’s early films being shown across the street, so I hurried past his photographs of trees in the snow, promising to return while their winter still hung on the walls.
“I have a ticket waiting for me,” I announced at the will-call booth.
“Excuse me, sir,” came an irked voice from behind me, “but there’s a line here?”
How did I miss seeing all the people in the queue, when my eyes could now see invisible air? "Sorry ma’m,” I said to her. And almost confided, “I thought I was ignoring a row of trees planted in the snow.” Beware!
Kiarostami looked on with amusement as I trudged to the back of line. Not Abbas, but his son Ahmad, who had labored to make the event happen. He welcomed us, then sat one row behind us with a couple of his artist friends. We chatted each other up with such good natured Iranian cinema banter that I nostalgically wished I had brought some pistachios and tohkmeh to share. It would not have been out of place. Abbas Kiarostami’s signature is never to let go of his earthy humor, even when his protagonist is on a mountain talking to God--on a cell phone. Even when she is losing her son to patriarchal insensitivity, while the kid wonders if the cream puffs she bought are for the guests.
Kiarostami uses comedy to constantly slap awake the upper layers of consciousness fatigued by the tragedies he frames before us. A sense of humor is a big part of what enables this artist to create aesthetics out of misery.
For example, So Can I, released when Abbas was in his mid thirties, already predicts the future authority of his signature seal of humor. In this cartoon short, a child realizes he can ludicrously jump like a kangaroo, laughably crawl like a worm, and passably swim like a fish. But when he ponders whether he can fly like a bird, he is stumped. As adults we laugh at the child’s charming dilemma, but how many times have we been confronted with the tragedy of human limitations? How many times have we wept helplessly as death took away a loved one? The film ends with a magnificent shot of a jet plane taking off, engines screaming louder than thirty simorghs.
Decades later, in The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas’ formidable flight of humorous intellect challenged the tragic limitations of Iran’s censorship laws. Juxtaposing the simple milking of a cow with a sensuous Farrokhzaad love poem, he dared the pious censors to make the dirty-minded connection to ejaculation, putting them in a damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t checkmate.
It is unwise, however, to be too confident of having discovered the elements of Kiarostami’s craft. Bread and Alley (1970) another short film insightfully included in the day’s lineup, shows that the genius director is often steps ahead of his critics. In this ten minute directorial debut, a vicious guard dog blocks passage in an alley leading to a boy’s home. The solution to the quandary seems obvious at the outset. The boy is on his way home from buying bread for his family, all he has to do is make friends with the animal by giving it a scrap of the bread. We Iranian adults, versed in the poet Sa’di’s didactic morality watch the boy arrive at the classically proper solution. But Kiarorstami has a surprise for us that transcends the 13th century poet by centuries. After the boy buys his passage with that scrap of bread, the dog begins to guard the alley the boy lives in, making us understand what the hungry animal was protecting in the first place. All along, the deeper subject of the story had been the human animal and our post-Darwinian-psychology, not the boy and his medieval predicament. Checkmate!
Therefore, I feel wary of the grandmaster as I critique the last work in that day’s Kiarostami lineup, a filmmaking masterpiece called The Traveler.
Released five years before Iran’s Islamic Republic came to power, The Traveler has turned out to be an oracular study of fanatic passion. The plot revolves around Ghassem, a poor teenager from the small town of Malayer. He worships the seventies’ national soccer hero, Ghelichkhani. In his resolve to make a pilgrimage to Tehran’s Amjadieh soccer stadium he balks at nothing, however unethical, to come up with his ticket and travel money.
Kiarostami makes us laugh when the resourceful boy goes around with a filmless camera conning his vain but destitute classmates into paying for portraits. Later, we watch more soberly as Ghassem secretly sells his own soccer team’s equipment to the rival team. We discovered the boy’s frightening zeal earlier when he endures torture at the hands of his headmaster rather than give up the few Tomans stolen from his own mother. For Ghassem, the soccer match in Tehran is not just a teenage dream, it is the heartless stuff of religious fanaticism. It is not just an ambition of admirable intensity, it is a quest for fulfillment of spiritual lust. The aesthetic allure of his purpose transcends friendship, compassion, love, all the gentle elements of human morality.
There are scenes in which the mother blames the father, and the headmaster blames the mother for not intervening early enough. But their powerless mannerisms show clearly that no one is a match for Ghassem’s innate single-mindedness.
Yet, like a nature film on the Discovery channel, Kiarostami makes us root for this beautiful natural predator. We adore scruffy little Ghassem for his precocious determination. We sigh at his disappointments and cheer as he emerges triumphant after each crisis. From the film’s view, Ghassem’s opponent is not the society he victimizes, but the Universe that gave him desire without the means. Posed in this way, it is impossible not to give heart and soul to the boy who commands into the Void, “let there be justice for me.” The rest of humanity, queued up to receive their rights, might as well be a row of trees planted in the snow.
Relentlessly raising the stakes, Kiarostami now embarrasses us in our willingness to be led astray. In an ironic scene, Ghassem is victimized by his future self. The stadium ticket office runs out just before our hero’s turn to finally buy his passage to the game. A scalper--who is responsible for the shortage--makes the desperate boy pay four times as much for that ticket. Just what Ghassem will do when he grows up. We thought we were thick as thieves with Abbas, giving our approving wink to Ghassem’s machinations. It turns out the director was putting us to the test all along. Beware!
Kiarostami’s devastating critique of our sense of fairness falters, however, in the scenes just before the final shot. He knows something important is still left unsaid. Redemption is the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that an artist from a Christian culture may have snapped into place. But for Kiarostami redemption is not a jigsaw piece, it is a chess piece. The black and white squares of morality are just the background to vastly more complex subtleties.
Sidestepping a naive resolution in salvation, the young Kiarostami clumsily twists the plot towards retribution. Ghassem inexplicably falls asleep just before the soccer match begins, missing union with his divine. A dream sequence suggesting the weight of subconscious guilt felled our hero is uncharacteristically heavy handed. The sudden transmutation of Ghassem’s mettle seems beneath Kiarostami’s savvy. Is the director still taunting us towards a better understanding of ourselves? Or was this just a blunder by a young director with a small budget for editing and rewrites?
Fortunately, The Traveler is a still portrait of Ghassem, it is not his story. As in some other Kiarostami photographs presented in motion picture format, what evolves is the viewer, not the image. The story is in the frustrations he leaves behind that continue to add reels in our minds. What will happen to the heartbroken Ghassem now that he is marooned penniless in a metropolis? Will he fall prey to his own kind? If he outsmarts them, will he grow up to be an unscrupulous leader who would lie to mire his nation in unjust wars? Or by some rare transcendence, will he become a great director with sharper insight into right and wrong than those who have never grappled with passion and its dishonest ways?
After the show, we stepped out to happier frustrations. The restaurant we like gets booked up at night. Chopin’s #20 nocturne, was left unfinished on a friend’s piano from earlier in the day when we had to hurry for the theatre.
In between the sun and the night, Kiarostami’s still frames, and air.
I was late for a rendez-vous with friends to see some of Kiarostami’s early films being shown across the street, so I hurried past his photographs of trees in the snow, promising to return while their winter still hung on the walls.
“I have a ticket waiting for me,” I announced at the will-call booth.
“Excuse me, sir,” came an irked voice from behind me, “but there’s a line here?”
How did I miss seeing all the people in the queue, when my eyes could now see invisible air? "Sorry ma’m,” I said to her. And almost confided, “I thought I was ignoring a row of trees planted in the snow.” Beware!
Kiarostami looked on with amusement as I trudged to the back of line. Not Abbas, but his son Ahmad, who had labored to make the event happen. He welcomed us, then sat one row behind us with a couple of his artist friends. We chatted each other up with such good natured Iranian cinema banter that I nostalgically wished I had brought some pistachios and tohkmeh to share. It would not have been out of place. Abbas Kiarostami’s signature is never to let go of his earthy humor, even when his protagonist is on a mountain talking to God--on a cell phone. Even when she is losing her son to patriarchal insensitivity, while the kid wonders if the cream puffs she bought are for the guests.
Kiarostami uses comedy to constantly slap awake the upper layers of consciousness fatigued by the tragedies he frames before us. A sense of humor is a big part of what enables this artist to create aesthetics out of misery.
For example, So Can I, released when Abbas was in his mid thirties, already predicts the future authority of his signature seal of humor. In this cartoon short, a child realizes he can ludicrously jump like a kangaroo, laughably crawl like a worm, and passably swim like a fish. But when he ponders whether he can fly like a bird, he is stumped. As adults we laugh at the child’s charming dilemma, but how many times have we been confronted with the tragedy of human limitations? How many times have we wept helplessly as death took away a loved one? The film ends with a magnificent shot of a jet plane taking off, engines screaming louder than thirty simorghs.
Decades later, in The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas’ formidable flight of humorous intellect challenged the tragic limitations of Iran’s censorship laws. Juxtaposing the simple milking of a cow with a sensuous Farrokhzaad love poem, he dared the pious censors to make the dirty-minded connection to ejaculation, putting them in a damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t checkmate.
It is unwise, however, to be too confident of having discovered the elements of Kiarostami’s craft. Bread and Alley (1970) another short film insightfully included in the day’s lineup, shows that the genius director is often steps ahead of his critics. In this ten minute directorial debut, a vicious guard dog blocks passage in an alley leading to a boy’s home. The solution to the quandary seems obvious at the outset. The boy is on his way home from buying bread for his family, all he has to do is make friends with the animal by giving it a scrap of the bread. We Iranian adults, versed in the poet Sa’di’s didactic morality watch the boy arrive at the classically proper solution. But Kiarorstami has a surprise for us that transcends the 13th century poet by centuries. After the boy buys his passage with that scrap of bread, the dog begins to guard the alley the boy lives in, making us understand what the hungry animal was protecting in the first place. All along, the deeper subject of the story had been the human animal and our post-Darwinian-psychology, not the boy and his medieval predicament. Checkmate!
Therefore, I feel wary of the grandmaster as I critique the last work in that day’s Kiarostami lineup, a filmmaking masterpiece called The Traveler.
Released five years before Iran’s Islamic Republic came to power, The Traveler has turned out to be an oracular study of fanatic passion. The plot revolves around Ghassem, a poor teenager from the small town of Malayer. He worships the seventies’ national soccer hero, Ghelichkhani. In his resolve to make a pilgrimage to Tehran’s Amjadieh soccer stadium he balks at nothing, however unethical, to come up with his ticket and travel money.
Kiarostami makes us laugh when the resourceful boy goes around with a filmless camera conning his vain but destitute classmates into paying for portraits. Later, we watch more soberly as Ghassem secretly sells his own soccer team’s equipment to the rival team. We discovered the boy’s frightening zeal earlier when he endures torture at the hands of his headmaster rather than give up the few Tomans stolen from his own mother. For Ghassem, the soccer match in Tehran is not just a teenage dream, it is the heartless stuff of religious fanaticism. It is not just an ambition of admirable intensity, it is a quest for fulfillment of spiritual lust. The aesthetic allure of his purpose transcends friendship, compassion, love, all the gentle elements of human morality.
There are scenes in which the mother blames the father, and the headmaster blames the mother for not intervening early enough. But their powerless mannerisms show clearly that no one is a match for Ghassem’s innate single-mindedness.
Yet, like a nature film on the Discovery channel, Kiarostami makes us root for this beautiful natural predator. We adore scruffy little Ghassem for his precocious determination. We sigh at his disappointments and cheer as he emerges triumphant after each crisis. From the film’s view, Ghassem’s opponent is not the society he victimizes, but the Universe that gave him desire without the means. Posed in this way, it is impossible not to give heart and soul to the boy who commands into the Void, “let there be justice for me.” The rest of humanity, queued up to receive their rights, might as well be a row of trees planted in the snow.
Relentlessly raising the stakes, Kiarostami now embarrasses us in our willingness to be led astray. In an ironic scene, Ghassem is victimized by his future self. The stadium ticket office runs out just before our hero’s turn to finally buy his passage to the game. A scalper--who is responsible for the shortage--makes the desperate boy pay four times as much for that ticket. Just what Ghassem will do when he grows up. We thought we were thick as thieves with Abbas, giving our approving wink to Ghassem’s machinations. It turns out the director was putting us to the test all along. Beware!
Kiarostami’s devastating critique of our sense of fairness falters, however, in the scenes just before the final shot. He knows something important is still left unsaid. Redemption is the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that an artist from a Christian culture may have snapped into place. But for Kiarostami redemption is not a jigsaw piece, it is a chess piece. The black and white squares of morality are just the background to vastly more complex subtleties.
Sidestepping a naive resolution in salvation, the young Kiarostami clumsily twists the plot towards retribution. Ghassem inexplicably falls asleep just before the soccer match begins, missing union with his divine. A dream sequence suggesting the weight of subconscious guilt felled our hero is uncharacteristically heavy handed. The sudden transmutation of Ghassem’s mettle seems beneath Kiarostami’s savvy. Is the director still taunting us towards a better understanding of ourselves? Or was this just a blunder by a young director with a small budget for editing and rewrites?
Fortunately, The Traveler is a still portrait of Ghassem, it is not his story. As in some other Kiarostami photographs presented in motion picture format, what evolves is the viewer, not the image. The story is in the frustrations he leaves behind that continue to add reels in our minds. What will happen to the heartbroken Ghassem now that he is marooned penniless in a metropolis? Will he fall prey to his own kind? If he outsmarts them, will he grow up to be an unscrupulous leader who would lie to mire his nation in unjust wars? Or by some rare transcendence, will he become a great director with sharper insight into right and wrong than those who have never grappled with passion and its dishonest ways?
After the show, we stepped out to happier frustrations. The restaurant we like gets booked up at night. Chopin’s #20 nocturne, was left unfinished on a friend’s piano from earlier in the day when we had to hurry for the theatre.
In between the sun and the night, Kiarostami’s still frames, and air.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Dr. Homayoun at Berkeley
“We all made mistakes,” confessed one member of an audience of fifty or so that had gathered at UC Berkeley to see Dr. Daryoosh Homayoun. The former Pahlavi era minister was there to talk about Iran’s historic struggles with modernity, but many had showed up hoping to confront the intellectual with his Pahlavi past and to dispute his controversial call for a constitutional monarchy in Iran.
The highlight of the energetic and sometimes noisy exchange was the moment following that sadly introspective, “We all made mistakes.” The room went quiet, like a daycare center where children fighting over a rag doll had torn off a limb, and now stood in shocked remorse, each holding a piece.
If Shiism hadn’t won the day, we wondered, and our Leninist/Maoist/Stalinist naiveté had inherited Iran’s revolution, would the country be any better off today? And Homayoun, perhaps remembering the cruel tactics of the Pahlavi dynasty nodded in apparent acknowledgment. Was he admitting the moral errors, or did he simply regret the political miscalculations of the regime he was part of? His praise for Reza Shah and Ataturk, who tried to secularize by force, suggests the latter.
“The Turks worship Ataturk,” he pointed out authoritatively. When confronted with the human cost of this reform, the strikingly tall 78 year old statesman displayed the pain of wisdom on his still charismatic face, as though to say, “if only you understood the responsibilities of power.” Having once walked the corridors of power, Homayoun’s lanky stride still echoes marbled floors. The slight bend of his shoulders appears less a sign of aging than the burden of his critics’ adolescent idealism.
Watching Homayoun’s composure, I would have guessed--incorrectly--an aristocratic military background. He declined to drink his lecturer’s bottled water without a glass. Looking around, he spotted some plastic cups near the coffee pot, then directed the organizers to bring him one. There was no “thank you,” just in case this breach in hospitality was not simply American informality but an Iranian sign of disrespect.
During his lecture Homayoun seemed to talk down to his audience. Too many of his statements appeared as asides for tutoring rather than information supporting his case. This misunderstanding occurs because his presentation lacks modern linear structure. Like passengers on a Tehran bus, some of his points dangle off the sides of the discourse waiting for a proper seat. At one point he asked the audience to let him know when to stop talking.
Homayoun was quite succinct, however, when it came to clarifying the difference between modernity and modernization. The straight forward argument boils down to this: handing a scalpel to a butcher doesn’t transform him into a surgeon. Modernity is not the same as industrialization or better financial institutions. It is a mindset of humanism, secularism and rationalism. The Iranian culture does not have this mindset, therefore Iran is not a modern nation.
His solution: toss the culture. A nation’s identity, he believes, is in her history, not in her culture. As to how any Iranian would submit to this cultural lobotomy, leaving only memories of facts, Homayoun offered no guidance. Nor did he develop a theory as to what is really meant by culture. Having correctly handed the scalpel to the surgeon, we now wonder if the doctor plans to kill the patient. Was the butcher safer after all?
There were indications in Homayoun’s discourse that he isn’t really suggesting a lobotomy but an Islamectomy. Yet even there we find that Dr. Homayoun misunderstands the function of the organ he is planning to remove. This is apparent in a partial autobiography where he remembers spending time in jail with an Iranian Muslim during the chaos of the revolution. The man was studying one of the many Islamic advice books titled, Explanation of Problems (towzih-ol-masaael). Here is what Homayoun says:
“A couple of times we asked him to read parts of the book for us. He stopped reading for us when he saw our uncontrolled laughter. After that, every evening we would force him to give us the book and entertained ourselves by reading it. Never before did we have time to make the acquaintance of such things [bold typeface emphasis mine]. We could not believe that these were the people who had defeated us, and how was it possible for our nation, under the leadership of their intelligentsia, to long for the government of such characters in preference to us.”
What Homayoun found funny was likely the books straight faced Dr. Phil responses to questions like, If I have sex with my goat, is the meat still halaal? The answer: The meat is haraam to you but halaal to others. What we may observe-- after we’re done laughing--is that this well-reasoned answer provides a disincentive for romancing ones livestock, and at the same time makes sure the meat is not wasted.
It is also mindful of the economy as it averts a possible panic in the community for certified virgin meat. Note the adeptness of the ayatollah in tackling the problems of sexuality and poverty in a rural environment. While Homayoun et al. ridiculed the simple peasant as being beneath their sympathy, the religious scholar took the time to understand the man as a sexual being. In this autobiographical passage Homayoun has answered his own question as to why his accidental cellmate chose “the government of such characters in preference to us.”
Homoayoun goes on to say that he spent the dull waiting times during his prison escape reading Moby Dick and the works of Saul Bellow. Fully devoting their minds to understanding the West, the Iranian elite found themselves intellectually unprepared to take on the Mullahs.
And perhaps the ayatollahs better understand even the West. Does modernity give us a ladder to climb out of the vulgar irrationality of human sexuality? Sure, but marketing experts, film directors and the artistic elite of the West more often use the ladder to go farther down, not up. There is research to inidcate that pornography played a central role in the the development of Western civilization. Ertoic imagery was one of the earliest uses of the printing press, advancing its development. Today it is a common belief among mass media professionals that the course of technologies such as the internet and DVDs are often determined by the porn industry. The obscene amount of energy generated around the Hejab issue both by its Muslim supporters and its Western detractors is as clearly explained by the ayatollahs' comedic obsession with genitalia as with Captain Ahab’s tragic obsession with his Moby Dick.
Ironically, Homayoun’s most controversial idea, his support for a constitutional monarchy is a well calculated concession of intellect to lowly instinct. Our herd instinct in particular. Common people love royalty, and will rally around the symbol. Getting past my gag reflex, I nibbled a little on his monarchy idea and found it actually palatable. In a crisis of divisiveness a throne is a handier piece of furniture than seats in the parliament. In harmonizing our ethnic diversity chanting “Jaavid Shah” compares well with chanting “death to America." Unified under a crown, perhaps we won't need unification under dangerous slogans. In the alphabet of our daily concerns Zionism can go back where it belongs with Zulbia and Zereshk polo.
Taking his cue from Homayoun’s political philosophy, Iran’s handsome new king would distance Iran from the filth and fury of the third world, allying us instead with the cream of civilization, the West. I would quite enjoy living in the happy kingdom of Iran.
But when I step out of Disneyland, I see a world where the disparity between rich and poor nations has created an empty niche of power. This particular niche has been exploited ever since Jesus Christ showed one could get a following by saying “blessed are the poor.” The only trouble with Iran preaching rebellion to destitute nations is that the Islamic regime itself has only a primitive concept of human rights, democracy, and non-violence. Otherwise it is well within the mandate of the Iranian revolution to confront injustice in world affairs, and once again have our philosophies, culture, and management style affect the course of History. The limits of our national ambitions are farther out than Homayoun would allow. During audience exchanges we spent much time arguing about the limits of scope of the 1906 revolution and had only unspoken despair for the vastly larger, global scope of our 1979 revolution. Yet in its degree of activism--though not in methods--Iran's revolution is not only alive but thriving in the Islamic Republic.
Despite the many instances when I thought Homayoun was wrong, there was a moment when he touched my soul. With a sense of plea that his proud voice could not hide, he reminded us that he was at the helm of affairs for only one year in Iran, but for sixty other years his service to the country was unquestionable. He mentioned being the publisher of the popular paperback series Ketaab Jeebee. I remember as a youth delighting at every new release, saving money for the next one. The fatherly figure adeptly defending himself from our reproach had helped give us the very tools of the intellect we were using to disagree with him. As he had destroyed, so had he built, and along the way he had made mistakes. We all made mistakes.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Dr. Homayoun at Berkeley
“We all made mistakes,” confessed one member of an audience of fifty or so that had gathered at UC Berkeley to see Dr. Daryoosh Homayoun. The former Pahlavi era minister was there to talk about Iran’s historic struggles with modernity, but many had showed up hoping to confront the intellectual with his Pahlavi past and to dispute his controversial call for a constitutional monarchy in Iran.
The highlight of the energetic and sometimes noisy exchange was the moment following that sadly introspective, “We all made mistakes.” The room went quiet, like a daycare center where children fighting over a rag doll had torn off a limb, and now stood in shocked remorse, each holding a piece.
If Shiism hadn’t won the day, we wondered, and our Leninist/Maoist/Stalinist naiveté had inherited Iran’s revolution, would the country be any better off today? And Homayouni, perhaps remembering the cruel tactics of the Pahlavi dynasty nodded in apparent acknowledgment. Was he admitting the moral errors, or did he simply regret the political miscalculations of the regime he was part of? His praise for Reza Shah and Ataturk, who tried to secularize by force, suggests the latter.
“The Turks worship Ataturk,” he pointed out authoritatively. When confronted with the human cost of this reform, the strikingly tall 78 year old statesman displayed the pain of wisdom on his still charismatic face, as though to say, “if only you understood the responsibilities of power.” Having once walked the corridors of power, Homayoun’s lanky stride still echoes marbled floors. The slight bend of his shoulders appears less a sign of aging than the burden of his critics’ adolescent idealism.
Watching Homayoun’s composure, I would have guessed--incorrectly--an aristocratic military background. He declined to drink his lecturer’s bottled water without a glass. Looking around, he spotted some plastic cups near the coffee pot, then directed the organizers to bring him one. There was no “thank you,” just in case this breach in hospitality was not simply American informality but an Iranian sign of disrespect.
During his lecture Homayoun seemed to talk down to his audience. Too many of his statements appeared as asides for tutoring rather than information supporting his case. This misunderstanding occurs because his presentation lacks modern linear structure. Like passengers on a Tehran bus, some of his points dangle off the sides of the discourse waiting for a proper seat. At one point he asked the audience to let him know when to stop talking.
Homayoun was quite succinct, however, when it came to clarifying the difference between modernity and modernization. The straight forward argument boils down to this: handing a scalpel to a butcher doesn’t transform him into a surgeon. Modernity is not the same as industrialization or better financial institutions. It is a mindset of humanism, secularism and rationalism. The Iranian culture does not have this mindset, therefore Iran is not a modern nation.
His solution: toss the culture. A nation’s identity, he believes, is in her history, not in her culture. As to how any Iranian would submit to this cultural lobotomy, leaving only memories of facts, Homayoun offered no guidance. Nor did he develop a theory as to what is really meant by culture. Having correctly handed the scalpel to the surgeon, we now wonder if the doctor plans to kill the patient. Was the butcher safer after all?
There were indications in Homayoun’s discourse that he isn’t really suggesting a lobotomy but an Islamectomy. Yet even there we find that Dr. Homayoun misunderstands the function of the organ he is planning to remove. This is apparent in a partial autobiography where he remembers spending time in jail with an Iranian Muslim during the chaos of the revolution. The man was studying one of the many Islamic advice books titled, Explanation of Problems (towzih-ol-masaael). Here is what Homayoun says:
“A couple of times we asked him to read parts of the book for us. He stopped reading for us when he saw our uncontrolled laughter. After that, every evening we would force him to give us the book and entertained ourselves by reading it. Never before did we have time to make the acquaintance of such things [bold typeface emphasis mine]. We could not believe that these were the people who had defeated us, and how was it possible for our nation, under the leadership of their intelligentsia, to long for the government of such characters in preference to us.”
What Homayoun found funny was likely the books straight faced Dr. Phil responses to questions like, If I have sex with my goat, is the meat still halaal? The answer: The meat is haraam to you but halaal to others. What we may observe-- after we’re done laughing--is that this well-reasoned answer provides a disincentive for romancing ones livestock, and at the same time makes sure the meat is not wasted. It is also mindful of the economy as it averts a possible panic in the community for certified virgin meat. Note the adeptness of the ayatollah in tackling the problems of sexuality and poverty in a rural environment. While Homayoun et al. ridiculed the simple peasant as being beneath their sympathy, the religious scholar took the time to understand the man as a sexual being. In this autobiographical passage Homayoun has answered his own question as to why his accidental cellmate chose “the government of such characters in preference to us.”
Homoayoun goes on to say that he spent the dull waiting times during his prison escape reading Moby Dick and the works of Saul Bellow. Fully devoting their minds to understanding the West, the Iranian elite found themselves intellectually unprepared to take on the Mullahs.
And perhaps the ayatollahs better understand even the West. Does modernity give us a ladder to climb out of the vulgar irrationality of human sexuality? Sure, but marketing experts, film directors and the artistic elite of the West more often use the ladder to go farther down, not up. There is research to inidcate that pornography played a central role in the the development of Western civilization. Ertoic imagery was one of the earliest uses of the printing press, advancing its development. Today it is a common belief among mass media professionals that the course of technologies such as the internet and DVDs are often determined by the porn industry. The obscene amount of energy generated around the Hejab issue both by its Muslim supporters and its Western detractors is as clearly explained by the ayatollahs' comedic obsession with genitalia than by Captain Ahab’s tragic obsession with his Moby Dick.
Ironically, Homayoun’s most controversial idea, his support for a constitutional monarchy is a well calculated concession of intellect to lowly instinct. Our herd instinct in particular. Common people love royalty, and will rally around the symbol. Getting past my gag reflex, I nibbled a little on his monarchy idea and found it actually palatable. In a crisis of divisiveness a throne is a handier piece of furniture than seats in the parliament. In harmonizing our ethnic diversity chanting “Jaavid Shah” compares well with chanting “death to America." Unified under a crown, perhaps we won't need unification under dangerous slogans. In the alphabet of our daily concerns Zionism can go back where it belongs with Zulbia and Zereshk polo.
Taking his cue from Homayoun’s political philosophy, Iran’s handsome new king would distance Iran from the filth and fury of the third world, allying us instead with the cream of civilization, the West. I would quite enjoy living in the happy kingdom of Iran.
But when I step out of Disneyland, I see a world where the disparity between rich and poor nations has created an empty niche of power. This particular niche has been exploited ever since Jesus Christ found he could get a following by saying “blessed are the poor.” The only trouble with Iran preaching rebellion to destitute nations is that the Islamic regime itself has only a primitive concept of human rights, democracy, and non-violence. Otherwise it is well within the mandate of the Iranian revolution to confront injustice in world affairs, and once again have our philosophies, culture, and management style affect the course of History. The limits of our national ambitions are farther out than Homayoun would allow. During audience exchanges we spent much time arguing about the limits of scope of the 1906 revolution and had only unspoken despair for the vastly larger, global scope of our 1979 revolution. Yet in its degree of activism--though not in methods--Iran's revolution is not only alive but thriving in the Islamic Republic.
Despite the many instances when I thought Homayoun was wrong, there was a moment when he touched my soul. With a sense of plea that his proud voice could not hide, he reminded us that he was at the helm of affairs for only one year in Iran, but for sixty other years his service to the country was unquestionable. He mentioned being the publisher of the popular paperback series Ketaab Jeebee. I remember as a youth delighting at every new release, saving money for the next one. The fatherly figure adeptly defending himself from our reproach had helped give us the very tools of the intellect we were using to disagree with him. As he had destroyed, so had he built, and along the way he had made mistakes. We all made mistakes.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Haleh Esfandiari
I’m still scratching my head as to why Iranian officials had to wear masks to confiscate Dr. Haleh Esfandiari’s passport. I’ve never had my passport taken away, but in the movies it’s usually a uniformed civil servant in a booth at the airport. He types your passport info into a computer, there’s a moment of suspense, then he picks up the phone, giving you a dirty look. He never wears a ski mask, and if his government has trusted him with a weapon, it’s usually a sidearm, not a switchblade.Granted this is just Hollywood, but I’ve seen my share of airports and can testify to the realism of the costume. Even in Reykjavik, where it gets really cold, government officials don’t wear their ski masks on the job. Criminals on the other hand sometimes wear masks so their victims can’t identify them to the authorities. But the men who took away Esfandiari's travel papers were the authorities. If the incident weren’t so tragically real, this would be a perfect setup for an ethnic joke.
And why dispatch no less than three switchblades after the frail woman? Where in her intelligence file does it say that this 67 year old can overpower two grown men, and that it takes at least a third blade to subdue her? I imagine that even as her heart was pounding with the fear of being knifed, the scholar’s brain tallied the two extra assailants as part of Iran’s unemployment problem. And then I wonder if this is why the regime is so afraid of her. Not that she may be a spy, but because she can count the failures.
Arithmetic isn’t something Esfandiari's accusers are good at. Their long list of suspicions published in a Kayhan article don’t add up. The article says that after the revolution Esfandiari fled—goreekht--Iran. I couldn’t find anywhere in the article as to how this fugitive made her subsequent visits to Iran without being arrested. When was she forgiven? Then there are the dates and places that have been quite reasonably challenged. Of course, this case shouldn’t be tried on the web. Esfandiari’s guilt or innocence is for a court of law to decide.
Unfortunately in recent years the Islamic regime has treated its laws as a set of intentions akin to New Year’s eve resolutions, to be discarded when temptation overwhelms character. In this spirit, Esfandiari has been arbitrarily denied access to legal counsel. The Law, that powerful, complex institution standing above all other organizations, individuals, and situations isn’t there to give objective meaning to Esfandiari’s guilt or innocence. The accused is trapped inside Iran’s bizarre legal Eden.
Astonishingly, there’s hope for an expulsion. Consistent international pressure has proven effective in resolving human rights cases, even when the oppressor is not otherwise rewarded or bribed! After trying to riddle why this is true, I gave up and began searching the literature. Turns out social psychologists are also flummoxed by the phenomenon(page 14). It seems there's a moral magic to the collective stare of humanity that awakens the sense of decency in human rights violators.
An erudite member of the Iranian-American community currently sits behind bars instead of behind her desk at the Wilson Center for Scholars. My hopeful stare is on her captors.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Haale
Before Haale Gafori, no singer had made me dig up my collection of Forough Farrokhzad poems to find the one where the poet plants her ink-stained hands in the garden. Yes, Shahram Nazeri, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Khatereh Parvaneh occasionally send me scampering to the bookshelf for a familiar Masnavi or Ghazal, but flipping through Forough after a concert is new. Finally, after years of putting up with that stubborn staccatoed synthesizer beat in Persian restaurants, a new kind of Iranian-Western theme has arrived that does not trigger a Pavlovian response to order the koobideh*.
Haale, the thirty-something Iranian singing talent is from New York, touring California. Her audience, like her music, is developing fast. These days her mystic compositions are making headway with spiritually curious Americans who delight in Eastern exotica. During Haale’s concert, I watch a young blonde in the front row sway to the lazy throbbing of the music. As the rhythm builds, the woman can no longer bear to remain seated; she stands up and twirls on her toes, palms up, head to one side, like a whirling darvish. Suddenly she skips half a continent and her darvish dance morphs into a reasonably watchable Bollywood routine. Yet this audience member is not being naïve, Haale just gave us a slight suggestion of a raga, accompanied by a hint of a tabla beat. And not just any raga or tabla beat, this texture comes straight out of the familiar John Lennon repertoire. As the saying goes, genius steals! Haale is not merely influenced by the psychedelic sixties, she is resurrecting it. In Haale’s music, the calloused fingers that Jimmy Hendrix planted alongside Farrokhzad’s ink-stained hands have sprouted.
Like Farrokhzad, Haale is overtly sensuous in her artistic mysticism. Stealing a trick from the rock repertoire of stage moves, Haale surrenders her breath to the microphone, letting it rise from her chest into a sexy nasal groan. Rumi’s drunken words first spill out of her mouth then cascade down a length of dark, disheveled hair that only a Hafez could describe. For a moment during the concert I really understood why the Ayatollahs are so intimidated by Iranian women’s hair. As with many superbly talented stage musicians, Haale is difficult to capture in the two dimensions of a photograph. Her beauty is encoded as much in the alluring way she moves and sings as in the aesthetic symmetries of her face.
Unlike many on the music stage, Haaleh doesn’t seem to make a conscious effort to exploit her sex appeal. She goes only so far physically before she turns inwards spiritually. This may or may not limit her marketability depending on whether or not she becomes aware of some of the other ways she may be holding back. She uses the Persian setar mostly as a drone instrument, and it is clear that her acquaintance with the radif of Persian music has only just begun. At times her singing instincts bring her very close to a chah-chah**, which she declines to fully develop.
The Persian chah-chah is a potentially groundbreaking development in rock music. In 1973 a singer named Clare Torry astonished the Western world by giving voice to a musical sensation that many Iranians consider routine in classical Persian music. Torry gave us the famous vocal, “The Great Gig in the Sky” in the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon. This wordless lament is arguably the most deeply sensuous rendition of love, yearning and rapture in popular Western music, and yet, according to Pink Floyd, it is about Death and Annihilation. If you asked this most Sufi of popular Western vocals to compare itself to what Persian classical singing has already accomplished, it might say, "Maa hanooz andar khameh yek koocheh eem.***"
As popular Western music turns more and more to the past, recycling idioms from previous decades, Haale has the opportunity to upend the uncreative eclecticism by going full throttle in fusing the soul of Iran’s ancient musical traditions to the kind of profound rock that David Gilmore, Carlos Santana, and Jimi Hendrix began. Then the world can sit back and listen as a new Western musical journey through the haft shahreh eshgh**** begins. Yesterday in San Rafael, California I met a slight, down to earth, musician with enough talent to lead this journey.
*A favorite Iranian kabob dish
** A from of vocalization that sounds like yodeling to the unfamiliar ear.
***Literally "we are still around the bend of the first alley." A humble reference by Rumi comparing Attar's spiritual accomplishments to his own.
****Literally, "The seven cities of love." According to Rumi, the spiritual real estate Attar covered while Rumi was rounding that "bend of the first alley."
Sunday, April 29, 2007
An amicus brief to the Iranian Supreme Court
Note: An amicus curiae brief is a letter from a party who is not the plaintiff or the defendant in a case, but who would like the court to consider the ramifications of its verdict beyond the particulars of the case.
The Iranian Supreme Court recently overturned the murder convictions of 6 Basij vigilantes who executed a young couple, Reza Nejadmalayeri and Shohreh Nikpour, on grounds that the couple’s behavior was unIslamic. Since a last appeal to undo this decision is still possible, here is a plea to the full membership body of Iran’s Supreme Court to consider the political and economic consequences of its final verdict.
In 1875 the United States Supreme Court decision, United States v. Cruikshank overturned the murder convictions of a band of white vigilantes who had participated in the lynching of several black men. The Cruikshank case and the Nejadmalayeri case are connected in ways that go beyond the de facto sanctioning of lynch mobs.
Many decades after the infamous Cruikshank decision--and many other racist verdicts--the United States was unable to morally defend itself against Soviet anti-American propaganda. During the Cold War competition for global leadership an amicus brief by the US justice department urged the Supreme Court to consider the international ramifications of how it interprets the US constitution. Similarly, in an atmosphere of anti-Iranian sentiment in the West, Nejadmalayeri should be judged in the light of the current threats to Iran’s national security.
War:
The most immediate threat to Iran’s sovereignty is the possibility of a military strike by the United States. Though support for the Iraq war is fast fading, it is a mistake to take this as an indication that post 9-11 America is ready to make its peace with the Islamic world. None of the leading US presidential candidates, Democrat or Republican are willing to take the option of a military—possibly nuclear--strike off the table. In a country where polls guide politicians' public statements it is not hard to guess what the candidates’ internal polls are revealing about the American state of mind relative to Iran. America’s internecine dispute is mainly about how badly the Iraq war was managed. No American leader is seriously considering reversing the policy of military involvement in the Middle East.
Allowing the basij vigilantes to go free gives the impression that the Islamic Regime has abdicated its authority to the mob. If the full membership body of Iran’s Supreme Court upholds Nejadmalayeri, any anti-war argument which cites Iran’s national sovereignty will lack a solid foundation. A government which does not appropriate enough authority to itself to fully administer the laws of the land, does not have a reasonable claim to legitimacy. In the past, the United States has gained support for military action abroad by successfully demonstrating that the country she is about to invade is run by warlords. Somalia, Afghanistan and the Balkans are examples. The Iranian government’s sanctioning of street justice strengthens such a case for war against Iran.
Economy:
Global warming concerns have made nuclear energy an attractive alternative to oil. As a result nuclear power generation is increasing steadily throughout the world. In the near future any country that cannot generate its own nuclear power will be at a serious economic disadvantage.
International fear of Iran’s nuclear technology program is not just about atom bombs. Due to the extremely dangerous nature of nuclear material, even civilian use of nuclear energy requires trustworthy guardianship. Iran’s government must demonstrate a high level of skill and professionalism in administrating the law, so as to foster respect for order among its citizens. Sanctioning vigilantism is a step in the wrong direction. At this point even the most well intentioned defenders of Iran’s right to advanced technologies would be reluctant to recommend scientific cooperation with Iran. Iran’s growing population urgently needs nuclear energy, and the nation’s efforts to obtain it would be hurt if the current Nejadmalayeri verdict is left to stand.
Civil War:
Citizens give their consent to be governed in order to enjoy the benefits of protection from the governing body. Victims of state-sanctioned vigilantism are denied the important protection of due process. So far secular Iranians have weighed the benefits of rebellion versus its costs and have decided that in the balance it is better to shrug off basij interference as annoyances. But once basij vigilantism goes beyond harassment to include physical harm or death, this balance will quickly change and the citizenry will withdraw the legitimacy of the regime. If Nejadmalayeri is left to stand it could become the turning point where Iran’s pacifism towards the current regime will shift to militancy.
The Cold War eventually led The United States Supreme Court away from Cruickshank towards Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case which ended racial segregation in America. This turned out to be of enormous benefit to the country. Without Brown v. Board of Education The United States would not today be able to project her power across the globe, as she would be internally wracked by civil strife. Likewise Iran could benefit from her own landmark supreme court decisions which interpret Iran’s constitution with an eye towards national unity and international reputation.
Several years ago the Israeli Supreme Court blocked the attempt by the Israel Land Administration to create separate Arab and Jewish housing developments. The president of Israel’s Supreme Court, Aharon Barak was able to protect Israeli Muslims from discrimination by citing a famous legal precedent. The case he cited was from another country's law history: Brown v. Board of Education. In the long run there is barakat in extending the protection of our laws to all humans, even if at first it seems we are doing so out of expedience. Now Iran's Supreme Court has the opportunity to turn Nejadmalayeri into a Brown v. Board of Education. Leaving it as a Cruickshank is harmful to civilization, Iran's in particular.
The Iranian Supreme Court recently overturned the murder convictions of 6 Basij vigilantes who executed a young couple, Reza Nejadmalayeri and Shohreh Nikpour, on grounds that the couple’s behavior was unIslamic. Since a last appeal to undo this decision is still possible, here is a plea to the full membership body of Iran’s Supreme Court to consider the political and economic consequences of its final verdict.
In 1875 the United States Supreme Court decision, United States v. Cruikshank overturned the murder convictions of a band of white vigilantes who had participated in the lynching of several black men. The Cruikshank case and the Nejadmalayeri case are connected in ways that go beyond the de facto sanctioning of lynch mobs.
Many decades after the infamous Cruikshank decision--and many other racist verdicts--the United States was unable to morally defend itself against Soviet anti-American propaganda. During the Cold War competition for global leadership an amicus brief by the US justice department urged the Supreme Court to consider the international ramifications of how it interprets the US constitution. Similarly, in an atmosphere of anti-Iranian sentiment in the West, Nejadmalayeri should be judged in the light of the current threats to Iran’s national security.
War:
The most immediate threat to Iran’s sovereignty is the possibility of a military strike by the United States. Though support for the Iraq war is fast fading, it is a mistake to take this as an indication that post 9-11 America is ready to make its peace with the Islamic world. None of the leading US presidential candidates, Democrat or Republican are willing to take the option of a military—possibly nuclear--strike off the table. In a country where polls guide politicians' public statements it is not hard to guess what the candidates’ internal polls are revealing about the American state of mind relative to Iran. America’s internecine dispute is mainly about how badly the Iraq war was managed. No American leader is seriously considering reversing the policy of military involvement in the Middle East.
Allowing the basij vigilantes to go free gives the impression that the Islamic Regime has abdicated its authority to the mob. If the full membership body of Iran’s Supreme Court upholds Nejadmalayeri, any anti-war argument which cites Iran’s national sovereignty will lack a solid foundation. A government which does not appropriate enough authority to itself to fully administer the laws of the land, does not have a reasonable claim to legitimacy. In the past, the United States has gained support for military action abroad by successfully demonstrating that the country she is about to invade is run by warlords. Somalia, Afghanistan and the Balkans are examples. The Iranian government’s sanctioning of street justice strengthens such a case for war against Iran.
Economy:
Global warming concerns have made nuclear energy an attractive alternative to oil. As a result nuclear power generation is increasing steadily throughout the world. In the near future any country that cannot generate its own nuclear power will be at a serious economic disadvantage.
International fear of Iran’s nuclear technology program is not just about atom bombs. Due to the extremely dangerous nature of nuclear material, even civilian use of nuclear energy requires trustworthy guardianship. Iran’s government must demonstrate a high level of skill and professionalism in administrating the law, so as to foster respect for order among its citizens. Sanctioning vigilantism is a step in the wrong direction. At this point even the most well intentioned defenders of Iran’s right to advanced technologies would be reluctant to recommend scientific cooperation with Iran. Iran’s growing population urgently needs nuclear energy, and the nation’s efforts to obtain it would be hurt if the current Nejadmalayeri verdict is left to stand.
Civil War:
Citizens give their consent to be governed in order to enjoy the benefits of protection from the governing body. Victims of state-sanctioned vigilantism are denied the important protection of due process. So far secular Iranians have weighed the benefits of rebellion versus its costs and have decided that in the balance it is better to shrug off basij interference as annoyances. But once basij vigilantism goes beyond harassment to include physical harm or death, this balance will quickly change and the citizenry will withdraw the legitimacy of the regime. If Nejadmalayeri is left to stand it could become the turning point where Iran’s pacifism towards the current regime will shift to militancy.
The Cold War eventually led The United States Supreme Court away from Cruickshank towards Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case which ended racial segregation in America. This turned out to be of enormous benefit to the country. Without Brown v. Board of Education The United States would not today be able to project her power across the globe, as she would be internally wracked by civil strife. Likewise Iran could benefit from her own landmark supreme court decisions which interpret Iran’s constitution with an eye towards national unity and international reputation.
Several years ago the Israeli Supreme Court blocked the attempt by the Israel Land Administration to create separate Arab and Jewish housing developments. The president of Israel’s Supreme Court, Aharon Barak was able to protect Israeli Muslims from discrimination by citing a famous legal precedent. The case he cited was from another country's law history: Brown v. Board of Education. In the long run there is barakat in extending the protection of our laws to all humans, even if at first it seems we are doing so out of expedience. Now Iran's Supreme Court has the opportunity to turn Nejadmalayeri into a Brown v. Board of Education. Leaving it as a Cruickshank is harmful to civilization, Iran's in particular.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
300
Directed by Zach Snyder
Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller
Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller
In one scene of this movie two women can be seen openly kissing each other in the court of Xerxes, the Persian monarch. A few cuts later, a man with a disability is welcomed into the Persian court by the great king himself. Even though Persians are a Caucasian race, they have chosen a king who appears to be of African descent. In the movie 300 the Persian Empire seems overrun by American liberal ideology. I half wondered if the bloody battles weren't really over universal health care and gay marriage.
The neo-cons in this allegory are the Spartans. Their king, Leonidas, has taken his troops to war despite opposition from virtually every wise counsel in his land. Like his modern counterpart Leonidas says he is going to battle in the cause of freedom and reason. But 300 shows us that Leonidas is not a reasonable man. In a fit of rage the Spartan king executes Xerxes’ messengers--a deed the reasonable Xerxes seems to have forgiven when Leonidas himself stands vulnerable before the Persian king. And anyone who has read even a little about Spartan society would know that Leonidas couldn’t possibly be fighting for freedom. The slaves in Sparta outnumbered free citizens by seven to one. A common initiation rite for a young Spartan male was to sneak up on local slaves and massacre them. No wonder Leonidas and his 300 braves would rather have died than become part of the Persian Empire: ever since the time of the Persian king Cyrus the Great, such human rights abuses had been against the law of the empire.
On a clay cuneiform cylinder made 25 centuries ago Cyrus declares, “I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of others by force or without compensation. As long as I live I prohibit unpaid, forced labor. Today I announce that everyone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regions and take up a job provided that they never violate others’ rights… I prohibit slavery and my governors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains. Such a tradition should be exterminated the world over.” The return to Israel of the Jews held in Babylonian slavery was a consequence of this legislation. Historically, King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans died to prevent freedom, not to preserve it.
So how does director Zack Snyder take these obvious facts in favor of ancient Persia to deliver a pro-Spartan message? The trick is infuriating in its simplicity, and perhaps not an undeserved insult to the members of the audience who carelessly empathize with the 300. Snyder presents the Spartans as a good-looking bunch with chiseled faces, bulging pectorals, and abs that even a computer graphics body would need megahertz crunches to accomplish. None of the Spartan's adversaries on the other hand look like they have seen the inside of a health club except Xerxes himself--and even this character has disfigured himself with unsightly piercings. Persians and other nay-sayers to the war have ugly skin, whereas the hawkish Spartans have manly sex appeal. Also, using swaggering language such as “come and get us,” and “We’ll fight in the shade,” the Spartans establish a locker room camaraderie between themselves and among susceptible members of the audience. The Persians on the other hand have obviously never drank beer in front of the TV on a Monday night.
300 is worth studying because it reflects the cognitive dissonance of American society under the Bush administration. Like the Nazi propaganda footage sometimes aired on the History Channel, one wonders just how much it will take for a human to think black is white and white is black. 300 reiterates the frightening lesson we learned during the heyday of fascism: it takes very little to manipulate the human mind. The simple ingredients are smart uniforms, and pats on the back for enjoying violence. And of course talented film directors with no scruples.
The neo-cons in this allegory are the Spartans. Their king, Leonidas, has taken his troops to war despite opposition from virtually every wise counsel in his land. Like his modern counterpart Leonidas says he is going to battle in the cause of freedom and reason. But 300 shows us that Leonidas is not a reasonable man. In a fit of rage the Spartan king executes Xerxes’ messengers--a deed the reasonable Xerxes seems to have forgiven when Leonidas himself stands vulnerable before the Persian king. And anyone who has read even a little about Spartan society would know that Leonidas couldn’t possibly be fighting for freedom. The slaves in Sparta outnumbered free citizens by seven to one. A common initiation rite for a young Spartan male was to sneak up on local slaves and massacre them. No wonder Leonidas and his 300 braves would rather have died than become part of the Persian Empire: ever since the time of the Persian king Cyrus the Great, such human rights abuses had been against the law of the empire.
On a clay cuneiform cylinder made 25 centuries ago Cyrus declares, “I will never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of others by force or without compensation. As long as I live I prohibit unpaid, forced labor. Today I announce that everyone is free to choose a religion. People are free to live in all regions and take up a job provided that they never violate others’ rights… I prohibit slavery and my governors and subordinates are obliged to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains. Such a tradition should be exterminated the world over.” The return to Israel of the Jews held in Babylonian slavery was a consequence of this legislation. Historically, King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans died to prevent freedom, not to preserve it.
So how does director Zack Snyder take these obvious facts in favor of ancient Persia to deliver a pro-Spartan message? The trick is infuriating in its simplicity, and perhaps not an undeserved insult to the members of the audience who carelessly empathize with the 300. Snyder presents the Spartans as a good-looking bunch with chiseled faces, bulging pectorals, and abs that even a computer graphics body would need megahertz crunches to accomplish. None of the Spartan's adversaries on the other hand look like they have seen the inside of a health club except Xerxes himself--and even this character has disfigured himself with unsightly piercings. Persians and other nay-sayers to the war have ugly skin, whereas the hawkish Spartans have manly sex appeal. Also, using swaggering language such as “come and get us,” and “We’ll fight in the shade,” the Spartans establish a locker room camaraderie between themselves and among susceptible members of the audience. The Persians on the other hand have obviously never drank beer in front of the TV on a Monday night.
300 is worth studying because it reflects the cognitive dissonance of American society under the Bush administration. Like the Nazi propaganda footage sometimes aired on the History Channel, one wonders just how much it will take for a human to think black is white and white is black. 300 reiterates the frightening lesson we learned during the heyday of fascism: it takes very little to manipulate the human mind. The simple ingredients are smart uniforms, and pats on the back for enjoying violence. And of course talented film directors with no scruples.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Cafe Transit
Director/Screenwriter Cambuzia Partovi
Having already won best screenplay at Iran’s Fajr Film Festival, Café Transit is now that country’s official entry for the Oscars. How did director/screenwriter Kambuzia Partovi go from having his works banned in Iran to becoming the artistic pride of his country? The answer is that Café Transit is cleverly written so that its domestic message says one thing while its foreign message says the opposite. The Western audience sees a romance between a sensuously forthright European truck driver and an enterprising Iranian widow. We are heartbroken as their love is made impossible by a nightmarish, apparently Islamic custom. Native Iranian audience, on the other hand, know that the practice of widows having to marry their dead husband’s brother isn’t particularly Islamic or Iranian. In their view, the lovers are battling against the absurd anachronisms of a backward Turkic speaking village. Western critics tend to applaud movies that authenticate the “clash of civilizations,” while Iranian cultural authorities reward movies that favorably compare their nation’s regressive gender policies against even lower—possibly fictitious--standards. Café Transit is a well crafted piece of international filmmaking that makes Iran appear developmentally stunted to the Western viewer at the same time that it makes the country’s mainstream values look culturally superior in the eyes of its domestic audience.
Catering to diverse political agendas assures wider acceptance, but a film does not become a contender for Fajr and the Oscars unless its point of view is expressed with artistic merit. Café Transit is a strong candidate for international filmmaking prizes mostly because the protagonist, Reyhan, is a refreshing twist to the standard determined-woman-struggling-against-tradition persona.
Even before we meet the charismatic heroine, the plot reveals that her real name is not Reyhaneh, but Reyhan (basil)--the same name with the feminine suffix deleted. Thus Kambuzia Partovi prepares us for a story about a woman who will transgress gender barriers. The film fulfills this expectation when Reyhan refuses to close down her late husband’s truck stop, choosing instead to use her extraordinary cooking skills to grow the business. Soon truck drivers from all over Europe and Asia are eating at her café on the border of Iran and Turkey. Reyhan’s brother in law, Nasser-- to whom truck drivers queuing up for a home cooked meal look no different than men waiting in line at a bordello--urges the widow not to dishonor the family. She should close the café, follow local custom and marry him so that he can provide for her and her two children. Reyhan, who is not a local, refuses to bend to this bizarre custom. She does not love Nasser, moreover he already has a wife. The jilted brother in law’s campaign to close down Reyhan’s business creates much of the suspense and indignation in Café Transit, particularly since Reyhan’s attraction to a Greek truck driver has made her vulnerable to gossip.
For the Iranian viewer, Reyhan’s breach of local custom is not a rebellion against the country’s mainstream Islamic values. Even though she manages a busy truck stop, she tries to avoid scandal by staying in the kitchen at all times, letting a trusted old male employee deal with her hungry customers. To the Western viewer the need for such precaution is a symptom of life in an intrusively misogynistic society. It creates sympathy for Reyhan. To the traditional Iranian, however, this is proof of the heroine’s sense of decorum. It generates respect for her and convinces the audience that the brother in law’s concern for the honor of the family has no justification.
Despite her conflict with her brother in law, Reyhan remains as respectful to him as possible. Is this because her patriarchal society punishes protest, or is Reyhan’s forbearance a sign of Iranian culture’s wisdom and humility? Fereshteh Sadr Orafaiy, who plays Reyhan, does a superb job of disallowing a straightforward answer. Instead, the Reyhan she portrays seems to understand people by way of their needs, not their threat level. The character’s natural mastery of the universal language of need is why her café has become home away from home for so many travelers from so many distant cultures.
Though Café Transit is unmistakably feminist, it subscribes to the brand of feminism that presupposes a female intuition for nurturing, specifically homemaking. Reyhan’s ability to use flavors, colors, and aromas to create an atmosphere of caring and rootedness is her main ally throughout the movie. This strength gives her success in business, a sense of independence, and a feeling of accomplishment. It also helps her in love. She flirts with Zacharias--the Greek truck driver with whom she falls in love--by sending out plates of food to him, watching him secretly from the kitchen window as he eats. Orafaiy fashions a potent feminine allure out of Reyhan’s passivity. When Zacharias finally tells Reyhan he loves her, she can only walk away without a word, but after a while her widow’s black mourning headscarf is gone, replaced with colorful ones. The heroines actions are as quietly forceful as the colors that affect our moods. Art director Hassan Farsi highlights this “feminine touch” very effectively, not only in the sets and costumes but in the amazing food presentations.
As a strong female character, Reyhan also has the power to protect. Besides enhancing the film’s feminist credentials in the West, this protectiveness serves a domestic function. The parallel between the outdated customs of this village and the reactionary gender policies of the Islamic Republic, is obvious even to the Iranian viewer, so Partovi mitigates this subversive allegory with a moralizing subplot about a young Russian woman whose Western values have led to a life of vagrancy and sex for favors. In a proselytizing gesture, Partovi’s screenplay has some unscrupulous men dump the homeless Russian woman in front of the café where her dignity is nursed back to health under Reyhan’s virtuous and motherly sheltering. There is an emotional scene where both women—neither of whom understand one another’s language—cry upon each other’s shoulders. In this touching invocation of international sisterhood, the sisters are actually grieving over the devastations of war, not the unfairness of patriarchal systems.
Crediting a female role model with special instincts for nest building, passive influence, and motherliness seems a hackneyed consolation for lack of gender equality, but that is what Café Transit offers its domestic audience. Mindful of Islamic cultural biases, Partovi never argues against a woman’s place being in the home; his feminism lies in his expanding the traditional concept of home, not in expanding the traditional concept of woman. Feminists in Iran can only hope the audience will see that the vector of progress from managing a home to managing a café may eventually point to managing a country. Beyond that Partovi knows he cannot go, unless he wants his work banned yet again.
This self censorship is not without artistic penalty. In a scene where Reyhan’s Greek admirer dances in front of her, we are not permitted to see the desire in her face. The resulting absence of information is as annoying as a hole in the canvas or a harsh skip on a music CD. A Global Film Initiative discussion guide diplomatically explains away one such scene claiming that the character is being given her privacy. One wonders why in a feminist movie it is not left up to the actress to decide how much privacy she wants to claim in displaying the inner feelings of her character.
The busy truck traffic of goods flowing north and south in front of Reyhan’s café constantly reminds us that Iran cannot isolate itself from outside influence. The Oscar committee will be flattered to see an Iranian film’s respectful nod to Western feminism, perhaps unaware that Partovi has given Iran’s traditional culture the last word in the movie. In the final sequence, the Russian girl which Reyhan rescued, is somewhere outside of Iran preparing a dish for her male friends.
“What is this? It’s great,” the men ask.
“Mirza Ghasemi*,” she replies.
When it comes to culture or ideology, there’s no such thing as one-way traffic.
*An Iranian dish.
Having already won best screenplay at Iran’s Fajr Film Festival, Café Transit is now that country’s official entry for the Oscars. How did director/screenwriter Kambuzia Partovi go from having his works banned in Iran to becoming the artistic pride of his country? The answer is that Café Transit is cleverly written so that its domestic message says one thing while its foreign message says the opposite. The Western audience sees a romance between a sensuously forthright European truck driver and an enterprising Iranian widow. We are heartbroken as their love is made impossible by a nightmarish, apparently Islamic custom. Native Iranian audience, on the other hand, know that the practice of widows having to marry their dead husband’s brother isn’t particularly Islamic or Iranian. In their view, the lovers are battling against the absurd anachronisms of a backward Turkic speaking village. Western critics tend to applaud movies that authenticate the “clash of civilizations,” while Iranian cultural authorities reward movies that favorably compare their nation’s regressive gender policies against even lower—possibly fictitious--standards. Café Transit is a well crafted piece of international filmmaking that makes Iran appear developmentally stunted to the Western viewer at the same time that it makes the country’s mainstream values look culturally superior in the eyes of its domestic audience.
Catering to diverse political agendas assures wider acceptance, but a film does not become a contender for Fajr and the Oscars unless its point of view is expressed with artistic merit. Café Transit is a strong candidate for international filmmaking prizes mostly because the protagonist, Reyhan, is a refreshing twist to the standard determined-woman-struggling-against-tradition persona.
Even before we meet the charismatic heroine, the plot reveals that her real name is not Reyhaneh, but Reyhan (basil)--the same name with the feminine suffix deleted. Thus Kambuzia Partovi prepares us for a story about a woman who will transgress gender barriers. The film fulfills this expectation when Reyhan refuses to close down her late husband’s truck stop, choosing instead to use her extraordinary cooking skills to grow the business. Soon truck drivers from all over Europe and Asia are eating at her café on the border of Iran and Turkey. Reyhan’s brother in law, Nasser-- to whom truck drivers queuing up for a home cooked meal look no different than men waiting in line at a bordello--urges the widow not to dishonor the family. She should close the café, follow local custom and marry him so that he can provide for her and her two children. Reyhan, who is not a local, refuses to bend to this bizarre custom. She does not love Nasser, moreover he already has a wife. The jilted brother in law’s campaign to close down Reyhan’s business creates much of the suspense and indignation in Café Transit, particularly since Reyhan’s attraction to a Greek truck driver has made her vulnerable to gossip.
For the Iranian viewer, Reyhan’s breach of local custom is not a rebellion against the country’s mainstream Islamic values. Even though she manages a busy truck stop, she tries to avoid scandal by staying in the kitchen at all times, letting a trusted old male employee deal with her hungry customers. To the Western viewer the need for such precaution is a symptom of life in an intrusively misogynistic society. It creates sympathy for Reyhan. To the traditional Iranian, however, this is proof of the heroine’s sense of decorum. It generates respect for her and convinces the audience that the brother in law’s concern for the honor of the family has no justification.
Despite her conflict with her brother in law, Reyhan remains as respectful to him as possible. Is this because her patriarchal society punishes protest, or is Reyhan’s forbearance a sign of Iranian culture’s wisdom and humility? Fereshteh Sadr Orafaiy, who plays Reyhan, does a superb job of disallowing a straightforward answer. Instead, the Reyhan she portrays seems to understand people by way of their needs, not their threat level. The character’s natural mastery of the universal language of need is why her café has become home away from home for so many travelers from so many distant cultures.
Though Café Transit is unmistakably feminist, it subscribes to the brand of feminism that presupposes a female intuition for nurturing, specifically homemaking. Reyhan’s ability to use flavors, colors, and aromas to create an atmosphere of caring and rootedness is her main ally throughout the movie. This strength gives her success in business, a sense of independence, and a feeling of accomplishment. It also helps her in love. She flirts with Zacharias--the Greek truck driver with whom she falls in love--by sending out plates of food to him, watching him secretly from the kitchen window as he eats. Orafaiy fashions a potent feminine allure out of Reyhan’s passivity. When Zacharias finally tells Reyhan he loves her, she can only walk away without a word, but after a while her widow’s black mourning headscarf is gone, replaced with colorful ones. The heroines actions are as quietly forceful as the colors that affect our moods. Art director Hassan Farsi highlights this “feminine touch” very effectively, not only in the sets and costumes but in the amazing food presentations.
As a strong female character, Reyhan also has the power to protect. Besides enhancing the film’s feminist credentials in the West, this protectiveness serves a domestic function. The parallel between the outdated customs of this village and the reactionary gender policies of the Islamic Republic, is obvious even to the Iranian viewer, so Partovi mitigates this subversive allegory with a moralizing subplot about a young Russian woman whose Western values have led to a life of vagrancy and sex for favors. In a proselytizing gesture, Partovi’s screenplay has some unscrupulous men dump the homeless Russian woman in front of the café where her dignity is nursed back to health under Reyhan’s virtuous and motherly sheltering. There is an emotional scene where both women—neither of whom understand one another’s language—cry upon each other’s shoulders. In this touching invocation of international sisterhood, the sisters are actually grieving over the devastations of war, not the unfairness of patriarchal systems.
Crediting a female role model with special instincts for nest building, passive influence, and motherliness seems a hackneyed consolation for lack of gender equality, but that is what Café Transit offers its domestic audience. Mindful of Islamic cultural biases, Partovi never argues against a woman’s place being in the home; his feminism lies in his expanding the traditional concept of home, not in expanding the traditional concept of woman. Feminists in Iran can only hope the audience will see that the vector of progress from managing a home to managing a café may eventually point to managing a country. Beyond that Partovi knows he cannot go, unless he wants his work banned yet again.
This self censorship is not without artistic penalty. In a scene where Reyhan’s Greek admirer dances in front of her, we are not permitted to see the desire in her face. The resulting absence of information is as annoying as a hole in the canvas or a harsh skip on a music CD. A Global Film Initiative discussion guide diplomatically explains away one such scene claiming that the character is being given her privacy. One wonders why in a feminist movie it is not left up to the actress to decide how much privacy she wants to claim in displaying the inner feelings of her character.
The busy truck traffic of goods flowing north and south in front of Reyhan’s café constantly reminds us that Iran cannot isolate itself from outside influence. The Oscar committee will be flattered to see an Iranian film’s respectful nod to Western feminism, perhaps unaware that Partovi has given Iran’s traditional culture the last word in the movie. In the final sequence, the Russian girl which Reyhan rescued, is somewhere outside of Iran preparing a dish for her male friends.
“What is this? It’s great,” the men ask.
“Mirza Ghasemi*,” she replies.
When it comes to culture or ideology, there’s no such thing as one-way traffic.
*An Iranian dish.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
The trouble with denying the Holocaust
As a leader of a predominantly Shiite country, President Ahamadinejad understands the utility of politicizing grief. For over thirteen centuries Shiism has found sustenance in mournful rituals commemorating the death of its Imams. In the mind of a Shiite politician, the Holocaust story is a familiar emotional device for amplifying and channeling political power. However, this interpretation of the Holocaust as an instrument of manipulation is behind the times. In the modern world, the Holocaust lesson serves civilization by helping prevent atrocities that would occur otherwise.
Unfortunately the prevention is not complete. In 1994 Hutus in Rwanda massacred a million Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) in a matter of three months. In the 1990’s Bosnian Serbs attempted to cleanse Bosnia of its non-Serb population; mass graves are still being found. In the mid seventies the Khmer Rouge systematically killed off millions in the ideological cleansing of Cambodia. Our generation does not need to take the word of historians for these events; we witnessed the rising body count daily in the news. Even as I write, the killings in Darfur continue. Genocide it seems is more the historical rule than the exception. Ask any Iranian. Persian culture still displays the scars of the Mongol decimation of Iran’s population eight centuries ago.
Despite our instinct for creating civilizations, the human conscience is a fragile organ of cognition. Our sense of right and wrong is easily overwhelmed by anger, jealousy, greed, or suspicion. This is not all bad news; the unusually rapid evolution of the human brain seems to have been the result of competition against other members of our own species. The down side however--though few of us can face the thought--is that human societies are prone to murdering each other.
The continual refreshing of the horrors of the Holocaust has been the most successful strategy in controlling outbreaks of genocidal behavior in the West. Minorities living in the United States or Europe enjoy the benefits of multiculturalism--arts, music, fashion, food, architecture, cinema, festivals, religion—without worrying about the hazards of being in the minority.
After 9-11, some radio talk show hosts provoked their American listeners by asking “can Muslims be good Americans?” Five million Americans with Muslim backgrounds could have found themselves in concentration camps, or worse. There was no American Bosnia because Holocaust awareness has strengthened the infrastructure of tolerance in America. What kept American Muslims safe during the dangerous times right after 9-11 was Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Judgment at Nuremberg and a host of other movies, television shows, books and novels about the Holocaust. For years such works have relentlessly shamed and marginalized anyone who would think of putting people in concentration camps.
President Ahmadinejad says European laws against denying the Holocaust are a curtailment of the freedom of speech. He believes these laws are a testament to Jewish power in the West. Here I offer a parallel explanation: these curtailments are a testament to the nearness of another Holocaust in Europe. What European leaders fear more than Jewish power is another Hitler. In the United States we are reminded of the closeness of this peril whenever a Mel Gibson delivers an anti-Semitic rant, or a Michael Richards goes into racist rage, or a policeman brutally tasers an Iranian-American student.
President Ahmadinejad says that guilt created by the Holocaust manipulates Western powers into supporting Israel's harsh behavior towards the Palestinians. Be that as it may, acknowledging the Holocaust has a positive function for civilization which we must not give up even as we condemn its abuses.
Unfortunately the prevention is not complete. In 1994 Hutus in Rwanda massacred a million Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) in a matter of three months. In the 1990’s Bosnian Serbs attempted to cleanse Bosnia of its non-Serb population; mass graves are still being found. In the mid seventies the Khmer Rouge systematically killed off millions in the ideological cleansing of Cambodia. Our generation does not need to take the word of historians for these events; we witnessed the rising body count daily in the news. Even as I write, the killings in Darfur continue. Genocide it seems is more the historical rule than the exception. Ask any Iranian. Persian culture still displays the scars of the Mongol decimation of Iran’s population eight centuries ago.
Despite our instinct for creating civilizations, the human conscience is a fragile organ of cognition. Our sense of right and wrong is easily overwhelmed by anger, jealousy, greed, or suspicion. This is not all bad news; the unusually rapid evolution of the human brain seems to have been the result of competition against other members of our own species. The down side however--though few of us can face the thought--is that human societies are prone to murdering each other.
The continual refreshing of the horrors of the Holocaust has been the most successful strategy in controlling outbreaks of genocidal behavior in the West. Minorities living in the United States or Europe enjoy the benefits of multiculturalism--arts, music, fashion, food, architecture, cinema, festivals, religion—without worrying about the hazards of being in the minority.
After 9-11, some radio talk show hosts provoked their American listeners by asking “can Muslims be good Americans?” Five million Americans with Muslim backgrounds could have found themselves in concentration camps, or worse. There was no American Bosnia because Holocaust awareness has strengthened the infrastructure of tolerance in America. What kept American Muslims safe during the dangerous times right after 9-11 was Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Judgment at Nuremberg and a host of other movies, television shows, books and novels about the Holocaust. For years such works have relentlessly shamed and marginalized anyone who would think of putting people in concentration camps.
President Ahmadinejad says European laws against denying the Holocaust are a curtailment of the freedom of speech. He believes these laws are a testament to Jewish power in the West. Here I offer a parallel explanation: these curtailments are a testament to the nearness of another Holocaust in Europe. What European leaders fear more than Jewish power is another Hitler. In the United States we are reminded of the closeness of this peril whenever a Mel Gibson delivers an anti-Semitic rant, or a Michael Richards goes into racist rage, or a policeman brutally tasers an Iranian-American student.
President Ahmadinejad says that guilt created by the Holocaust manipulates Western powers into supporting Israel's harsh behavior towards the Palestinians. Be that as it may, acknowledging the Holocaust has a positive function for civilization which we must not give up even as we condemn its abuses.
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