Comedian Maz Jobarani finagled his complicated schedule so he could accept Iranian Scholarship Foundation’s invitation to speak at their fundraising gala. An alternate choice for the event had been graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi. But Jobrani was more stubbornly persuasive in beating back his schedulers. A stellar cluster of young Iranian scholars needed his support, and no other engagement seemed more important.
Jobrani immediately challenged his audience with a hilariously multi-layered routine about how his mother wanted him to be a lawyer--when he really wanted to be an actor.
Mother: You want to grow up to be a clown?
Maz: Mom, I just want to act.
Mother: Well being a lawyer is a kind of acting. Isn’t it? You act in front of the jury, that’s twelve people right there. Throw in the judge; that makes thirteen. And then there’s the weekends. Why don’t you act on weekends, ghorboonet beram.
Of course none of the scholarship students are attending clown school. Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, are all institutions with superb curricula in law and the sciences. But Jobrani’s clever routine seemed to be asking if the Scholarship Committee treated the arts seriously. As though in answer, one of the student speakers gave us the delightful news that his new play was about to be professionally produced. Later I found out another scholarship student majored in fashion design. In the case of Lawyer vs. Clown, the Scholarship Committee had been an impartial jury.
This impartiality is expressed tersely by Selection Committee member Dr. Abbas Milani. He says, "Once I determine a candidate has the four qualifications--grades, need, Iranian ancestors and contribution to promotion of Persian culture--then a composite of all four, along with the quality of statement and recommendations determines a students final rank."
On the emotional level, however, the four qualifications can be better understood in a Wizard of OZ format: brains, courage, heart, and vision.
The brains part of the story is easiest to see. A GPA of 3.5 in this need-based scholarship qualifies to apply for it, but some of the students carry strings of uninterrupted “A”s coupled with near perfect SAT scores.
Courage is the domain of Professor Jaleh Pirnazar, another of the six committee members. Venturing beyond academic achievement, undeterred by imperfect grades, she scours the applicant’s written essay, seeking strengths where a gamble may bring big payoffs. The qualities that impress her are leadership, perseverance against hardships, and a good sense of community responsibility. Tellingly, a recipient is obligated to perform 100 hours of community service each year so that his/her conscientious faculties continue to get a workout. Outside of class, look for ISF students in places like the Big Brother/Sister Program or cancer help centers.
Heart is symbolized by Mehdi Safipour. Ask any of the students who hold him up as their role model for commitment. When I saw Safipour last Sunday, I lied to him about looking less tired than he did during previous galas. He has not stopped to rest since he joined the committee years ago. The force of his dedication supplies even the tiniest administrative capillary of this foundation. In the middle of a busy financial accounting day, he has been known to take the trouble of making reminder calls to students who may be late in their paperwork, or who may need counseling towards a particular course credit.
Azadeh Hariri is the Dorothy archetype, symbolic of the students' vision . Her dream of happier futures drives the ISF narrative. An heiress to pre-revolution textile wealth, Hariri is the financial mill of the foundation. At first encounter she comes across as an unpretentiously rich altruist. Good students shouldn’t have to worry about money while in school.
At a broader level Hariri sees a time when the best Iranian minds are contributing to American culture. As politicians, judges, artists, entrepreneurs, professors, medical scientists, journalists, and economists they will fuse the wisdom of their Iranian heritage with the traditions of American democracy, creating better policies and decisions.
Of course if some of these students were to win Nobel Prizes, Oscars, or Pulitzers—and it's a safe bet—Hariri’s collection of intellectual gems will outshine any ornament she could put behind a glass. But this takes Hariri's philanthropic strategy too lightly. To explain, she pays all the costs of the foundation including the huge annual gala, so that 100% of the donations go to the students. One may ask if she’s got so much money why doesn’t she just pay the tuitions directly? Because the social institution of Iranian-Americans rolling up their sleeves to support each other could use help being built. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and…
Among the farsighted organizations teaching our community to fish, few are able to grant up to a $10,000 yearly scholarship four academic years in a row. Also, the selection committee never considers an applicant’s politics or religion in the award decision. At the gala there is a student who wears an Islamic roosari. This recipient--who scored first place in Iran's national university entrance exams--has bonded with Bahaiis, Jews, Christians and other Iranian youth of undetermined creed.
Packed with donors this year, at each event the numbers at the gala have been growing. Still, more funds are sought to invest beyond obviously “blue chip” students. There is hidden talent out there for historic Iranian-American innovations. With rising support and exposure, ISF hopes to go after matching university funds, potentially doubling its capacity to reach out to our community.
This year’s gala brought in over half a million dollars, including the auction overseen by hostess Rudy Bakhtiar, the journalist who occasionally lights up the CNN newsroom with her Persian charm.
The journalist Bakhtiar hosted us, the actor Jobrani gave us critical perspective, and the Persian Jazz singer, Ziba Shirazi, recorded the event in our emotional memories. Humming a Ziba Shirazi tune during the drive home, I wondered when the scholarship custom began in history. Back in the fifteenth century the wealthy Medici family took in a 13 year old kid who wasn’t much into school, but liked to draw. This is one early instance of the secular scholarship tradition that I could think of. The kid's name was Michelangelo.
Important note:
The May 31 deadline for ISF applications is approaching. Here’s the link if you know a student from anywhere in the US who would like to apply. Check out interviews with some of the ISF students here.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 07, 2008
Shirin and Salt Man.
By Nilofar Shidmehr.
Oolichan books 2008
No man has died more nobly for love than Farhad the stonecutter. And no man should be loathed more than the heartless news bearer who told him the lie that his Shirin had died.
The poet Nezami tells us that Princess Shirin of fable built a mausoleum for Farhad who shredded mountains to deserve her. 1700 years later, author Nilofar Shidmehr found out that mummified remains of a man were discovered near the mountains where Farhad had thrown himself to his death. There was no mausoleum. Fickle Shirin, undreamable as the morning sun, if love cannot rage then what curse burdens your daughters today?
In Shidmehr’s vastly imaginative novella, Shirin and Salt Man, a modern day Iranian woman named Shirin plans to elope with the mummy of an ancient salt miner preserved in brine and discovered in 1993 in Iran. She is not as fortunate as Nezami’s Farhad. Her insanity is not from love, but from neglect. She married the abusive Khosro, and now remorse has driven her to adultery with the pile of salted bones she imagines to be Farhad.
Shidmehr’s Khosro is not a king like Nezami’s Khosro. Though the romantically obsessed heroine married him for his kingly name, he really just works at the ministry of Islamic Guidance. As Shirin says,
“His job was to censor foreign actresses
who spoke their love out loud.
He was good at chopping images
and changing story lines.
My husband turned prostitutes into virgins
all the time”
The modern Khosro would likely censor Shidmehr. Her imagery mixes anger and sex like mud and blood. Here’s how the author describes the virgin Shirin being raped:
“There was Shapoor
shaking and gnashing his teeth
as though my shame were his.
You showed me your legs.
You stole away my virtue;
cover your body, woman.
Pebbles jabbed into my back,
like a mess of my own dislocated vertebrae.
and when he got up my voice ran silent
as the river through me. Darkness covered
my body, the mud was mixed with blood.”
Shirin had tried to get a ride with the man, who accidentally glimpsed her legs through a split chador. Shidmehr perhaps knows that the Nezami fan would compare this to Farhad’s equally pathological but harmless behavior at his first glimpse of Shirin. He faints!
Even in her humorous moments Shidmeh’s imagery is wet. She says,
“Shir has three meanings, as you know: milk, or the animal,
the lion. Never mind the third meaning.”
It was the meaning between the first and the second that got Abbas Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us” in trouble with Iranian Khosros. You see, the director had “no idea” women aren’t supposed to milk cows while men read love poems to them.
Yet Nezami has ducked Islamic censors for centuries. Shidmehr constantly borrows from his sensuality in her free translations of him:
“Call me whenever you drink
from that milky brook
I brought you. Every day
when you sweeten your mouth
please say my name aloud,
for I am bitter here without you”
At one point in the novella the repeated milk imagery suggests an odd possibility to the reader.
“As a newborn
to a mother’s breast,
Farhad spoke to Shirin,
I am drawn to you.”
Does Shirin intend to put the stolen mummy to her breast and nurse him back to flesh? Is the second meaning of shir not lion but lioness taking responsibility for suckling a new pride?
Struck by Shidmehr’s display of literary brilliance, I kept wondering why Shirin and Salt Man is a novella and not a full-length novel. A more culturally aware publisher would not have let her stop at women vs. Islam. Like a lover who can’t get enough, the editor would have begged the author to go places where Nezami’s imagination could only point the way.
For example, she could tell us why Farhad had to die. In Nezami’s time, and doubly so in the Sassanian period when Khosro va Shirin takes place, a princess could never marry a stone cutter, regardless of his merits. Nezami is coerced into feeding Farhad and his pure love to the maws of his social order. The hero was condemned to execution by the tragedy of rigid hierarchical societies.
But modernity changes class paradigms in upheavals that dwarf the political revolutions it inspires. The new consciousness of female oppression rides the seismic waves of a historyquake where dynamic landmasses of meritocracy rub against the stolid ways of autocracy. This is how a modern novel about Shirin and Farhad story can have a happy ending.
Sadly, the Western publishing industry (includes distribution, reviews and other publicity) takes only what it is conditioned to want from Iranian women writers, allowing the rest of their talent to lie dormant. It has frustrated the desirous volcano inside Shidmehr to groan threateningly but not erupt.
Yet love compensates for small dissatisfactions. Shidmeh’r mature romance with our own literature cleans up after many of the carefree Lolitas seduced by the lustful Humberts of Western autocracy. While these writers’ crush on the splendid American Khosro makes them oblivious to our culture’s humble handsomeness, Shidmehr’s devotion to our legacy showcases just what treasures there are to lose if we neglect our heritage. Despite the taste of salt in her lament, Shidmehr’s protectiveness of Nezami forbids the foreigner Alexander to think his sword could defeat a Gordian knot as skillfully tied as Persian culture.
It is fair to acknowledge the complaint of star struck Lolitas, but we need no urging to suffer Shidmehr’s anguish because this writer has made it clear she is of the same body as the rest of us. Or as Farhad said of Shirin, “I cannot say we are of one body because self-worship is idolatry.”
Reading Shidmehr’s resurrection of Nezami in English, I wondered if it is it even possible for the thirty-year-old IRI weed to choke a three thousand years old tree? Shidmehr’s prognosis is not the hope of a mad lover when she says,
“No story is written unchangeably
in stone—not mine
nor Nezami’s Shirin’s,
Shah Khosro’s or Farhad’s:
“Reconfiguring Mount Bisotun.”
I could call Farhad back
to life, be a Jesus
and make Farhad rise
from the dead. He will lift
his head off the stones,
his breath lend its color
to the world I create
around him. He will intuit
that Shirin lives, that the news-bearer
was deadly and dead
wrong. He will raise”
When I see an Iranian writer unraveling our old myths to weave new meaning into familiar smelling wool, I am inspired to wish that for every copy of Reading Lolita In Tehran there would be two copies of Shirin and Saltman, Because inside the pages there
is nourishment , there is power, there is hope.
There is love.
Notes:
1. See Nazy Kaviani’s prose telling of the Shirin and Farhad story, here.
2. See Nezami in the original, here.
Oolichan books 2008
No man has died more nobly for love than Farhad the stonecutter. And no man should be loathed more than the heartless news bearer who told him the lie that his Shirin had died.
The poet Nezami tells us that Princess Shirin of fable built a mausoleum for Farhad who shredded mountains to deserve her. 1700 years later, author Nilofar Shidmehr found out that mummified remains of a man were discovered near the mountains where Farhad had thrown himself to his death. There was no mausoleum. Fickle Shirin, undreamable as the morning sun, if love cannot rage then what curse burdens your daughters today?
In Shidmehr’s vastly imaginative novella, Shirin and Salt Man, a modern day Iranian woman named Shirin plans to elope with the mummy of an ancient salt miner preserved in brine and discovered in 1993 in Iran. She is not as fortunate as Nezami’s Farhad. Her insanity is not from love, but from neglect. She married the abusive Khosro, and now remorse has driven her to adultery with the pile of salted bones she imagines to be Farhad.
Shidmehr’s Khosro is not a king like Nezami’s Khosro. Though the romantically obsessed heroine married him for his kingly name, he really just works at the ministry of Islamic Guidance. As Shirin says,
“His job was to censor foreign actresses
who spoke their love out loud.
He was good at chopping images
and changing story lines.
My husband turned prostitutes into virgins
all the time”
The modern Khosro would likely censor Shidmehr. Her imagery mixes anger and sex like mud and blood. Here’s how the author describes the virgin Shirin being raped:
“There was Shapoor
shaking and gnashing his teeth
as though my shame were his.
You showed me your legs.
You stole away my virtue;
cover your body, woman.
Pebbles jabbed into my back,
like a mess of my own dislocated vertebrae.
and when he got up my voice ran silent
as the river through me. Darkness covered
my body, the mud was mixed with blood.”
Shirin had tried to get a ride with the man, who accidentally glimpsed her legs through a split chador. Shidmehr perhaps knows that the Nezami fan would compare this to Farhad’s equally pathological but harmless behavior at his first glimpse of Shirin. He faints!
Even in her humorous moments Shidmeh’s imagery is wet. She says,
“Shir has three meanings, as you know: milk, or the animal,
the lion. Never mind the third meaning.”
It was the meaning between the first and the second that got Abbas Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us” in trouble with Iranian Khosros. You see, the director had “no idea” women aren’t supposed to milk cows while men read love poems to them.
Yet Nezami has ducked Islamic censors for centuries. Shidmehr constantly borrows from his sensuality in her free translations of him:
“Call me whenever you drink
from that milky brook
I brought you. Every day
when you sweeten your mouth
please say my name aloud,
for I am bitter here without you”
At one point in the novella the repeated milk imagery suggests an odd possibility to the reader.
“As a newborn
to a mother’s breast,
Farhad spoke to Shirin,
I am drawn to you.”
Does Shirin intend to put the stolen mummy to her breast and nurse him back to flesh? Is the second meaning of shir not lion but lioness taking responsibility for suckling a new pride?
Struck by Shidmehr’s display of literary brilliance, I kept wondering why Shirin and Salt Man is a novella and not a full-length novel. A more culturally aware publisher would not have let her stop at women vs. Islam. Like a lover who can’t get enough, the editor would have begged the author to go places where Nezami’s imagination could only point the way.
For example, she could tell us why Farhad had to die. In Nezami’s time, and doubly so in the Sassanian period when Khosro va Shirin takes place, a princess could never marry a stone cutter, regardless of his merits. Nezami is coerced into feeding Farhad and his pure love to the maws of his social order. The hero was condemned to execution by the tragedy of rigid hierarchical societies.
But modernity changes class paradigms in upheavals that dwarf the political revolutions it inspires. The new consciousness of female oppression rides the seismic waves of a historyquake where dynamic landmasses of meritocracy rub against the stolid ways of autocracy. This is how a modern novel about Shirin and Farhad story can have a happy ending.
Sadly, the Western publishing industry (includes distribution, reviews and other publicity) takes only what it is conditioned to want from Iranian women writers, allowing the rest of their talent to lie dormant. It has frustrated the desirous volcano inside Shidmehr to groan threateningly but not erupt.
Yet love compensates for small dissatisfactions. Shidmeh’r mature romance with our own literature cleans up after many of the carefree Lolitas seduced by the lustful Humberts of Western autocracy. While these writers’ crush on the splendid American Khosro makes them oblivious to our culture’s humble handsomeness, Shidmehr’s devotion to our legacy showcases just what treasures there are to lose if we neglect our heritage. Despite the taste of salt in her lament, Shidmehr’s protectiveness of Nezami forbids the foreigner Alexander to think his sword could defeat a Gordian knot as skillfully tied as Persian culture.
It is fair to acknowledge the complaint of star struck Lolitas, but we need no urging to suffer Shidmehr’s anguish because this writer has made it clear she is of the same body as the rest of us. Or as Farhad said of Shirin, “I cannot say we are of one body because self-worship is idolatry.”
Reading Shidmehr’s resurrection of Nezami in English, I wondered if it is it even possible for the thirty-year-old IRI weed to choke a three thousand years old tree? Shidmehr’s prognosis is not the hope of a mad lover when she says,
“No story is written unchangeably
in stone—not mine
nor Nezami’s Shirin’s,
Shah Khosro’s or Farhad’s:
“Reconfiguring Mount Bisotun.”
I could call Farhad back
to life, be a Jesus
and make Farhad rise
from the dead. He will lift
his head off the stones,
his breath lend its color
to the world I create
around him. He will intuit
that Shirin lives, that the news-bearer
was deadly and dead
wrong. He will raise”
When I see an Iranian writer unraveling our old myths to weave new meaning into familiar smelling wool, I am inspired to wish that for every copy of Reading Lolita In Tehran there would be two copies of Shirin and Saltman, Because inside the pages there
is nourishment , there is power, there is hope.
There is love.
Notes:
1. See Nazy Kaviani’s prose telling of the Shirin and Farhad story, here.
2. See Nezami in the original, here.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Confessions of a Farsiholic: reviewing a one-letter epic.
The first time I was fined for saying “Farsi” instead of “Persian” I didn’t fight the ticket because back then the action was all about French. French fries had become “Freedom” fries, ruining a flavorful shortcut to khoresh-e-gheimeh. Flag wavers claimed fried potatoes sliced lengthwise should never have been called French fries in the first place. There were “chips” to go with fried fish in England as early as 1864. Surely the US adopting fries in the 1930s, should have named this calorie bomb after her freedom-loving ally, and not after folks who would leave Iraqis in peace.
The Francophile in me worried that the logic of Iran experts who said the term “Farsi” broke ties with prestigious Persia, could also apply to French culture. I was nervous that Freedom fries, instead of French fries, would confuse historians as to the location of the Louvre and the nationality of Inspector Clouseau. If this renaming becomes a trend, I fussed, Americans would no longer think of Descartes when they eat French toast, or of Voltaire when they look out of French windows. Cardinal Richelieu would never again leap to mind as soon as anyone stuck a tongue in someone else’s mouth.
In this crisis, I reached out to an abridged history of the potato, which tentatively placed fries in Paris in 1840, almost a quarter of a century before the first chips greased the streets of London. I could go back to enjoying khoresh-e- gheimeh without feeling a party to the looting of Iraq’s civilization. More importantly, American English could begin reversing its Orwellian decline.
The Francophile in me worried that the logic of Iran experts who said the term “Farsi” broke ties with prestigious Persia, could also apply to French culture. I was nervous that Freedom fries, instead of French fries, would confuse historians as to the location of the Louvre and the nationality of Inspector Clouseau. If this renaming becomes a trend, I fussed, Americans would no longer think of Descartes when they eat French toast, or of Voltaire when they look out of French windows. Cardinal Richelieu would never again leap to mind as soon as anyone stuck a tongue in someone else’s mouth.
In this crisis, I reached out to an abridged history of the potato, which tentatively placed fries in Paris in 1840, almost a quarter of a century before the first chips greased the streets of London. I could go back to enjoying khoresh-e- gheimeh without feeling a party to the looting of Iraq’s civilization. More importantly, American English could begin reversing its Orwellian decline.
Throughout this time, though, I kept falling off the “Persian” wagon. Supportive friends promised that love would eventually come to my arranged marriage with this word. Yet I philandered with “Farsi,” and English cheerily egged me on. She gets a kick out of making her speakers and writers squabble. For example, did I tell you about the black eye I got over Star Trek’s “To boldly go where no man has gone before?” English has been on red alert status since the original sci-fi series first came out in the sixties. Is it correct English to insert the adverb “boldly” between “to” and “go?” I was in the coalition that said even in the 23rd century Captain Kirk had no right to split his infinitives. He should have said, “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” We thought we had the opposition finally outgunned, when Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suddenly decloaked in front of us.
In his book, The Language Instinct, Pinker explained the origin of the taboo against split infinitives, making our side look very silly. Showing off your Latin was a sign of good education in England, and in Latin you can’t split the infinitive even if you wanted to. Latin infinitives are like Farsi “raftan.” Where can you put “boldly” in “raftan?” Surely not “raft boldly an!” But natural English does allow us to boldly split infinitives. So for years over-educated English academics had unnecessarily disfigured their beautiful language with the syntax of Cicero.
The Language Instinct, more than histories of the potato, transformed my lust for the word “Farsi” from a sin to a fact of nature. Though Pinker focuses on English grammar rather than word usage and doesn’t mention Farsi, his book exposes the organic, dynamic, and inborn aspects of human language. Pinker’s work made me think that the English language has adopted “Farsi” for natural reasons, not because Iranians have passed on a bad habit to English speakers.
To find out why English speakers feed “Farsi” but shoo away “Persian,” I spoke with American novelist and prolific short story writer Elliot Fintushel. Fintushel’s prose should never be taken with other amphetamines, but this ultra-modern writer has a subconscious so close to his normal awareness that he can explain why he does or doesn’t choose a particular word. By the way, he knew nothing about The Farsibition when I phoned him.
Ari- Hello Elliot, what do you think of when I say, “The Persian language?”
Fintushel- Well, uh…Sanskrit!
This educated and worldly American writer prefers “Farsi” to “Persian” because his image of historic Persia is at odds with his modern interactions with Iranians. He says “Farsi” because his mind can no longer put Iran in a museum. Television, globalization, immigration, Youtube, cheap travel, all conspire to break the “Persian” display glass for him. While the culture of Sohrab allows the old to kill the young, Fintushel ‘s Oedipal culture has no qualms against slipping the dagger of novelty deep into Rostam’s heart. “Persian” withers, “Farsi” flowers. English sighs, remembering her own virgin days when brave men called her “Angelisc.”
As for the Iranian speaker of English, there are also natural reasons why “Persian” sounds like a trademark and “Farsi” the real thing.
First, developmentally. “Farsi” is what our moms said our language was called, and if English wants to imitate us, then she has realized—perhaps by sensing our adamancy—that “Persian” is no longer the right word. Remember, until recently English didn’t have much contact with Iranians except through our classical culture. Never mind that the French don’t use their own word for their language when they speak English. Fintushel’s tongue isn’t allergic to “French” but he does break out in hives with “Persian.” The word “French” doesn’t fight his reality of who the French people are; “Persian” does! Thankfully, the ultimate authority on American English has baptized “Farsi” into the English language and here’s a link that swears to it:
Webster also says that the English word “Persian” primarily refers to ANY of the SEVERAL Iranian languages dominant in Persia. Iranians who tell hapless Webster-toting Americans that they speak Persian are suggesting they may be fluent in several languages including Tajik, Dari and Judeo-Bukharic.
Secondly, there is an organic link between words and voice/body gesturing. Here’s a revealing test for Iranian-American writers and poets: with which concept do you best associate the following sounds? Aakh, oho, evaa, ah’, vaay, digeh, bah’, baabaa. Imperial Persian or Farsi e khodemooni? The interjection I most associate with “Persian” is Maz Jobrani’s famous “meow.
Third, mechanically. Farsi rolls off the tongue better than “Parsi,” or “Persian.” The “P” sound is a sudden plosive consonant; “F” is a smooth fricative, takes less force. In an onomatopoeic sense (the closeness of a sound to its intended meaning), Farsi may reflect our subtler post-Empire maturity better than “Parsi.” Sure, Arabic voice mechanics changed “Parsi “to “Farsi,” but why didn’t it change “Paarsaal” to “Faarsaal?” Yes, we were flattering Arab administrative jargon, but there must have also been a social advantage in the consonant change that somehow served the common speaker. This advantage may not exist today—whatever it was—but it was there. To speculate as to what this utility may have been, poetic ears may notice there is an inclusivity of regional sounds in the lovely name “Khalijeh Fars” that is lost in its unrealistically exclusive—and bumpy-- translation, “Persian Gulf.” When I contemplate why “F” and no longer “P,” I hear songs, not battle cries. I see pens, not swords.
Finally, there are patriotic aspects to using the term “Farsi.” Ironically this has to do with our protective feelings for our classical literature. To an Iranian writing in English, it feels unfair to allow Greece at the height of its splendor to name a language that eventually surpassed Greek in poetic expressiveness. When Herodotus was calling us Persians (Persikos) none of Iran’s classical poets had been born to measure up to Homer, Hesoid and Sappho. But some centuries later, 300 Khayaams kicked ass against a million Greeks. “Persian” reflects Hellenistic cultural supremacy; “Farsi” starts the clock when we had our strongest claim to high culture, documented by our own historians.
In our day-to-day experience “Persian” covers just a small subset of the Farsi that buzzes around our ears. Colloquially we may call it Farsi e Aflaatooni. But this Persian of the distinguished Yarshater, Davis and Nicholson is just one bee in the bustling hive of contemporary Farsi. In fact the other bees are so busy making up new words for modern nuances, they sometimes steal from other languages. Young people occasionally use the English word “money” when they covet a hard-to-afford luxury, and the traditional “pool” when they buy gum. They use the English “number” for digits that dial a date, and the old “shomareh” when they call their parents. Among a different group, the Arabic proper name “Zeid,”--Farsi equivalent of “some dude”-- now also comes with a Russian suffix: “Zeidowfski!
Sometimes there is ethnic influence. Daaf for girl is Kalimi Farsi, so is “Zaakhaar” for “boy,” occasionally meaning, ”mate” in the Australian sense. There are new descriptive verbs like “Yazeed shodan” as in to suddenly explode into anger—from a mean character in Shiite plays—but we also have “love tarakaandan” for public display of affection.
Haveej is used for street cleaners—refers to uniform color, as does kaaktus for police. BBC can be a spy or a cell phone. To this add the journalistic and technical vocabulary factories that coin Farsi expressions daily like the Feds print money, making my Farsi dictionary as useless as a stack of dollars. One Nobel Prize winner throws around words like faraa ravesh (methodology) and shahrvand (citizen). Remind me, which Persian dynasty popularized the word shahrvand? If all this activity makes your head spin, you need a daroon paalaa (exorcist)
In this dynamic linguistic community, I speak a variant that could be termed "Farsi e Dolaari." Yet I am aware that there are Javaads, Ghazanfars, Manijehs and Shahlaas stuck in Tehran traffic in their Jaaroo barghee (vacuum cleaner), jaa saaboni (soap dish), and pejhoo kaarmandi (Dilbert mobile). They watch film e aamoozeshi(over 21 “documentaries”) and spend esken, money, peel, maayeh.
There are narm afzaar (software) geeks kleeking away on their raayaanehs (computers) building taarnamaas (websites). After I explain to Fintushel about the double entendre in daroon gozaasht (input) and beeroon daad (output), you would have to drag him to Egypt and waterboard him before he gives up “Farsi” for a word that conjures up Sanskrit to his readers.
To be sure in academic circles where precision is more important than expressiveness, “Persian” is an indispensable technical term. But should Persian literature academics dictate to English speaking writers, poets, casual speakers, standup comics, or rappers, which English words are allowed? Would they bully little Luke on Valentine’s Day if he’s hard up for something to rhyme with “Marcy?” The attempt reveals a disappointing absence of communication with the social science building next door where they study how communities create and use language. The intrusion of our culture’s dictatorial vices into the common man’s English is ungracious, whereas our tolerant and humble flip side is magnetic.
The marketing approach, promoting “Persian” as a brand name, has been harmful to Iran’ s sincere modern culture. For example, my interview with contemporary Iranian-American playwright Sepideh Khosrowjah rankled a commenter who was frustrated about the article’s use of the term “Farsi.” This commenter obviously has an interest in the arts or he/she wouldn’t have read the piece. In the spirit of this shared love, I propose we redouble our efforts in encouraging our living cultural treasures, even as we struggle to rescue our threatened antiquity. Artists like Khosrowjah wield a formidable language. They contribute to one day making “Farsi” as prestigious as “Persian.”
The commenter asks rhetorically if my use of “Farsi” has a political motive.
You bet!
Some notes:
1.For an informative and entertaining study on Tehrani Farsi vernacular see Farhag va Loghaateh e Zaban Makhfi, by Dr. Seid Mehdi Samaai. info@nashr-e-markaz.com
2.The touching and beautiful Zoroastrian Gathas do compete with, and arguably transcend, ancient Greek poetry, but their number is few in comparison and their subjects limited to devotional concerns.
3.To explore why Greeks had historians and pre-Islamic Iranians possibly had only mytholgy, see anthropologist Donal E. Brown's work on hereditary caste societies.
Monday, March 10, 2008
"In Memory of Kazem Ashtari," backstage
Backstage, after seeing “In memory of Kazem Ashtari,” I told actress Bella Warda that I thought her character, the resilient Mahin Ashtari is in very good hands. If you haven’t been backstage after a play, prepare for a jolting experience. There is strong magic in speaking to someone--still in costume and sweating from the ordeal--who has just returned from the story world. This is something film can never do.
As I waited to congratulate actress Sepideh Khosrowjah, she was still the ambitious yet easily dominated character, Shafagh Gooya. The fact that as playwright Khosrowjah created Shafagh and all the other characters in the comedy belonged to the reality she was just coming back to.
Director Hamid Ehya was thoughtful, absently submitting to our praise. What worked, what didn’t work with the audience? I bet he wishes Mahin’s wisecrack to Shafagh were true.
Shafagh- But do you even know how to direct?
Mahin—Directing doesn’t need any knowing how!
Funny line! Ehya’s task was far messier than “simply” interpreting the work. For example, Warda has strong stage tactics. Like a good chess player she goes after the center and holds it, inclining the other characters to speak towards center stage instead of out to the audience. Remedying this without diminishing Warda’s presence takes careful problem solving.
Here’s another example, this time in set design. There is a door-answering phone where Mahin’s daughter, Atefeh, gives us the first “oh shit” moment of the play. Someone’s at the door she did not expect. This event begins the story’s climb; yet its comic impact is threatened by a small stage that forces the phone in an awkward out-of-the-action place. The young actress Shadi Yousefian has funny body and face language when the sky falls down, and stage limitations diminished one of her good moments. But to borrow from Donald Rusmsfeld, you direct with the stage you’ve got. Budget, time, and resource juggling makes the director as much mathematician, as artist. When you see the play, watch for the limitations to appreciate the director.
Putting on his artist hat, Ehya has introduced a clever sideshow that takes place before the curtains open and during scene changes. In this slide show appear the play’s characters in their earlier days. We see film director Kazem Ashtari pretending to be chummy with Iranian film icons Behrooz Vosoghi and Mohammad-ali Fardin. There he was stretching to match heights with the great filmmaker Bahram Beizai, proudly displaying Atefeh when she was a baby, and smiling next to his stunning young wife, Mahin. There are also pictures of his abysmally designed B-movie film posters, graced only by the face of the beautiful actress Shafagh Gooya. These images are intermingled with unintentionally hilarious condolence cards from a film industry that rightly did not take Ashtari seriously while he was still alive.
These preludes add greatly to the emotional and comedic impact of the play; they help especially with act one which is often the thinnest act in any play.
In act two the plot heats up. Mahin Ashtari has published the love letters her husband had sent to Shafagh Gooya. Mahin has prefaced the collection with, “Dedicated to my wife, Mahin, my only love in life.” Shafagh storms into Mahin’s house, pissed about the blatant lie. But Mahin, who over the years has transmuted her pain into wisdom, makes a devious proposition to Shafhagh. A proposition that eventually makes Kazem Ashtari deader than he was before.
After the show I saw Kazem Ashtari sucking up to Hamid Ehya. I wanted to warn Ehya about what a scoundrel Ahstari is, never mind that Ehya was really consulting with Mansour Taeed, the wonderful actor and promoter of Iranian culture. Backstage magic takes a long time to wear off. Try it though!
As I waited to congratulate actress Sepideh Khosrowjah, she was still the ambitious yet easily dominated character, Shafagh Gooya. The fact that as playwright Khosrowjah created Shafagh and all the other characters in the comedy belonged to the reality she was just coming back to.
Director Hamid Ehya was thoughtful, absently submitting to our praise. What worked, what didn’t work with the audience? I bet he wishes Mahin’s wisecrack to Shafagh were true.
Shafagh- But do you even know how to direct?
Mahin—Directing doesn’t need any knowing how!
Funny line! Ehya’s task was far messier than “simply” interpreting the work. For example, Warda has strong stage tactics. Like a good chess player she goes after the center and holds it, inclining the other characters to speak towards center stage instead of out to the audience. Remedying this without diminishing Warda’s presence takes careful problem solving.
Here’s another example, this time in set design. There is a door-answering phone where Mahin’s daughter, Atefeh, gives us the first “oh shit” moment of the play. Someone’s at the door she did not expect. This event begins the story’s climb; yet its comic impact is threatened by a small stage that forces the phone in an awkward out-of-the-action place. The young actress Shadi Yousefian has funny body and face language when the sky falls down, and stage limitations diminished one of her good moments. But to borrow from Donald Rusmsfeld, you direct with the stage you’ve got. Budget, time, and resource juggling makes the director as much mathematician, as artist. When you see the play, watch for the limitations to appreciate the director.
Putting on his artist hat, Ehya has introduced a clever sideshow that takes place before the curtains open and during scene changes. In this slide show appear the play’s characters in their earlier days. We see film director Kazem Ashtari pretending to be chummy with Iranian film icons Behrooz Vosoghi and Mohammad-ali Fardin. There he was stretching to match heights with the great filmmaker Bahram Beizai, proudly displaying Atefeh when she was a baby, and smiling next to his stunning young wife, Mahin. There are also pictures of his abysmally designed B-movie film posters, graced only by the face of the beautiful actress Shafagh Gooya. These images are intermingled with unintentionally hilarious condolence cards from a film industry that rightly did not take Ashtari seriously while he was still alive.
These preludes add greatly to the emotional and comedic impact of the play; they help especially with act one which is often the thinnest act in any play.
In act two the plot heats up. Mahin Ashtari has published the love letters her husband had sent to Shafagh Gooya. Mahin has prefaced the collection with, “Dedicated to my wife, Mahin, my only love in life.” Shafagh storms into Mahin’s house, pissed about the blatant lie. But Mahin, who over the years has transmuted her pain into wisdom, makes a devious proposition to Shafhagh. A proposition that eventually makes Kazem Ashtari deader than he was before.
After the show I saw Kazem Ashtari sucking up to Hamid Ehya. I wanted to warn Ehya about what a scoundrel Ahstari is, never mind that Ehya was really consulting with Mansour Taeed, the wonderful actor and promoter of Iranian culture. Backstage magic takes a long time to wear off. Try it though!
Playwright Sepideh Khosrowjah
When playwright Sepideh Khosrowjah was two years old her parents gave her a doll, which she immediately destroyed. “Toys were boring,” she says. I can understand why dolls would frustrate a future playwright; there’s nothing inside them. Darvag performance company has recently staged Khosrowjah’s Farsi language play, “Dar Soogeh Kazem Ashtari,” and there is plenty inside the characters. Besides humor, love, cunning, ambition, jealously, shame, and frustration, there is also a surprising secret. It was fun reading the play twice, the second time knowing the characters were hiding something from each other..
I asked Khosrowjah, “can you tell when people are acting in real life, and is that necessarily a sign of insincerity?” She replied,
“Everyone acts in real life. We all act all the time. We play different characters under different circumstances; I play a mom with my son, a professional woman at work, a cool person with friends, a good girl with older people, etc. This is not at all a sign of insincerity most of the time; it is a sign of how life is just a constant play. Those insincere people are bad actors both in real life and on stage.”
After 23 years of writing plays, Khosrowjah would know what makes a bad actor. In fact one of her characters in “Dar Soogeh Kazem Ashtari,” is a so-so actress. I look forward to watching this character on stage, as it takes an accomplished performer to play a mediocre actress. Actually I’m doubly curious because Khosrowjah herself will be playing this difficult role.
The playwright revealed something about her approach to acting when I asked her about her favorite character in any work of fiction.
“My favorite character in a play is Jessie in “Night' Mother,” a play by Marsha Norman. She is a woman who has come to the end in life and she wants to commit suicide. The play is about her last night and how she wants to put everything in order for her mother before leaving. She gets to explain why she has decided to end her life or as she puts it to ‘get off the Bus of life.’ When you listen to her you realize the alienation in life and how we lose opportunities to make thing different for each other. It is a very sad play, but it is a masterpiece. I was lucky enough to play Jessie many years ago, but it made me so depressed that I could not think of going back on stage again, like with Jessie dying I was also dead as an actor.”
“How did it come about you auditioned for Jessie's role in ‘Night' Mother,’ and would have ended the play differently?” I asked.
“One of the advantages of having your own theater company is that you don't have to audition. People who have worked with you for years know you and are aware of your abilities. Hamid Ehya translated the play to Persian and directed it. Darvag produced the play and I got to play Jessie and Mojdeh Molavi played the mother. I would have not ended the play differently. It was totally justified for Jessie to end her life. I can't think of any different ending. This was the tragedy of the play and the tragedy of our lives. You understand the character so well that you don't dare give her the usual clichés about thinking positively! “
Yet “Dar Soog…” does dare think positively, though not in clichés. A thoughtless act of insincerity by the deceased, Kazem Ashtari, has created chaos for his wife, his daughter and his mistress. In response, the three women characters defy expectation by making the right decisions! Now we begin to sense these women’s mediocrity in life was perhaps due to Kazem Ashtari’s influence.
“Was there ever a period in your life when a man seemed to dull your talents?” I didn’t really ask that question. If life were so straightforward, we wouldn’t need artists. Khosrowjah does say, though, that when she started acting she realized not many playwrights were telling her story. This is why she began writing her own plays at the age of 25. Her first play aptly named “Aghaz,” began a long career in the dramatic arts, not just as a playwright and actress but also as a theater company founder.
“I was one of the co-founders of Darvag. With a few friends who loved theatre, we established Darvag in August 1985, but after the first production, Darvag became much more than a few of us. I just became part of a group of wonderful people who also loved theatre. Mansour Taeed who is playing in Dar soogeh Kazem Ashtari was also one of the founding members and Bella Warda [also in the play] joined us from the first play, and Hamid Ehya [director] joined us in 1986. It is amazing how we still enjoy working with each other. Of course, we had lots of ups and downs, but we are still together after 23 years. We are so happy and excited that Shadi Yousefian also joined us in this play. Shadi is a young, beautiful, talented, energetic artist who is an amazing addition to our group and I hope she will carry the torch after my generation.”
Here in America, not many performance companies are telling our story either. Darvag is one of the few, and we would certainly like to see more productions. Khosrowjah identifies the challenge in this way,
“I have been writing plays for 23 years and after all these years my book containing three of my plays were published in Iran by Nila publishing house. I really enjoy doing my art and don't like to promote it as much because the time I should take to promote my work I can think about writing another play. I always like to think of the flying because I know the bird will die, "Parvaz ra beh khater bespar, Parandeh mordanist" (remember the flight, the bird is mortal). Creating art is like flying and you want to go higher and higher to be free!”
So that more birds will fly, the sky must invite.
I asked Khosrowjah, “can you tell when people are acting in real life, and is that necessarily a sign of insincerity?” She replied,
“Everyone acts in real life. We all act all the time. We play different characters under different circumstances; I play a mom with my son, a professional woman at work, a cool person with friends, a good girl with older people, etc. This is not at all a sign of insincerity most of the time; it is a sign of how life is just a constant play. Those insincere people are bad actors both in real life and on stage.”
After 23 years of writing plays, Khosrowjah would know what makes a bad actor. In fact one of her characters in “Dar Soogeh Kazem Ashtari,” is a so-so actress. I look forward to watching this character on stage, as it takes an accomplished performer to play a mediocre actress. Actually I’m doubly curious because Khosrowjah herself will be playing this difficult role.
The playwright revealed something about her approach to acting when I asked her about her favorite character in any work of fiction.
“My favorite character in a play is Jessie in “Night' Mother,” a play by Marsha Norman. She is a woman who has come to the end in life and she wants to commit suicide. The play is about her last night and how she wants to put everything in order for her mother before leaving. She gets to explain why she has decided to end her life or as she puts it to ‘get off the Bus of life.’ When you listen to her you realize the alienation in life and how we lose opportunities to make thing different for each other. It is a very sad play, but it is a masterpiece. I was lucky enough to play Jessie many years ago, but it made me so depressed that I could not think of going back on stage again, like with Jessie dying I was also dead as an actor.”
“How did it come about you auditioned for Jessie's role in ‘Night' Mother,’ and would have ended the play differently?” I asked.
“One of the advantages of having your own theater company is that you don't have to audition. People who have worked with you for years know you and are aware of your abilities. Hamid Ehya translated the play to Persian and directed it. Darvag produced the play and I got to play Jessie and Mojdeh Molavi played the mother. I would have not ended the play differently. It was totally justified for Jessie to end her life. I can't think of any different ending. This was the tragedy of the play and the tragedy of our lives. You understand the character so well that you don't dare give her the usual clichés about thinking positively! “
Yet “Dar Soog…” does dare think positively, though not in clichés. A thoughtless act of insincerity by the deceased, Kazem Ashtari, has created chaos for his wife, his daughter and his mistress. In response, the three women characters defy expectation by making the right decisions! Now we begin to sense these women’s mediocrity in life was perhaps due to Kazem Ashtari’s influence.
“Was there ever a period in your life when a man seemed to dull your talents?” I didn’t really ask that question. If life were so straightforward, we wouldn’t need artists. Khosrowjah does say, though, that when she started acting she realized not many playwrights were telling her story. This is why she began writing her own plays at the age of 25. Her first play aptly named “Aghaz,” began a long career in the dramatic arts, not just as a playwright and actress but also as a theater company founder.
“I was one of the co-founders of Darvag. With a few friends who loved theatre, we established Darvag in August 1985, but after the first production, Darvag became much more than a few of us. I just became part of a group of wonderful people who also loved theatre. Mansour Taeed who is playing in Dar soogeh Kazem Ashtari was also one of the founding members and Bella Warda [also in the play] joined us from the first play, and Hamid Ehya [director] joined us in 1986. It is amazing how we still enjoy working with each other. Of course, we had lots of ups and downs, but we are still together after 23 years. We are so happy and excited that Shadi Yousefian also joined us in this play. Shadi is a young, beautiful, talented, energetic artist who is an amazing addition to our group and I hope she will carry the torch after my generation.”
Here in America, not many performance companies are telling our story either. Darvag is one of the few, and we would certainly like to see more productions. Khosrowjah identifies the challenge in this way,
“I have been writing plays for 23 years and after all these years my book containing three of my plays were published in Iran by Nila publishing house. I really enjoy doing my art and don't like to promote it as much because the time I should take to promote my work I can think about writing another play. I always like to think of the flying because I know the bird will die, "Parvaz ra beh khater bespar, Parandeh mordanist" (remember the flight, the bird is mortal). Creating art is like flying and you want to go higher and higher to be free!”
So that more birds will fly, the sky must invite.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Iman Maleki 's Paintings
A criticism often leveled at Iman Maleki’s astonishingly realistic paintings is, “ why not just use a photograph?” To survey the strengths and weaknesses of one of Iran’s most promising artists, we ask the same question of the following work by American painter, Denis Peterson.
“Don’t Shed No Tears” (2006) is, believe it or not, acrylic on canvas! This instance of hyperrealism is a performance art. Viewers are deliberately made to notice the amazing amount of time and painstaking effort that went into portraying this Darfur refugee. Peterson isn't showing off; he is a radical painter, compelling us with his dedication. The astonishing realism is the result of every wrinkle and twist of hair being colored and shadowed in the context of reflected light from every other object in the scene. Whereas the camera does this mindlessly as a matter of optics, the artist has endured whatever it took to make sure human eyes do not respond as mindlessly. We can flip the page on a Newsweek photo, worth a click of the camera, but we can’t as easily turn away from such an extraordinary labor of compassion.
Maleki’s hyperrealism is likewise rooted in obsessive compassion. But he also draws from his gift as a storyteller. In “Omens of Hafez,” one young woman is wearing a ring on her right hand, the other only a watch, both waiting.
Empty sandals is a clever way to suggest each woman is waiting for someONE. The poetry book being opened does Hafez justice with its double entendre, hinting at wedding night sensuality. There’s a subtle contrast in the facial expressions of the two characters. The soft trace of hesitation in the older girl’s face is enigmatic. What is there to fear about becoming a woman?
In the next painting, we see a possible answer.
In this image, the age difference in the characters is more extreme. It is no longer possible to nuance the obvious. The infant is sleep to the world. The young girl looks on, perhaps with envy, at the younger sibling who has displaced her as the baby. She is on her way to the reality that her mother experiences. The angular motif in the background window echoes a similar pattern on the carpet in the first painting, connecting the themes. The sandals in this painting are now full, by the way.
I asked an Iranian woman friend about this painting. This was her comment:
“There is fear, and there is resignation, worry and perhaps even feelings of betrayal among many other feelings, all encapsulated on the face of the young mother holding her newborn. This is an undeniably huge commitment sitting on her lap. The unknowns on the road ahead are even huger. Is the father a war 'martyr'? An absentee dad? Is there a 'havoo' somewhere in the picture? Will she end up having to beg for her and her kids' livelihood? Is she rejected because she has given birth to yet another daughter?”
Maleki is an artist who sees fit to pay a brush stroke for every human suffering, using detail to flagellate himself in sympathy with his subject. He reflects a Shiite culture in shedding visible tears for the suffering of others, and reveals an Iranian mindset in respecting our tradition of detail in visual arts. The best carpets take years to weave; inlay artists sacrifice their eyesight, and tile workers grow old with unfinished mosques. Iran's aesthetic culture is more comfortable with styles where clear references exist by which to judge a work. In showcasing labor and commitment Maleki makes his work immediately accessible to a larger audience, yet in energy and impact, he holds his own against more exclusive abstract styles.
Sometimes, however, the traditions that give strength to Maleki’s art also conspire against him. He is brilliant at drawing attention to suffering, but tends to abandon his subjects to noble resignation. The mother in the above painting has dignity but no power. The child in the painting below is trapped in his environment, just like the beautiful goldfish he can’t sell.
In meter with Iran’s traditional poetry, Maleki occasionally finds more artistic payoff in surrendering to Fate.
Philosophical bickering aside however, the above work is quite successful in what it sets out to do. By Western standards the painting may appear overly sentimental, but that is mostly because something is lost in translating the Iranian emotional vocabulary. It is probably the days before Nowruz, still winter. But for this child there is obviously never a spring. Putting philosophy back into the debate, the Nowruz symbol could have been used beyond irony, to encourage hope.
When Maleki refuses to surrender, his images of adversity are energizing and inspirational. Below is a painting titled, “Composing Music, secretly”—presumably so as not to alert a Baseej gang, as it is unlikely these musicians are practicing in secret for a birthday surprise.
In this image of defiance, the drum is silent, and the singer is brooding, heavy verses sagging his shoulder. Yet there is a rebellious joy in their gathering. We are moved by the almost childlike enthusiasm of these souls, who stubbornly refuse to let go of their right to “boogie.” Touchingly humorous is Maleki's implying that each performer has brought his own chair to the jam session. Also, he shows us it is daylight outside. The darkness is not imposed by nature, but by social circumstance. Note, there are no women in the scene, even though this is a secret gathering. In this regard a progressive reading of the painting is compromised.
Maleki’s treatment of women is sympathetic and respectful, but not empowering in a modern sense. In “Unstable Cover,” the artist shows us the hands from the da Vinci portrait, Mona Lisa. Here, the painting is not what is covered; Mona Lisa herself is draped! We could take this as a visual joke by a master painter, or read a feminist protest in it. Or both.
If Mona Lisa’s hands ripped away those covers though, we would not see the typical Maleki woman. We would see a painting where the Italian artist has given his female subject a great deal more power.
Most strikingly, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is looking back at the viewer. In Maleki paintings, women are often looking down, usually preoccupied with books, mementos, and other ways of being somewhere else in spirit. Below is an example.
Maleki’s playfulness is apparent in the way he makes us guess how these three young women are related. The clue is in the black and white photo of the three of them as children. Can you tell which is which? Who was Mom’s favorite? Or maybe the sisters in the black and white picture are from the previous generation, and these women are first cousins. This is the kind of painting one can spend hours navigating emotionally. Longer than it takes to watch a movie. Not bad for a single frame! Significantly, Mom is not wearing a roosari in her mug shot. The photos are outdated technology, but Mom’s world was advanced enough she could look into the camera. The “photographer,” Maleki, does quiz himself on issues of female power; he’s just timid about it.
In contrast to his women, the stunning male portrait below projects solid confidence in the charismatic subject staring at us.
Just as self-assured is Maleki’s “Achaemenid Soldier.” The diligent research into Achaemenid weaponry and military uniform is admirable. Architectural grandeur is appropriately understated, yet breathtaking. Hollywood should occasionally hire this artist as a set consultant.
The atypical narrative-starved choice of subject, however, exposes an unsoldierly hesitation in the painter. If Maleki wishes to romanticize this period of Iran’s pre-Islamic history, he certainly knows of more provocative Ahcaemenid legends he could risk. Of course depicting the defeat of the imposter Gautama--who pretended to be Iran’s legitimate ruler—may have Maleki chalking murals on Evin prison walls. Safer, but just as communicative would have been, Cyrus freeing the Jews of Babylon, or Xerxes lashing the sea. After seeing “Achaemeind Soldier” I am curious as to how Maleki would treat historic/legendary themes--pre-Islamic or otherwise--that give a better workout to his talent for hidden commentary.
To illustrate, below is Jacque-Louis David’s propagandistic “Oath of the Horati.,” completed during the years leading up to the French revolution. David is recognized as an influential painter because he used romanticized historical themes to participate in the political debates of his time.
The testosterone on canvas notwithstanding, Horace (center) is making the ultimate sacrifice, offering up his sons in the service of the Roman Republic. It is obvious that David’s mind is not as complex as Maleki’s, yet the French painter is more assertive in making his political statements.
Western artists such as David, da Vinci and Denis Peterson are important in part because of their skill and innovation, but also because they come from cultures that dominate the modern global power scene. Renaissance painters catered to emerging capitalism, the sons in David’s painting above symbolize French colonies, and Peterson’s Darfur painting, “Don’t Shed No Tears” provokes America to intervene with her wealth. Iran too is no longer an “extra” in the global power drama, and has found a “speaking role” in History, so the voice of our best artists has the potential to carry much further into the future, and much wider across societies. Our artists are more important now than they have been ever since the Safavids.
Which brings me to the most urgent aspect of modern art criticism. Financial advice! Sell your belongings to snap up the right Maleki paintings, as they come along.
“Don’t Shed No Tears” (2006) is, believe it or not, acrylic on canvas! This instance of hyperrealism is a performance art. Viewers are deliberately made to notice the amazing amount of time and painstaking effort that went into portraying this Darfur refugee. Peterson isn't showing off; he is a radical painter, compelling us with his dedication. The astonishing realism is the result of every wrinkle and twist of hair being colored and shadowed in the context of reflected light from every other object in the scene. Whereas the camera does this mindlessly as a matter of optics, the artist has endured whatever it took to make sure human eyes do not respond as mindlessly. We can flip the page on a Newsweek photo, worth a click of the camera, but we can’t as easily turn away from such an extraordinary labor of compassion.
Maleki’s hyperrealism is likewise rooted in obsessive compassion. But he also draws from his gift as a storyteller. In “Omens of Hafez,” one young woman is wearing a ring on her right hand, the other only a watch, both waiting.
Empty sandals is a clever way to suggest each woman is waiting for someONE. The poetry book being opened does Hafez justice with its double entendre, hinting at wedding night sensuality. There’s a subtle contrast in the facial expressions of the two characters. The soft trace of hesitation in the older girl’s face is enigmatic. What is there to fear about becoming a woman?
In the next painting, we see a possible answer.
In this image, the age difference in the characters is more extreme. It is no longer possible to nuance the obvious. The infant is sleep to the world. The young girl looks on, perhaps with envy, at the younger sibling who has displaced her as the baby. She is on her way to the reality that her mother experiences. The angular motif in the background window echoes a similar pattern on the carpet in the first painting, connecting the themes. The sandals in this painting are now full, by the way.
I asked an Iranian woman friend about this painting. This was her comment:
“There is fear, and there is resignation, worry and perhaps even feelings of betrayal among many other feelings, all encapsulated on the face of the young mother holding her newborn. This is an undeniably huge commitment sitting on her lap. The unknowns on the road ahead are even huger. Is the father a war 'martyr'? An absentee dad? Is there a 'havoo' somewhere in the picture? Will she end up having to beg for her and her kids' livelihood? Is she rejected because she has given birth to yet another daughter?”
Maleki is an artist who sees fit to pay a brush stroke for every human suffering, using detail to flagellate himself in sympathy with his subject. He reflects a Shiite culture in shedding visible tears for the suffering of others, and reveals an Iranian mindset in respecting our tradition of detail in visual arts. The best carpets take years to weave; inlay artists sacrifice their eyesight, and tile workers grow old with unfinished mosques. Iran's aesthetic culture is more comfortable with styles where clear references exist by which to judge a work. In showcasing labor and commitment Maleki makes his work immediately accessible to a larger audience, yet in energy and impact, he holds his own against more exclusive abstract styles.
Sometimes, however, the traditions that give strength to Maleki’s art also conspire against him. He is brilliant at drawing attention to suffering, but tends to abandon his subjects to noble resignation. The mother in the above painting has dignity but no power. The child in the painting below is trapped in his environment, just like the beautiful goldfish he can’t sell.
In meter with Iran’s traditional poetry, Maleki occasionally finds more artistic payoff in surrendering to Fate.
Philosophical bickering aside however, the above work is quite successful in what it sets out to do. By Western standards the painting may appear overly sentimental, but that is mostly because something is lost in translating the Iranian emotional vocabulary. It is probably the days before Nowruz, still winter. But for this child there is obviously never a spring. Putting philosophy back into the debate, the Nowruz symbol could have been used beyond irony, to encourage hope.
When Maleki refuses to surrender, his images of adversity are energizing and inspirational. Below is a painting titled, “Composing Music, secretly”—presumably so as not to alert a Baseej gang, as it is unlikely these musicians are practicing in secret for a birthday surprise.
In this image of defiance, the drum is silent, and the singer is brooding, heavy verses sagging his shoulder. Yet there is a rebellious joy in their gathering. We are moved by the almost childlike enthusiasm of these souls, who stubbornly refuse to let go of their right to “boogie.” Touchingly humorous is Maleki's implying that each performer has brought his own chair to the jam session. Also, he shows us it is daylight outside. The darkness is not imposed by nature, but by social circumstance. Note, there are no women in the scene, even though this is a secret gathering. In this regard a progressive reading of the painting is compromised.
Maleki’s treatment of women is sympathetic and respectful, but not empowering in a modern sense. In “Unstable Cover,” the artist shows us the hands from the da Vinci portrait, Mona Lisa. Here, the painting is not what is covered; Mona Lisa herself is draped! We could take this as a visual joke by a master painter, or read a feminist protest in it. Or both.
If Mona Lisa’s hands ripped away those covers though, we would not see the typical Maleki woman. We would see a painting where the Italian artist has given his female subject a great deal more power.
Most strikingly, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is looking back at the viewer. In Maleki paintings, women are often looking down, usually preoccupied with books, mementos, and other ways of being somewhere else in spirit. Below is an example.
Maleki’s playfulness is apparent in the way he makes us guess how these three young women are related. The clue is in the black and white photo of the three of them as children. Can you tell which is which? Who was Mom’s favorite? Or maybe the sisters in the black and white picture are from the previous generation, and these women are first cousins. This is the kind of painting one can spend hours navigating emotionally. Longer than it takes to watch a movie. Not bad for a single frame! Significantly, Mom is not wearing a roosari in her mug shot. The photos are outdated technology, but Mom’s world was advanced enough she could look into the camera. The “photographer,” Maleki, does quiz himself on issues of female power; he’s just timid about it.
In contrast to his women, the stunning male portrait below projects solid confidence in the charismatic subject staring at us.
Just as self-assured is Maleki’s “Achaemenid Soldier.” The diligent research into Achaemenid weaponry and military uniform is admirable. Architectural grandeur is appropriately understated, yet breathtaking. Hollywood should occasionally hire this artist as a set consultant.
The atypical narrative-starved choice of subject, however, exposes an unsoldierly hesitation in the painter. If Maleki wishes to romanticize this period of Iran’s pre-Islamic history, he certainly knows of more provocative Ahcaemenid legends he could risk. Of course depicting the defeat of the imposter Gautama--who pretended to be Iran’s legitimate ruler—may have Maleki chalking murals on Evin prison walls. Safer, but just as communicative would have been, Cyrus freeing the Jews of Babylon, or Xerxes lashing the sea. After seeing “Achaemeind Soldier” I am curious as to how Maleki would treat historic/legendary themes--pre-Islamic or otherwise--that give a better workout to his talent for hidden commentary.
To illustrate, below is Jacque-Louis David’s propagandistic “Oath of the Horati.,” completed during the years leading up to the French revolution. David is recognized as an influential painter because he used romanticized historical themes to participate in the political debates of his time.
The testosterone on canvas notwithstanding, Horace (center) is making the ultimate sacrifice, offering up his sons in the service of the Roman Republic. It is obvious that David’s mind is not as complex as Maleki’s, yet the French painter is more assertive in making his political statements.
Western artists such as David, da Vinci and Denis Peterson are important in part because of their skill and innovation, but also because they come from cultures that dominate the modern global power scene. Renaissance painters catered to emerging capitalism, the sons in David’s painting above symbolize French colonies, and Peterson’s Darfur painting, “Don’t Shed No Tears” provokes America to intervene with her wealth. Iran too is no longer an “extra” in the global power drama, and has found a “speaking role” in History, so the voice of our best artists has the potential to carry much further into the future, and much wider across societies. Our artists are more important now than they have been ever since the Safavids.
Which brings me to the most urgent aspect of modern art criticism. Financial advice! Sell your belongings to snap up the right Maleki paintings, as they come along.
Monday, January 21, 2008
A chat with Martin Luther King
There was still plenty of abgoosht and vodka left when Martin Luther King’s ghost crashed our party a couple of nights ago. His holiday wasn’t until today, but he showed up early because he overheard our debate about US-Iran relations. The subject: does criticism of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Falluja, Blackwater, and the Patriot Act somehow excuse or legitimize human rights violations of the Islamic Republic? After all, if it is legal in America to torture in the name of national security, why pick on Iran for doing the same thing?
Immediately, MLK jumped in with his famous quote, “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” I took it he was in no mood for letting Iran off the hook, just because America does something. He agreed to be interviewed, and my first question had to do with him being dead.
AS: Dr. King, what can you tell us about the other world?
MLK: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
AS: So you think it’s OK for us to protest US human rights violations?
MLK: There comes a time when silence is betrayal.
AS: But the IRI oppresses women. It threatens other countries in the region. Makes a sham of democracy, disqualifying perfectly good political candidates. I can’t tell you how frustrated, desperate, and angry we are about all this. Shouldn’t we hold back our gripes against America until after she has bombed this regime out of power?
MLK: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
AS: Um...sir, the Vietnam war was over years ago; Don’t you mean Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran?
[MLK just stared. Ghosts do that. All the ones I’ve met never use words beyond what they have said when they were still alive.]
AS: OK, so why do you oppose the war in, er… , Vietnam?
MLK: I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart. Above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country to stand as a moral example to the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and deal forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. America has strayed away, this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality. It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home.
AS: Well, I too am deeply disappointed in America. But it is not my “beloved country.” These days people like me are called America haters.
MLK. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
AS: Gosh, I suppose I do have a slight crush on America. Hard to admit though. Maybe, its just that I wasn’t born here, like you were.
MLK: We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
AS: We’re agreed on that, Dr. King.
MLK. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
AS: But many Americans don’t agree with our protest. They support a warlike president, Republicans and Democrats alike, and these folks may even elect a new President that will continue this war, even extend it.
MLK: Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world.
AS: Isn’t it the very job of writers and artists in a free society not to be conformists. Why do you think our best and brightest are so afraid to speak up?
MLK. Now of course one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows out of the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It is a dark day in our nation when high level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent.
AS: Yet we have the noisiest non-dissent I have ever heard. Do you get FOX news in the other world, or the New York Times?
MLK: In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
AS: I hear you man!
MLK: History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
AS: Speaking of strident clamor, how do you stand on the “support our troops,” issue?
MLK: I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
AS: Aren’t the troops defending us against terrorists who hate us?
MLK: Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism
AS: With so many people hating us, and this War On Terror, you’d expect Hell to be full of fighting men these days.
MLK: [shaking his head] Conscientious objectors!
AS: Hell is full of conscientious objectors?
MLK: Conscientious objectors in the war against poverty.
AS: I see.
MLK: I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years and years to come saying, "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths."
But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.
AS: Isn’t that condemnation a bit extreme?
MLK: The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
[The conversation dangerously drifting towards Homeland Security territory, I moved on to a much lighter subject]
AS: What do you think of George Bush?
MLK: Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
AS: And on a slightly more serious topic, what do you think of the abgoosht?
MLK: Divine!
To hear what Dr. King sounded like that ghostly night, check out this youtube link.
Also, here are some great MLK quotes , in case he appears to anyone else who may wish to interview him.
Immediately, MLK jumped in with his famous quote, “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” I took it he was in no mood for letting Iran off the hook, just because America does something. He agreed to be interviewed, and my first question had to do with him being dead.
AS: Dr. King, what can you tell us about the other world?
MLK: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
AS: So you think it’s OK for us to protest US human rights violations?
MLK: There comes a time when silence is betrayal.
AS: But the IRI oppresses women. It threatens other countries in the region. Makes a sham of democracy, disqualifying perfectly good political candidates. I can’t tell you how frustrated, desperate, and angry we are about all this. Shouldn’t we hold back our gripes against America until after she has bombed this regime out of power?
MLK: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
AS: Um...sir, the Vietnam war was over years ago; Don’t you mean Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran?
[MLK just stared. Ghosts do that. All the ones I’ve met never use words beyond what they have said when they were still alive.]
AS: OK, so why do you oppose the war in, er… , Vietnam?
MLK: I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart. Above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country to stand as a moral example to the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and deal forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. America has strayed away, this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality. It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home.
AS: Well, I too am deeply disappointed in America. But it is not my “beloved country.” These days people like me are called America haters.
MLK. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.
AS: Gosh, I suppose I do have a slight crush on America. Hard to admit though. Maybe, its just that I wasn’t born here, like you were.
MLK: We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
AS: We’re agreed on that, Dr. King.
MLK. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
AS: But many Americans don’t agree with our protest. They support a warlike president, Republicans and Democrats alike, and these folks may even elect a new President that will continue this war, even extend it.
MLK: Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world.
AS: Isn’t it the very job of writers and artists in a free society not to be conformists. Why do you think our best and brightest are so afraid to speak up?
MLK. Now of course one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows out of the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It is a dark day in our nation when high level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent.
AS: Yet we have the noisiest non-dissent I have ever heard. Do you get FOX news in the other world, or the New York Times?
MLK: In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
AS: I hear you man!
MLK: History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
AS: Speaking of strident clamor, how do you stand on the “support our troops,” issue?
MLK: I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
AS: Aren’t the troops defending us against terrorists who hate us?
MLK: Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism
AS: With so many people hating us, and this War On Terror, you’d expect Hell to be full of fighting men these days.
MLK: [shaking his head] Conscientious objectors!
AS: Hell is full of conscientious objectors?
MLK: Conscientious objectors in the war against poverty.
AS: I see.
MLK: I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years and years to come saying, "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths."
But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.
AS: Isn’t that condemnation a bit extreme?
MLK: The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
[The conversation dangerously drifting towards Homeland Security territory, I moved on to a much lighter subject]
AS: What do you think of George Bush?
MLK: Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
AS: And on a slightly more serious topic, what do you think of the abgoosht?
MLK: Divine!
To hear what Dr. King sounded like that ghostly night, check out this youtube link.
Also, here are some great MLK quotes , in case he appears to anyone else who may wish to interview him.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Persepolis
Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi
A handful of ordinary lives caught in the storms of civilization inspired Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Recently Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis has rendered the Iranian revolution in intimate terms, approaching what Dickens accomplished for the French revolution and Pasternak achieved for the Russian revolution. While History is a satellite photo of a forest, this autobiographical narrative is a single leaf which you can rub between your fingers and bring to your nose.
The graphic novels, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, now combined into a movie, do not look back to the classics. Satrapi’s self mocking style is ultra-modern. It combines a Disneyesque cuteness with the author’s Hedayat-like anguish. At first the work appears to lack subtlety, protesting the Islamic Regime’s repressions too directly. Later we realize this straight shooting is just another manifestation of the no-nonsense way in which the artist conducts her life. Satrapi’s uninhibited tendency to speak her primal mind has been the driving force in the events of her life.
After she slugged her school principal in Iran and trashed the Islamic Regime in the classroom, Satrapi’s parents hurriedly dispatched their fourteen-year-old daughter to a Catholic school in Europe. There she got herself expelled by calling the nuns whores. Later she made herself homeless by telling her Austrian landlady to go fuck herself. The nuns had dared suggest Iranians had no manners, and the crypto-racist landlady had accused Satrapi of theft.
In the humorous movie, some of the laughter comes from the character’s obliviousness to authority, and some from her breaking personal taboos such as showing us her hairy legs. One of the best moments happens in a scene where she combines the two techniques. Her Jedi master of a grandmother passes on to her granddaughter the secret of having firm breasts in old age. I won’t reveal the trick here, enough to say Yoda himself would shrink from the mind control it demands.
The humor sweetens the profound bitterness of the events. As in Sound of Music and Cabaret, where sugary melodies simultaneously mask and highlight the creep of fascism in Europe, Satrapis’ self-deprecating jokes expose the modern dissonance between individual concerns and social forces. Ominously, Satrapi’s Europe is as purposeless as Iran was in its pre-revolutionary times.
European youth, drugged, disappointed and mistrustful of their leaders, shout their aimless rage out-screaming electric guitars. In a scene stunningly effective for its graphics and sound, a club musician swears incomprehensibly at air while giving the finger to the emptiness of existence. The scene is also quite funny, which is why--for me--it best captures the bi-polar psychology of Persepolis.
Meanwhile, back in Satrapi’s Iran the youth have become focused by the war. With their existential angst soothed by arbitrary ideas of righteousness, they have become brutal enforcers of correct Islamic behavior. Much as Charles Dickens warned and criticized English society by dangling the French revolution in front of English eyes, Persepolis drags our attention to the possibility that the upheaval in Iran is just one expression of the global rationality crisis: the rising suspicion that Western Enlightenment has lost its appeal.
In Persepolis we find warmth and satisfaction only in the love between family members. In a departure from Disney charm, even the pure love between a dog and its European master is lampooned as a sign of loneliness and alienation. Family love is something Iranians have had in abundance for as long as we have been mammals. What does modernity offer that is worth the price of giving up family for a mutt?
A frame of mind which extends our caring for immediate family to include all of society was an implicit promise of modern humanism, to replace the explicit promise of the religions we outgrew. In Satrapi’s Europe, socialism cures her pneumonic, cigarette damaged lungs, but it is also why this smart, educated youth spent days homeless in the cold seeking cigarette butts on the sidewalk.
Satrapi constantly reminds us that she comes from a family of progressive liberals. Her uncle, who wrote his thesis on Marxist-Leninism, a program to reverse alienation, was jailed and eventually executed for his efforts. Yet there’s a scene in which an innocent conversation between Satrapi’s parents brings a heartbreaking disappointment.
The well-to-do parents discuss moving away from Iran--to America perhaps. Satrapi’s father tells her mother, “Why, so I can become a taxi driver and you a maid?” After years of risking their lives preaching that everyone’s function in society merits dignity, these “somebodies” still can’t shake their traditional disdain for “nobodies.”
Purposefully or not, Satrapi’s work goes to the heart of why our liberals and leftists were so roundly trounced by the Islamists. The intellectuals saw themselves as an aristocracy by virtue of their Western education and professional expertise. Like a piece of breakfast stuck to the lips, their internalized colonialism was seen by everyone but the intellectuals themselves.
Tellingly, numerous times in the graphic novel and in the movie, God appears to the young Satrapi as the Christian father figure, a leap Westward from the eerily abstract Semitic entity, Allah, who according to the Koran is “lam yalad va lam yoolad”: begets not, nor is begotten. In the book, this child raised among Marx fans self-critically reminds us of how Karl Marx looks so much like God to her--except with curlier hair. The mostly Muslim Iranian nation could not have overlooked what was obvious even to a child.
Meanwhile the movie shows us that the Islamic Republic has put a window washer in charge of administering a hospital. An asinine expression of Islamic affirmative action, but a gesture nevertheless, not unlike the ugly punk musician, this time giving the finger to the old order.
But social insightfulness aside, Persepolis is above all a living account of a young woman who has courageously invited us into her personal life, to share how she was affected by a pivotal period in world history. Our hostess is a punk version of Anastasia, the last surviving princess from a sophisticated class, executed, exiled and suppressed into oblivion by the boorish crowds. She is strong, but also prone to bouts of depression and self doubt. Unlike the fictional Dr. Zhivago or Sydney Carton of The Tale of Two Cities, Marjane Satrapi is real and lives among us today. So her story is not over, and we continue to worry for this character as her sudden celebrity status brings new adventure to her life.
Precisely because Persepolis is world-class art, it has set off political bickering, and triggered ideological opportunism. This is nothing new. Boris Pasternak’s Nobel prize in literature was helped along by the CIA in order to embarrass the Soviets (Pasternak knew nothing of this). The Iranian government has already protested Persepolis’ winning of the Prize of the Jury at the Cannes film festival:
"This year the Cannes Film Festival, in an unconventional and unsuitable act, has chosen a movie about Iran that has presented an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution…"
Since the US quarrel with Iran intensified, many Iranian women activists, writers and artists have received significant attention in Western media, Shirin Ebadi, Azar Nafisi, Firoozeh Dumas, Nahid Rachlin, Shahrnush Parsipour, Shirin Neshat, Azadeh Moaveni... To varying degrees, these Iranian women condemn the abuse of their heartfelt protests to justify Western aggression against Iran. But among them, the foul mouthed Princess Satrapi may have the most eloquent advice for both sides of the propaganda war. As she once instructed her dog-loving landlady, Frau Doctor Heller, “Go fuck yourself!”
A handful of ordinary lives caught in the storms of civilization inspired Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Recently Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis has rendered the Iranian revolution in intimate terms, approaching what Dickens accomplished for the French revolution and Pasternak achieved for the Russian revolution. While History is a satellite photo of a forest, this autobiographical narrative is a single leaf which you can rub between your fingers and bring to your nose.
The graphic novels, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, now combined into a movie, do not look back to the classics. Satrapi’s self mocking style is ultra-modern. It combines a Disneyesque cuteness with the author’s Hedayat-like anguish. At first the work appears to lack subtlety, protesting the Islamic Regime’s repressions too directly. Later we realize this straight shooting is just another manifestation of the no-nonsense way in which the artist conducts her life. Satrapi’s uninhibited tendency to speak her primal mind has been the driving force in the events of her life.
After she slugged her school principal in Iran and trashed the Islamic Regime in the classroom, Satrapi’s parents hurriedly dispatched their fourteen-year-old daughter to a Catholic school in Europe. There she got herself expelled by calling the nuns whores. Later she made herself homeless by telling her Austrian landlady to go fuck herself. The nuns had dared suggest Iranians had no manners, and the crypto-racist landlady had accused Satrapi of theft.
In the humorous movie, some of the laughter comes from the character’s obliviousness to authority, and some from her breaking personal taboos such as showing us her hairy legs. One of the best moments happens in a scene where she combines the two techniques. Her Jedi master of a grandmother passes on to her granddaughter the secret of having firm breasts in old age. I won’t reveal the trick here, enough to say Yoda himself would shrink from the mind control it demands.
The humor sweetens the profound bitterness of the events. As in Sound of Music and Cabaret, where sugary melodies simultaneously mask and highlight the creep of fascism in Europe, Satrapis’ self-deprecating jokes expose the modern dissonance between individual concerns and social forces. Ominously, Satrapi’s Europe is as purposeless as Iran was in its pre-revolutionary times.
European youth, drugged, disappointed and mistrustful of their leaders, shout their aimless rage out-screaming electric guitars. In a scene stunningly effective for its graphics and sound, a club musician swears incomprehensibly at air while giving the finger to the emptiness of existence. The scene is also quite funny, which is why--for me--it best captures the bi-polar psychology of Persepolis.
Meanwhile, back in Satrapi’s Iran the youth have become focused by the war. With their existential angst soothed by arbitrary ideas of righteousness, they have become brutal enforcers of correct Islamic behavior. Much as Charles Dickens warned and criticized English society by dangling the French revolution in front of English eyes, Persepolis drags our attention to the possibility that the upheaval in Iran is just one expression of the global rationality crisis: the rising suspicion that Western Enlightenment has lost its appeal.
In Persepolis we find warmth and satisfaction only in the love between family members. In a departure from Disney charm, even the pure love between a dog and its European master is lampooned as a sign of loneliness and alienation. Family love is something Iranians have had in abundance for as long as we have been mammals. What does modernity offer that is worth the price of giving up family for a mutt?
A frame of mind which extends our caring for immediate family to include all of society was an implicit promise of modern humanism, to replace the explicit promise of the religions we outgrew. In Satrapi’s Europe, socialism cures her pneumonic, cigarette damaged lungs, but it is also why this smart, educated youth spent days homeless in the cold seeking cigarette butts on the sidewalk.
Satrapi constantly reminds us that she comes from a family of progressive liberals. Her uncle, who wrote his thesis on Marxist-Leninism, a program to reverse alienation, was jailed and eventually executed for his efforts. Yet there’s a scene in which an innocent conversation between Satrapi’s parents brings a heartbreaking disappointment.
The well-to-do parents discuss moving away from Iran--to America perhaps. Satrapi’s father tells her mother, “Why, so I can become a taxi driver and you a maid?” After years of risking their lives preaching that everyone’s function in society merits dignity, these “somebodies” still can’t shake their traditional disdain for “nobodies.”
Purposefully or not, Satrapi’s work goes to the heart of why our liberals and leftists were so roundly trounced by the Islamists. The intellectuals saw themselves as an aristocracy by virtue of their Western education and professional expertise. Like a piece of breakfast stuck to the lips, their internalized colonialism was seen by everyone but the intellectuals themselves.
Tellingly, numerous times in the graphic novel and in the movie, God appears to the young Satrapi as the Christian father figure, a leap Westward from the eerily abstract Semitic entity, Allah, who according to the Koran is “lam yalad va lam yoolad”: begets not, nor is begotten. In the book, this child raised among Marx fans self-critically reminds us of how Karl Marx looks so much like God to her--except with curlier hair. The mostly Muslim Iranian nation could not have overlooked what was obvious even to a child.
Meanwhile the movie shows us that the Islamic Republic has put a window washer in charge of administering a hospital. An asinine expression of Islamic affirmative action, but a gesture nevertheless, not unlike the ugly punk musician, this time giving the finger to the old order.
But social insightfulness aside, Persepolis is above all a living account of a young woman who has courageously invited us into her personal life, to share how she was affected by a pivotal period in world history. Our hostess is a punk version of Anastasia, the last surviving princess from a sophisticated class, executed, exiled and suppressed into oblivion by the boorish crowds. She is strong, but also prone to bouts of depression and self doubt. Unlike the fictional Dr. Zhivago or Sydney Carton of The Tale of Two Cities, Marjane Satrapi is real and lives among us today. So her story is not over, and we continue to worry for this character as her sudden celebrity status brings new adventure to her life.
Precisely because Persepolis is world-class art, it has set off political bickering, and triggered ideological opportunism. This is nothing new. Boris Pasternak’s Nobel prize in literature was helped along by the CIA in order to embarrass the Soviets (Pasternak knew nothing of this). The Iranian government has already protested Persepolis’ winning of the Prize of the Jury at the Cannes film festival:
"This year the Cannes Film Festival, in an unconventional and unsuitable act, has chosen a movie about Iran that has presented an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution…"
Since the US quarrel with Iran intensified, many Iranian women activists, writers and artists have received significant attention in Western media, Shirin Ebadi, Azar Nafisi, Firoozeh Dumas, Nahid Rachlin, Shahrnush Parsipour, Shirin Neshat, Azadeh Moaveni... To varying degrees, these Iranian women condemn the abuse of their heartfelt protests to justify Western aggression against Iran. But among them, the foul mouthed Princess Satrapi may have the most eloquent advice for both sides of the propaganda war. As she once instructed her dog-loving landlady, Frau Doctor Heller, “Go fuck yourself!”
Thursday, October 11, 2007
A long chat with Maz Jobrani
“I’m Pehrzheean!” actor Maz Jobrani declares in one of his Axis of Evil stand up comedy routines. To find out how “Pehrzheean” Jobrani really is, I sent him an email asking if ever puts raw eggs on his rice.
“What red-blooded Iranian doesn’t?” was his reply.
Later I met Jobrani in person. He’d invited me to watch his performance at Punchline, the illustrious San Francisco comedy club that has also hosted Chris Rock, Ellen Degeneres, Dana Carvey, Margaret Cho, Dave Chapelle, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robin Williams. Afterwards, we met in a nearby pub. Jobrani was in a sprightly mood. He had just stepped down from the stage, leaving Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad with egg on their faces, and the audience still writhing with laughter.
It turns out, Ahamadinejad and Jobrani go way back:
“My dad was in New York on business in late ’78,” Jobrani explained. “My older sister and I went to an international school. The school was closing down for the winter holidays. Also because of the protests there had been some power outages. My dad sent for me, my sister, and my mom to join him in NYC for two weeks. We really didn’t think we’d be gone for good. I think people thought things might get better. To give you an idea of how much we planned to return, we actually left my baby brother back in Iran.”
“So what happened to your brother?”
Jobrani’s reply, “Today he is known as President Ahmadinejad.”
For the record, Jobrani was just kidding.
Teasing aside, Jobrani adds, “In reality we got the poor kid out 6 months later, and here we are almost thirty years out of Iran. I always say we left for two weeks and stayed for 28 years.”
Years later, each “brother” went on to start his own Axis of Evil comedy group. To see which one has had the most success, I googled both Maz Jobrani and Ahmadinejad. The score: Maz Jobrani 42 google pages, Ahamadinejad 38. Try it!
By this measure, the phenomenal success of Jobrani’s Axis of Evil comedy group ranks him as the most influential Iranian-American today. To show that this is not an exaggeration, one need only point to the millions of dollars of media airtime this artist has single handedly racked up for free, undoing the negative image of Iranians in the American mind. Dr. Jaleh Pirnazar, once Jobrani’s Persian Studies professor at UC Berkeley, astutely notes, “Even if the money was somehow available, who could have organized such an extraordinary task?”
I asked Jobrani how, as a political science major, he came to take Persian Studies at Berkeley.
“Since I came to America at the age of 6, I never really learned how to read and write Farsi. But I always spoke it at home, so I spoke it fluently. Well, when I started at Berkeley I signed up for beginning Farsi, in the hopes of learning the basics—alphabet, reading, writing. On the first day, the teacher went around the class and tested us to see if we spoke Farsi well. There were other Iranians in the class who dumbed down their Farsi in order to stay in the class. I, not knowing that I’d be moved up, spoke fluent Farsi with the teacher. He in turn moved me up to Dr. Pirnazar’s class. It was a challenge because I had to learn how to read and write on my own in order to catch up with the level of her class. I struggled through the semester, but Dr. Pirnazar was very cool and made sure I got through it.”
Having survived a semester of Dr. Pirnazar, Jobrani tested his courage with a language he could learn from scratch: Italian.
“From the moment the teacher came into the class and said, ‘Mi chiamo Francesca. Come ti chiami?’ (my name is Francesca, what’s yours?) I was in love with the language.”
Later, Jobrani went to Italy on a study abroad program. “Italians are very much like Iranians,” he observes. “Food, family, long naps in the middle of the day…It’s now a fantasy of mine to someday own a place out there where I could spend several months at a time sipping wine and conversing in Italian.”
Why Italian? I asked. Besides Jobrani, I know quite a few Iranians with Italian sounding last names—Fooladi, Milani, Kiani—but none has gone so far as to actually study Italian.
“I was…a big fan of the Godfather,” says Jobrani.
I think he’s serious. Francis Coppola’s brilliant filmmaking aside, Jobrani refers to his own father as the “Godfather” type. Not in the outlaw sense, but as someone people can rely on for help. According to his son, Mr. Jobrani Sr. is the kind of Tabrizi Iranian who gets offended if people who could use his help don’t let him know their need. He has been particularly generous to Iranian expatriates who found themselves in a financial bind after the revolution. Hearing Maz speak of his father, I wonder if the archetype he means is not the Godfather, but the Iranian strong protector persona, the pahlevaan.
Mr. Jobrani Sr. started his career at an electric power facility in Iran. He got the job because he was the only applicant who had the bulk and strength to pick up the massive iron-core transformers and fit them into place. Endowed with brains to outrival even his brawn, Mr. Jobrani Sr. quickly moved up the ranks to become one of three partners in the business. Later his two partners dropped out, leaving him as sole owner. When electric power was nationalized in Iran, he became a government contractor providing electricity for the country.
Almost six feet tall and in great physical shape, the son expresses his own pahlevaan sense of community in a modern context. Jobrani uses his considerable artistic ability to defend the image and honor (gheirat) of his countrymen in the West. In a humorous foretelling of a future as an artistic pahlevaan of sorts, teenage Jobrani’s first time on stage was his lead role in a Marin County Redwood High School production of The Batman Musical and Comedy.
I asked Jobrani, “As an experienced Batman, how do you rate the various interpretations by Clooney, Keaton, and West?”
“As a kid I loved the Adam West Batman. It was fun and campy. Always seemed strange that he had a slight belly going. After all, Batman was supposed to have 6 pack abs. West made him seem more like a normal dude who liked to wear Spandex. When the films started I was in my late teens and really enjoyed the Michael Keaton version. I think he did a good job showing a troubled Batman. He’s really a fantastic actor. That was my favorite.”
For a while there was speculation that Batman Begins 2 would star Robin Williams. Had things turned out that way, Williams would have been the second internationally known actor/comedian graduate of Marin County’s Redwood High to be in a Batman production. I neglected to ask if Jobrani and Williams have met, or discussed their high school alma mater. I did ask him though about his work with actor Sean Penn and director Sydney Pollack in the 2005 thriller The Interpreter. Jobrani played a sympathetic character as secret service agent Mo[hammad].
“I was very pleasantly surprised to see the final cuts and find that the Mo character is indeed important throughout… It was great to have a character like that of Middle Eastern descent that meant something [positive] to the film…I wish there were more parts like this in film and TV. I’m pushing for such things every day.”
Jobrani began his professional acting career relatively late. He was 26 years old when he told his parents he was going to drop out of the Ph.D. program at UCLA, to pursue his acting dream. From his comedy routines one gathers Jobrani’s parents would have preferred their son to continue with that Ph.D. program. Doctor, lawyer, dentist, engineer, Jamba Juice franchise owner—anything but the arts. But then how could they know their Maz had the potential to become a world class actor? Today at 35, Jobrani reveals the liberating excitement of this career decision in stories about his work:
“My experience with Penn was a really good one…[he] invited a group of the younger actors out to watch a good friend of his play music one night. That was an amazing night, as he was sitting with some secret service agents who he’d been in touch with for the role. I went over to say ‘hi’ to them and befriended one of the agents, who later took me to lunch in town. Always cool to be in an unmarked car that can turn on its sirens to get through traffic from time to time. As I was saying ‘hi’ to the secret service agents and Penn at this table, I looked up and another friend of Penn’s was walking toward us. It took me a second to register, but it was Al Pacino. He walked right up to the table and introduced himself. I almost lost my mind as I was standing there just looking like one of the guys shaking hands with Al.”
Here’s the actor still getting jazzed about being on the set:
“My first day on the set [of the Interpreter] I was waiting for Sydney]Pollack to go ‘who’s this guy? I wanted]the other bald goateed guy, not this one….’ However, he was very nice and made me feel comfortable—that is, until I had to do one of my first speaking scenes.
“I had a scene where I was supposed to be doing surveillance and looking through some binoculars into someone’s house. Then I was supposed to mumble some lines to myself as I looked at this guy through the binoculars. Well, I did the scene, mumbled the lines, and then heard Pollack’s voice come through a walkie-talkie they’d put in the car with me for him to give me direction. He said something like ‘Give the line less emphasis.’ So I did take 2 with less emphasis. Then his voice came back on the walkie, ‘You need to be more casual.’ I tried more casual. Take 3...take 5…this went on for about 7 or 8 takes.
“We moved on from that day and I felt more and more comfortable with Pollack. A year or so later when I saw the film, that scene was cut…I had a feeling it would be.”
Expecting to see Jobrani in a blockbuster any day now, I asked, If he could play a Star Wars character who it would be?
MJ: R2D2.
AS: Why R2?
MJ: He was always up to some goofy mischief, getting people into trouble and joking around. However, when it came time to save the day he could always be counted on. If It weren’t for him, none of the other characters would ever have prevailed—and yet he had a fun air to him.
AS: Which Star Wars character wouldn’t you play?
MJ: The Emperor. He had really bad skin.
AS: Speaking of bad skin, except for Xerxes, there isn’t a single Persian—out of a million—in the movie 300 who shouldn’t sue his dermatologist. Do I take it that Xerxes is the only Persian you would play in that movie?
MJ: I never saw 300. I saw Sin City and really enjoyed it. Someone told me that Frank Miller made some racist remark in a radio interview about Middle Easterners not having the knowledge to build airplanes and yet they flew those planes into the twin towers on Sept 11. I believe he was responding to the criticism of his film from the Persian community. If he did indeed say these words, then I don’t think I would have wanted to play any one of his characters in 300—good skin or not. However, I do have an idea for a sequel called 600, where a Persian dude buys a 600 series BMW—black—and goes around looking for Spartans to run over. It’s called The Persian Estrikes Back!
AS: Estarring who?
MJ: Estarring who? Estarring me, of course!
Spartans, there’s no need to run and hide. Even during his Batman days the gentle Jobrani drove the family’s hand-me-down Honda. He is a peace-loving, secular Muslim devoted to his secular Christian Indian wife. He has nothing but kind words even for his in-laws. Jobrani does, however, have a childhood bone to pick with the school bully.
6th grader Jim Jevonan used to tease little Maz about being Iranian. Things never got violent, however. “He was a 6th grader and I was a 4th grader,” Jobrani says. “He chose not to beat me up and I didn’t try to fight him since he was bigger than me. Just became material for the future.”
Indeed it did. Jobrani’s crowd-gathering charisma, compelling warmth, and sensuously animated stage presence, is secretly energized by a powerful angst characteristic of the most fearsome comedy. In my memory only Eddie Murphy—in his earlier days—has savaged racism with such glib intelligence. Eddie Murphy spoke in a time when anti-black racism was in retreat. Maz Jobrani takes the stage while anti-Iranianism is on the rise. That takes courage of a rarer sort.
As the evening wrapped up at the pub with Maz Jobrani, his friends and admirers, a friend of Jobrani’s father came up to him for Persian hugs and kisses. “I spoke to your father in Iran,” this friend whispered to the artist. “And he is very, very proud of you.”
As are we all, Maz.
“What red-blooded Iranian doesn’t?” was his reply.
Later I met Jobrani in person. He’d invited me to watch his performance at Punchline, the illustrious San Francisco comedy club that has also hosted Chris Rock, Ellen Degeneres, Dana Carvey, Margaret Cho, Dave Chapelle, Rosie O’Donnell, and Robin Williams. Afterwards, we met in a nearby pub. Jobrani was in a sprightly mood. He had just stepped down from the stage, leaving Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad with egg on their faces, and the audience still writhing with laughter.
It turns out, Ahamadinejad and Jobrani go way back:
“My dad was in New York on business in late ’78,” Jobrani explained. “My older sister and I went to an international school. The school was closing down for the winter holidays. Also because of the protests there had been some power outages. My dad sent for me, my sister, and my mom to join him in NYC for two weeks. We really didn’t think we’d be gone for good. I think people thought things might get better. To give you an idea of how much we planned to return, we actually left my baby brother back in Iran.”
“So what happened to your brother?”
Jobrani’s reply, “Today he is known as President Ahmadinejad.”
For the record, Jobrani was just kidding.
Teasing aside, Jobrani adds, “In reality we got the poor kid out 6 months later, and here we are almost thirty years out of Iran. I always say we left for two weeks and stayed for 28 years.”
Years later, each “brother” went on to start his own Axis of Evil comedy group. To see which one has had the most success, I googled both Maz Jobrani and Ahmadinejad. The score: Maz Jobrani 42 google pages, Ahamadinejad 38. Try it!
By this measure, the phenomenal success of Jobrani’s Axis of Evil comedy group ranks him as the most influential Iranian-American today. To show that this is not an exaggeration, one need only point to the millions of dollars of media airtime this artist has single handedly racked up for free, undoing the negative image of Iranians in the American mind. Dr. Jaleh Pirnazar, once Jobrani’s Persian Studies professor at UC Berkeley, astutely notes, “Even if the money was somehow available, who could have organized such an extraordinary task?”
I asked Jobrani how, as a political science major, he came to take Persian Studies at Berkeley.
“Since I came to America at the age of 6, I never really learned how to read and write Farsi. But I always spoke it at home, so I spoke it fluently. Well, when I started at Berkeley I signed up for beginning Farsi, in the hopes of learning the basics—alphabet, reading, writing. On the first day, the teacher went around the class and tested us to see if we spoke Farsi well. There were other Iranians in the class who dumbed down their Farsi in order to stay in the class. I, not knowing that I’d be moved up, spoke fluent Farsi with the teacher. He in turn moved me up to Dr. Pirnazar’s class. It was a challenge because I had to learn how to read and write on my own in order to catch up with the level of her class. I struggled through the semester, but Dr. Pirnazar was very cool and made sure I got through it.”
Having survived a semester of Dr. Pirnazar, Jobrani tested his courage with a language he could learn from scratch: Italian.
“From the moment the teacher came into the class and said, ‘Mi chiamo Francesca. Come ti chiami?’ (my name is Francesca, what’s yours?) I was in love with the language.”
Later, Jobrani went to Italy on a study abroad program. “Italians are very much like Iranians,” he observes. “Food, family, long naps in the middle of the day…It’s now a fantasy of mine to someday own a place out there where I could spend several months at a time sipping wine and conversing in Italian.”
Why Italian? I asked. Besides Jobrani, I know quite a few Iranians with Italian sounding last names—Fooladi, Milani, Kiani—but none has gone so far as to actually study Italian.
“I was…a big fan of the Godfather,” says Jobrani.
I think he’s serious. Francis Coppola’s brilliant filmmaking aside, Jobrani refers to his own father as the “Godfather” type. Not in the outlaw sense, but as someone people can rely on for help. According to his son, Mr. Jobrani Sr. is the kind of Tabrizi Iranian who gets offended if people who could use his help don’t let him know their need. He has been particularly generous to Iranian expatriates who found themselves in a financial bind after the revolution. Hearing Maz speak of his father, I wonder if the archetype he means is not the Godfather, but the Iranian strong protector persona, the pahlevaan.
Mr. Jobrani Sr. started his career at an electric power facility in Iran. He got the job because he was the only applicant who had the bulk and strength to pick up the massive iron-core transformers and fit them into place. Endowed with brains to outrival even his brawn, Mr. Jobrani Sr. quickly moved up the ranks to become one of three partners in the business. Later his two partners dropped out, leaving him as sole owner. When electric power was nationalized in Iran, he became a government contractor providing electricity for the country.
Almost six feet tall and in great physical shape, the son expresses his own pahlevaan sense of community in a modern context. Jobrani uses his considerable artistic ability to defend the image and honor (gheirat) of his countrymen in the West. In a humorous foretelling of a future as an artistic pahlevaan of sorts, teenage Jobrani’s first time on stage was his lead role in a Marin County Redwood High School production of The Batman Musical and Comedy.
I asked Jobrani, “As an experienced Batman, how do you rate the various interpretations by Clooney, Keaton, and West?”
“As a kid I loved the Adam West Batman. It was fun and campy. Always seemed strange that he had a slight belly going. After all, Batman was supposed to have 6 pack abs. West made him seem more like a normal dude who liked to wear Spandex. When the films started I was in my late teens and really enjoyed the Michael Keaton version. I think he did a good job showing a troubled Batman. He’s really a fantastic actor. That was my favorite.”
For a while there was speculation that Batman Begins 2 would star Robin Williams. Had things turned out that way, Williams would have been the second internationally known actor/comedian graduate of Marin County’s Redwood High to be in a Batman production. I neglected to ask if Jobrani and Williams have met, or discussed their high school alma mater. I did ask him though about his work with actor Sean Penn and director Sydney Pollack in the 2005 thriller The Interpreter. Jobrani played a sympathetic character as secret service agent Mo[hammad].
“I was very pleasantly surprised to see the final cuts and find that the Mo character is indeed important throughout… It was great to have a character like that of Middle Eastern descent that meant something [positive] to the film…I wish there were more parts like this in film and TV. I’m pushing for such things every day.”
Jobrani began his professional acting career relatively late. He was 26 years old when he told his parents he was going to drop out of the Ph.D. program at UCLA, to pursue his acting dream. From his comedy routines one gathers Jobrani’s parents would have preferred their son to continue with that Ph.D. program. Doctor, lawyer, dentist, engineer, Jamba Juice franchise owner—anything but the arts. But then how could they know their Maz had the potential to become a world class actor? Today at 35, Jobrani reveals the liberating excitement of this career decision in stories about his work:
“My experience with Penn was a really good one…[he] invited a group of the younger actors out to watch a good friend of his play music one night. That was an amazing night, as he was sitting with some secret service agents who he’d been in touch with for the role. I went over to say ‘hi’ to them and befriended one of the agents, who later took me to lunch in town. Always cool to be in an unmarked car that can turn on its sirens to get through traffic from time to time. As I was saying ‘hi’ to the secret service agents and Penn at this table, I looked up and another friend of Penn’s was walking toward us. It took me a second to register, but it was Al Pacino. He walked right up to the table and introduced himself. I almost lost my mind as I was standing there just looking like one of the guys shaking hands with Al.”
Here’s the actor still getting jazzed about being on the set:
“My first day on the set [of the Interpreter] I was waiting for Sydney]Pollack to go ‘who’s this guy? I wanted]the other bald goateed guy, not this one….’ However, he was very nice and made me feel comfortable—that is, until I had to do one of my first speaking scenes.
“I had a scene where I was supposed to be doing surveillance and looking through some binoculars into someone’s house. Then I was supposed to mumble some lines to myself as I looked at this guy through the binoculars. Well, I did the scene, mumbled the lines, and then heard Pollack’s voice come through a walkie-talkie they’d put in the car with me for him to give me direction. He said something like ‘Give the line less emphasis.’ So I did take 2 with less emphasis. Then his voice came back on the walkie, ‘You need to be more casual.’ I tried more casual. Take 3...take 5…this went on for about 7 or 8 takes.
“We moved on from that day and I felt more and more comfortable with Pollack. A year or so later when I saw the film, that scene was cut…I had a feeling it would be.”
Expecting to see Jobrani in a blockbuster any day now, I asked, If he could play a Star Wars character who it would be?
MJ: R2D2.
AS: Why R2?
MJ: He was always up to some goofy mischief, getting people into trouble and joking around. However, when it came time to save the day he could always be counted on. If It weren’t for him, none of the other characters would ever have prevailed—and yet he had a fun air to him.
AS: Which Star Wars character wouldn’t you play?
MJ: The Emperor. He had really bad skin.
AS: Speaking of bad skin, except for Xerxes, there isn’t a single Persian—out of a million—in the movie 300 who shouldn’t sue his dermatologist. Do I take it that Xerxes is the only Persian you would play in that movie?
MJ: I never saw 300. I saw Sin City and really enjoyed it. Someone told me that Frank Miller made some racist remark in a radio interview about Middle Easterners not having the knowledge to build airplanes and yet they flew those planes into the twin towers on Sept 11. I believe he was responding to the criticism of his film from the Persian community. If he did indeed say these words, then I don’t think I would have wanted to play any one of his characters in 300—good skin or not. However, I do have an idea for a sequel called 600, where a Persian dude buys a 600 series BMW—black—and goes around looking for Spartans to run over. It’s called The Persian Estrikes Back!
AS: Estarring who?
MJ: Estarring who? Estarring me, of course!
Spartans, there’s no need to run and hide. Even during his Batman days the gentle Jobrani drove the family’s hand-me-down Honda. He is a peace-loving, secular Muslim devoted to his secular Christian Indian wife. He has nothing but kind words even for his in-laws. Jobrani does, however, have a childhood bone to pick with the school bully.
6th grader Jim Jevonan used to tease little Maz about being Iranian. Things never got violent, however. “He was a 6th grader and I was a 4th grader,” Jobrani says. “He chose not to beat me up and I didn’t try to fight him since he was bigger than me. Just became material for the future.”
Indeed it did. Jobrani’s crowd-gathering charisma, compelling warmth, and sensuously animated stage presence, is secretly energized by a powerful angst characteristic of the most fearsome comedy. In my memory only Eddie Murphy—in his earlier days—has savaged racism with such glib intelligence. Eddie Murphy spoke in a time when anti-black racism was in retreat. Maz Jobrani takes the stage while anti-Iranianism is on the rise. That takes courage of a rarer sort.
As the evening wrapped up at the pub with Maz Jobrani, his friends and admirers, a friend of Jobrani’s father came up to him for Persian hugs and kisses. “I spoke to your father in Iran,” this friend whispered to the artist. “And he is very, very proud of you.”
As are we all, Maz.
Friday, October 05, 2007
The Real Story
The Iran Agenda The real story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis.
By Reese Erlich
2007 PoliPointPress
Journalist Reese Erlich grew up in Los Angeles just south of UCLA. As a child he used to walk up Westwood Boulevard toward Westwood village, past a stockbroker’s office and the Crest movie theater. At the time there was no Tehrangeles. The Westwood legal offices I visited last year to fix my Iranian passport mess used to house the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. As an aborigine of sorts, Erlich has no grievances against the Iranians who have colonized the Westwood of his childhood. On the contrary, he seems to delight in the cultural upgrade. His latest book, The Iran Agenda: the real story of U.S. policy and the Middle East crisis, should however give the American reader a nostalgic lump in the throat. Not because of old memories of a neighborhood now transformed; but because this seasoned journalist writes in a tradition now mostly abandoned by the US media. Trustworthiness.
Erlich identifies his sources by name, and gives references which independently corroborate his statements. By contrast the average American’s perception of Iran has been largely defined by “unidentified sources.” The Iran Agenda begins in the real Tehran bazaar where Erlich--along with actor Sean Penn and columnist Norman Solomon--had put their journalistic “boots on the ground” to report on the Iran situation. Erlich mentions other American reporters in Iran, but he observes, “Most American reporters I met saw Iran as an evil society and a danger to the United States. While many expressed disagreement with President Bush’s policies, they believed Iran was developing nuclear weapons that threatened America. In short, their views tracked the political consensus emanating from Washington. Rather than proceeding from reality, they filtered their reporting through a Washington lens. When a Washington official makes a statement, even a false one, the major media dutifully report it with few opposing sources.”
Of course this is not news to we Iranians. The value of The Iran Agenda is its usefulness as a tool of argument in discussions with curious Americans who ask us to be their tour guides on the Iran subject. Most educated Iranians carry an overall knowledge of the Iran-US quarrel, from Mossadegh’s overthow, to the hostage crisis, to the US Navy’s shooting down an Iran Air passenger jet. The Iran-Iraq war, NPT, human rights violations, student protests, worker’s union discontent, Ganji, Ebadi, Ossanlou, are all swimming somewhere in our data base. But it takes a professional like Erlich to organize these floating facts into an engaging story with a strong moral. To undo years of skilful propaganda, equal skill is needed. And Erlich is certainly a talented story teller.
While he informs us that the Kurdish PJAK guerrillas are supplied by the US and Israel, Erlich simultaneously evokes a feeling of action and travel reminiscent of the colorful adventures of Tintin:
“The PJAK camps are located in inhospitable terrain. During winter months, the snowy roads are accessible only on foot or by tractor. Luckily the snow hadn’t yet blanketed the area, and we drove up easily—if slowly—over winding dirt roads. Suddenly, young women in green pants in the distinctive Kurdish head scarf were walking along the road. They were female guerrillas. PJAK claims its troops are almost 50 percent women.”
Erlich’s very brief history of the Kurds updated me on some interesting statistics. For example, I was under the impression that Kurds were mostly Sunnis. This is true in general, but in Iran 50% of this minority is Shiite. This figure makes a difference in my thinking on the Kurdish issue.
Erlich goes on to remind his readers of other ethnic minorities, the Azeri, Baluchi and Arab Iranians, who could destabilize the Iranian regime. Little of this is intelligently discussed in the US media. For obvious reasons even the Iranian media tend to keep the lid on news of ethnic unrest.
Not all of Erlich’s criticism targets mainstream media. He has harsh words of advice for Iran’s exile media in his native Westwood backyard. He mentions Amir Taheri’s infamous false report about a Majils law requiring Iranian Jews to wear a yellow stripe on their clothing. “With each phony or exaggerated story,” Erlich warns, “the LA newscasters and commentators [who continued to play the story long after it was falsified] think they are helping the popular struggle against the Iranian government. But repeated over time, the distortions discredit the exile media and, by extension, all exile opposition.” Erlich describes another, bitterly funny incident--the Hakha affair-- as being “something right out of the Keystone Kops.” I can't find a web link that explains this fiasco nearly as well as Erlich's narrative.
Clarifying his own agenda in writing The Iran Agenda, Erlich says, “…I personally don’t trust mainstream politicians, lobbyists, and think tank gurus to resolve anything soon. Nor do I trust the clerics in Tehran to stop their belligerence. A pro-peace, pro-democracy movement exists within Iran. I think people in the United States need to build one as well.” It seems Westwood had earthy, smart people long before Iranians arrived.
By Reese Erlich
2007 PoliPointPress
Journalist Reese Erlich grew up in Los Angeles just south of UCLA. As a child he used to walk up Westwood Boulevard toward Westwood village, past a stockbroker’s office and the Crest movie theater. At the time there was no Tehrangeles. The Westwood legal offices I visited last year to fix my Iranian passport mess used to house the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. As an aborigine of sorts, Erlich has no grievances against the Iranians who have colonized the Westwood of his childhood. On the contrary, he seems to delight in the cultural upgrade. His latest book, The Iran Agenda: the real story of U.S. policy and the Middle East crisis, should however give the American reader a nostalgic lump in the throat. Not because of old memories of a neighborhood now transformed; but because this seasoned journalist writes in a tradition now mostly abandoned by the US media. Trustworthiness.
Erlich identifies his sources by name, and gives references which independently corroborate his statements. By contrast the average American’s perception of Iran has been largely defined by “unidentified sources.” The Iran Agenda begins in the real Tehran bazaar where Erlich--along with actor Sean Penn and columnist Norman Solomon--had put their journalistic “boots on the ground” to report on the Iran situation. Erlich mentions other American reporters in Iran, but he observes, “Most American reporters I met saw Iran as an evil society and a danger to the United States. While many expressed disagreement with President Bush’s policies, they believed Iran was developing nuclear weapons that threatened America. In short, their views tracked the political consensus emanating from Washington. Rather than proceeding from reality, they filtered their reporting through a Washington lens. When a Washington official makes a statement, even a false one, the major media dutifully report it with few opposing sources.”
Of course this is not news to we Iranians. The value of The Iran Agenda is its usefulness as a tool of argument in discussions with curious Americans who ask us to be their tour guides on the Iran subject. Most educated Iranians carry an overall knowledge of the Iran-US quarrel, from Mossadegh’s overthow, to the hostage crisis, to the US Navy’s shooting down an Iran Air passenger jet. The Iran-Iraq war, NPT, human rights violations, student protests, worker’s union discontent, Ganji, Ebadi, Ossanlou, are all swimming somewhere in our data base. But it takes a professional like Erlich to organize these floating facts into an engaging story with a strong moral. To undo years of skilful propaganda, equal skill is needed. And Erlich is certainly a talented story teller.
While he informs us that the Kurdish PJAK guerrillas are supplied by the US and Israel, Erlich simultaneously evokes a feeling of action and travel reminiscent of the colorful adventures of Tintin:
“The PJAK camps are located in inhospitable terrain. During winter months, the snowy roads are accessible only on foot or by tractor. Luckily the snow hadn’t yet blanketed the area, and we drove up easily—if slowly—over winding dirt roads. Suddenly, young women in green pants in the distinctive Kurdish head scarf were walking along the road. They were female guerrillas. PJAK claims its troops are almost 50 percent women.”
Erlich’s very brief history of the Kurds updated me on some interesting statistics. For example, I was under the impression that Kurds were mostly Sunnis. This is true in general, but in Iran 50% of this minority is Shiite. This figure makes a difference in my thinking on the Kurdish issue.
Erlich goes on to remind his readers of other ethnic minorities, the Azeri, Baluchi and Arab Iranians, who could destabilize the Iranian regime. Little of this is intelligently discussed in the US media. For obvious reasons even the Iranian media tend to keep the lid on news of ethnic unrest.
Not all of Erlich’s criticism targets mainstream media. He has harsh words of advice for Iran’s exile media in his native Westwood backyard. He mentions Amir Taheri’s infamous false report about a Majils law requiring Iranian Jews to wear a yellow stripe on their clothing. “With each phony or exaggerated story,” Erlich warns, “the LA newscasters and commentators [who continued to play the story long after it was falsified] think they are helping the popular struggle against the Iranian government. But repeated over time, the distortions discredit the exile media and, by extension, all exile opposition.” Erlich describes another, bitterly funny incident--the Hakha affair-- as being “something right out of the Keystone Kops.” I can't find a web link that explains this fiasco nearly as well as Erlich's narrative.
Clarifying his own agenda in writing The Iran Agenda, Erlich says, “…I personally don’t trust mainstream politicians, lobbyists, and think tank gurus to resolve anything soon. Nor do I trust the clerics in Tehran to stop their belligerence. A pro-peace, pro-democracy movement exists within Iran. I think people in the United States need to build one as well.” It seems Westwood had earthy, smart people long before Iranians arrived.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Benedictus, the play
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Screenwriting (chapter 7), says “In the theater, the playwright is God.” In screenwriting, on the other hand, the prevailing theology is that the director is God. The play Benedictus is about a Muslim and a Jew meeting in a Christian monastery, yet ironically God’s meddlesome hand has been slapped away. Displaying artistic chutzpah, the creators proudly declare that Benedictus has been put together by committee. Instead of the expected chaos however, a curious Darwinian order emerges from the multiplicity of perspectives.
Benedictus is a collaboration of Iranian, Israeli and American artists. This composition in itself immediately gives form to what the play will be about: the Iran-US-Israel conflict. I had hoped a less obvious theme would assert itself, but though one can occasionally negotiate with God, there is no arguing with reality. Subtlety takes longer to evolve.
The character Ahser Muthada, an Iranian born Israeli arms dealer, projects the Israeli point of view. Ben Martin, traumatized into alcoholism by his experience as a hostage in the 1979 US embassy crisis, is the American. Ali Kermani, an out-of-power Iranian reformist president, takes on the burden of being the Iranian. The three come together in Rome, each with their own agenda. Muthada is there to beg safe passage out of Iran for his Jewish Iranian sister He has good reason to fear for her safety because the US is only hours away from invading Iran. Kermani is in a position to help her, but won’t do so unless he gets what he wants: a secret meeting with a US official who can help stop the war. That would be the alcoholic Ben Martin, who is now a US ambassador. Kermani believes Muthada can set up such a meeting, and is in a sense holding Muthada’s sister hostage.
But nothing is as it seems, as they say. Plot twists reveal surprising hidden motivations, and in the tradition of sophisticated drama, each character sees the others more clearly than he sees himself. For example Kermani’s plea to save Iranians who would die in the impending war are countered by Muthada’s reminder that Kermani isn’t as concerned with life when it comes to the Islamic regime’s support of terrorism, and the brutal suppression of internal dissent.
Sadly, Kermani does not put up a worthy defense. This is partly because the Islamic regime’s position is difficult to uphold in the first place. Another reason is that the collaborating artistic team is composed of Iranians, Israelis, and Americans who disagree with the regime. The main reason however is artistic: Al Faris who plays Ali Kermani is not in love with his character. His comfort zone in Bendictus is the introverted, opaque type who, in his self righteousness, considers his opponents beneath emotional sharing. Though the Kermani character is certainly an upgrade from the terrorist types Feris has sometimes portrayed in mainstream films, he has to labor to operate outside those familiar unemotional parameters.
Ali Pourtash, on the other hand ingeniously lodges his character, the Israeli-Iranian Asher Muthada, into our hearts and minds. Muthada throws his arms around Kermani when they first meet in the secret negotiations chamber at the Benedictine monastery. They were childhood friends in Iran before the revolution. They played soccer on the same team. They spent time together in the Shah’s prisons. All those memories are embraced in Muthada’s wrap of his arms around his old friend. For Muthada, Kermani has the smell of home, of youth, adventure, idealism. The sight of his old friend takes him back to the time when they both Looked hopefully to the future instead of bitterly into the past. Muthada is reluctant to let go the hug. Kermani, on the other hand, hesitates to embrace Muthada. Something inhuman has occupied his soul, or perhaps the emotionally genuine Muthada had misunderstood Kermani’s calculating friendship all along.
Of course Muthada is not naïve, though he wishes he lived in a world where he could be. Like a loyal traditional wife Muthada even remembers what foods Kermani likes. The wealth Muthada has accumulated as an arms dealer is the result of his shrewd and non-judgmental assessment of human realities. While the young Kermani rose to power by exploiting idealism, Muthada could not pretend to transcend his fellow man; he got rich participating in the genuine savagery of our human nature.
All this and more is reflected in the brilliance of the Muthada characterization both by the writer Motti Lerner and by the actor Ali Pourtash. While Faris performs his actor’s duty and gets some sympathy for his character’s Islamic background, Pourtash, with openhearted humor, lavishes nuances on his Jewish character. Muthada’s unabashed solution to his national vs. religious identity issue is, “Who ordered Kosher?” This he blusters at the Benedictine nun attendant who has respectfully brought him a tray of food.
While the play was being created, there were intense moments of political disagreement between the various factions of the artistic team. It seems Faris wished his character could be portrayed as more trustworthy. Perhaps this is the directorial error that weakened this actor’s commitment to the Muslim character. The biggest mistake however, was made by Iran. Iran’s representative of the ITI (International Theatre Institute) turned down an invitation by the project’s initiator, Roberta Levitow, to participate. It seems Iranian resident artists felt a collaboration “is not possible at this time.” The opportunity for more input from the Iranian Muslim point of view was therefore squandered in mistrust. This was two years ago. Today, as war with the US creeps closer, the seriousness of such negligence in appreciating the communication power of art is more apparent.
Of course, not everyone can benefit from communication; sometimes art is just therapy. The American in the play, Ben Martin, is psychologically devastated by his experience as a hostage. His captors at the US embassy in Tehran used to click empty guns against his temple. Earl Kingston, who portrays Martin, does such an adept job of projecting this trauma that one wonders if the man is psychologically fit to be in any decision making loop regarding Iran. Benedictus is meant to suggest questions, and one question Martin’s experience raises is what share of Israel’s fear of Iran’s hostile posture is due to the trauma of the Nazi Holocaust.
Benedictus succeeds as entertaining and thoughtful theatre; its failures are the failures of our time not of the artists. Therefore its flaws are just as watchable as its strengths. Founding artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian and director Mahmood Karimi Hakak have delivered a work of high artistic quality. This includes attention to details sometimes neglected, such as music and sound design. Mitchell Greenhill starts the mood with melodic Middle Eastern flavored music, but as war nears he greatly enhances the foreboding developments with disturbing cello notes.
Ultimately though my favorite statement in the play is delivered by set designer Daniel Michaelson. Ostensibly to make the small stage appear bigger, he has created a physical perspective by converging the lines of the stage walls towards a vanishing point. At this singularity there is a door where the players enter into the secret negotiations chamber to hammer out deals. Of all the multiple ideological perspectives presented in the play, this singular physical point, the entrance into the negotiating room, represents the unifying principle of Benedictus. Michaelson seems to be saying, “There’s the place where peace begins.”
Benedictus is a collaboration of Iranian, Israeli and American artists. This composition in itself immediately gives form to what the play will be about: the Iran-US-Israel conflict. I had hoped a less obvious theme would assert itself, but though one can occasionally negotiate with God, there is no arguing with reality. Subtlety takes longer to evolve.
The character Ahser Muthada, an Iranian born Israeli arms dealer, projects the Israeli point of view. Ben Martin, traumatized into alcoholism by his experience as a hostage in the 1979 US embassy crisis, is the American. Ali Kermani, an out-of-power Iranian reformist president, takes on the burden of being the Iranian. The three come together in Rome, each with their own agenda. Muthada is there to beg safe passage out of Iran for his Jewish Iranian sister He has good reason to fear for her safety because the US is only hours away from invading Iran. Kermani is in a position to help her, but won’t do so unless he gets what he wants: a secret meeting with a US official who can help stop the war. That would be the alcoholic Ben Martin, who is now a US ambassador. Kermani believes Muthada can set up such a meeting, and is in a sense holding Muthada’s sister hostage.
But nothing is as it seems, as they say. Plot twists reveal surprising hidden motivations, and in the tradition of sophisticated drama, each character sees the others more clearly than he sees himself. For example Kermani’s plea to save Iranians who would die in the impending war are countered by Muthada’s reminder that Kermani isn’t as concerned with life when it comes to the Islamic regime’s support of terrorism, and the brutal suppression of internal dissent.
Sadly, Kermani does not put up a worthy defense. This is partly because the Islamic regime’s position is difficult to uphold in the first place. Another reason is that the collaborating artistic team is composed of Iranians, Israelis, and Americans who disagree with the regime. The main reason however is artistic: Al Faris who plays Ali Kermani is not in love with his character. His comfort zone in Bendictus is the introverted, opaque type who, in his self righteousness, considers his opponents beneath emotional sharing. Though the Kermani character is certainly an upgrade from the terrorist types Feris has sometimes portrayed in mainstream films, he has to labor to operate outside those familiar unemotional parameters.
Ali Pourtash, on the other hand ingeniously lodges his character, the Israeli-Iranian Asher Muthada, into our hearts and minds. Muthada throws his arms around Kermani when they first meet in the secret negotiations chamber at the Benedictine monastery. They were childhood friends in Iran before the revolution. They played soccer on the same team. They spent time together in the Shah’s prisons. All those memories are embraced in Muthada’s wrap of his arms around his old friend. For Muthada, Kermani has the smell of home, of youth, adventure, idealism. The sight of his old friend takes him back to the time when they both Looked hopefully to the future instead of bitterly into the past. Muthada is reluctant to let go the hug. Kermani, on the other hand, hesitates to embrace Muthada. Something inhuman has occupied his soul, or perhaps the emotionally genuine Muthada had misunderstood Kermani’s calculating friendship all along.
Of course Muthada is not naïve, though he wishes he lived in a world where he could be. Like a loyal traditional wife Muthada even remembers what foods Kermani likes. The wealth Muthada has accumulated as an arms dealer is the result of his shrewd and non-judgmental assessment of human realities. While the young Kermani rose to power by exploiting idealism, Muthada could not pretend to transcend his fellow man; he got rich participating in the genuine savagery of our human nature.
All this and more is reflected in the brilliance of the Muthada characterization both by the writer Motti Lerner and by the actor Ali Pourtash. While Faris performs his actor’s duty and gets some sympathy for his character’s Islamic background, Pourtash, with openhearted humor, lavishes nuances on his Jewish character. Muthada’s unabashed solution to his national vs. religious identity issue is, “Who ordered Kosher?” This he blusters at the Benedictine nun attendant who has respectfully brought him a tray of food.
While the play was being created, there were intense moments of political disagreement between the various factions of the artistic team. It seems Faris wished his character could be portrayed as more trustworthy. Perhaps this is the directorial error that weakened this actor’s commitment to the Muslim character. The biggest mistake however, was made by Iran. Iran’s representative of the ITI (International Theatre Institute) turned down an invitation by the project’s initiator, Roberta Levitow, to participate. It seems Iranian resident artists felt a collaboration “is not possible at this time.” The opportunity for more input from the Iranian Muslim point of view was therefore squandered in mistrust. This was two years ago. Today, as war with the US creeps closer, the seriousness of such negligence in appreciating the communication power of art is more apparent.
Of course, not everyone can benefit from communication; sometimes art is just therapy. The American in the play, Ben Martin, is psychologically devastated by his experience as a hostage. His captors at the US embassy in Tehran used to click empty guns against his temple. Earl Kingston, who portrays Martin, does such an adept job of projecting this trauma that one wonders if the man is psychologically fit to be in any decision making loop regarding Iran. Benedictus is meant to suggest questions, and one question Martin’s experience raises is what share of Israel’s fear of Iran’s hostile posture is due to the trauma of the Nazi Holocaust.
Benedictus succeeds as entertaining and thoughtful theatre; its failures are the failures of our time not of the artists. Therefore its flaws are just as watchable as its strengths. Founding artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian and director Mahmood Karimi Hakak have delivered a work of high artistic quality. This includes attention to details sometimes neglected, such as music and sound design. Mitchell Greenhill starts the mood with melodic Middle Eastern flavored music, but as war nears he greatly enhances the foreboding developments with disturbing cello notes.
Ultimately though my favorite statement in the play is delivered by set designer Daniel Michaelson. Ostensibly to make the small stage appear bigger, he has created a physical perspective by converging the lines of the stage walls towards a vanishing point. At this singularity there is a door where the players enter into the secret negotiations chamber to hammer out deals. Of all the multiple ideological perspectives presented in the play, this singular physical point, the entrance into the negotiating room, represents the unifying principle of Benedictus. Michaelson seems to be saying, “There’s the place where peace begins.”
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