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This blog has quoted the Iranian author Azar Nafisi several times. Here she is discussing the meaning of recent events:
Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, an often harrowing portrait of how the Islamic Revolution in Iran affected one professor and her students.
Her new book, Things I’ve Been Silent About, is a memoir of growing up against the background of Iran’s political revolution.
She is a visiting professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.
Nafisi is a professor of aesthetics, culture and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics.
Al Jazeera gets her thoughts on the Iranian elections.
Al Jazeera: What has just happened in Iran?
Azar Nafisi: Well, what has just happened in Iran is a continuation of what has been happening for thirty years. Iranian people took up opposition and used an open space to express what they want. Their vote was not just against [incumbent President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad but for what he stood for.
But it seems like Ahmadinejad has won an overwhelming majority?
But the most amazing thing is that so many people came out into the streets to demonstrate and protest and to make their wishes known.
“I was thrown out of the university that Mousavi shut down as part of the Cultural Revolution.” This is great because it disproves the myth that the Iranian people want the extreme laws imposed on them by the Islamic regime. In any society you will have extremists.
There will be always people who will support those like Mr. Ahmadinejad, in the same way that many Americans supported Mr. Bush or support Christian fundamentalists. But that does not mean that the Iranian people prefer a theocracy to a pluralistic country with freedom of religion and expression for everyone.
In their slogans and demands during the elections they asked for freedom and democracy and repudiated the repressive laws. But just as important is the fact that many within the ruling elite in Iran are realizing they cannot rule the society the way they claimed they could. A good example is Mr. Mousavi himself.
In order to win Mousavi had taken up the progressive slogans, which he had previously fought against. I was there at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution when he was the Prime Minister, and implemented many of the repressive measures which he now denounces.
I (like many others) was thrown out of the university that Mousavi helped to shut down as part of the Cultural Revolution.
The fact that Mr. Mousavi or Karoobi choose to talk of freedom and human rights show the degree to which the divisions within the regime are affected by the resistance of the Iranian people. I think these are the important points about the elections and not only who won or who lost.
But don’t you think this election result, the election of hardline Ahmadinejad as opposed to a reformist Mousavi, suggests that the majority of Iranians want their theocracy to continue?
For me, elections in a country such as Iran don’t have same meaning as in countries such as the US. We hardly have a choice in who we vote for anyway. There was also not one single international observer.A sizable number of people can’t even read in Iran and they will vote for Ahmadinejad.
I admit that I might be wrong, but for me the real poles are not the number of votes.
The real poles are what sort of platform the candidates use in order to win. It was really amazing and interesting to see what Mr Mousavi chose as his platform to win.
He didn’t just campaign against Ahmadinejad but against the very foundations of the Islamic Republic.
The fact that Mr Mousavi risked his political career to take up this position suggests that a sizable number of the population don’t want what exists now.
So you, as a liberal, are optimistic about these election results?
Yes, definitely - let me say – not optimistic but hopeful. I lived for 18 years with the Islamic Republic - through the worst years. What gave me hope was the way this society non-violently resisted official rule. And I have had no reason to change this view.
But the Iranian people voted for this official rule - they voted for the Islamic Republic. They have now voted for an orthodox president.
One of the problems with revolutions is that it is a time of great excitement but also great confusion. It always worries me. People are very certain what they don’t want but not very certain what they want. When people voted for the Islamic republic, they didn’t know what they were voting for.
The results of these elections have taken the world by surprise. Was there a failure here of the international media to guage Iran’s affairs and sentiment?
Yes! That is what fascinates me most ever since coming to the US. When I wrote about students reading Lolita in Tehran, I was accused of saying Western literature is great. That is not what I was saying - I was saying people in Iran are taking these texts and analysing and seeing them in their own way - in a way the West doesn’t.
The homogeneous picture of extreme belief where the majority of people believe in orthodox Islam which comes out of Iran is not true. Iran is a country of different ethnic minorities and different religions. Many of the Muslim minorities have been oppressed by the regime. This is not Islam – this is a state using Islam for power and we have to break this myth.
You’ve talked about and write about the importance of literature and culture in the fight for human rights and liberty in Iran and around the world. But is art, culture, literature ever going to be more powerful than religion? Is it enough to start a revolution?
If you look at it in the long term - yes it is. I never forget when Paul Ricoer, the philosopher, came to speak in Iran. He was an eighty-year-old but was treated like [the American rock star] Bon Jovi.
At one point the minister for Islamic Guidance said to him: “People like us [politicians] will vanish but you people will endure.” That will always remain with me. We don’t remember the king who ruled in the time of [14th century Persian poet] Hafiz, we remember Hafiz.
You work for Johns Hopkins University as executive director of Cultural Conversations. How is this election going to influence Iran’s conversations with the rest of the world?
Part of it depends on the rest of the world - how will they choose to converse with Iran.
The US government is sometimes silly in its response to Iran. For them, supporting human rights translates into giving money to various groups and individuals and to have a hostile stance on the country. But the point is not to go behind one individual but to give voice to the people. Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel prize-winning lawyer, is someone whose faith in Islam cannot be disputed. The media should give as much space to her as to Ahmadinejad.
I think [US President Barack] Obama should acknowledge that the Iranian people have a history, a culture and aspirations, which is different from what the regime claims.
Your last book focuses on a group of women living in Tehran and you have conducted many workshops for women on human rights and culture. What does this election result say about women in Iran today?
I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. If you want to guage a society and how free it is, you go to its women.
Iranian women have really worked for their freedom this election. Look at their signature campaign - they choose a non-violent campaign to educate people inside and outside Iran about the country’s repressive laws.
They played an important role in the beginning of the last century in bringing about a constitutional revolution. In the beginning of this century, they will play a central role in changing society towards openness.
Here’s a straw in the wind that I’ve been waiting for, and a possible indication that our pop culture may soon begin to catch up with 21st-century reality.
The Independent reports that the Brits’ love affair with memoirs about misery and wretchedness is over.
Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis lit boom may be over.
At its height, profits topped £24m a year and authors could be sure that the more they plumbed the depths of despair and depravity, the deeper publishers would reach into their pockets. But industry research firm Nielsen now estimates that sales for the top 10 best-selling misery memoirs will be down from £3.87m last year to £2.59m this year.
Regular readers know that I’ve been appalled at the poverty of imagination that’s been on display in the pop culture for a long time. The wretched-family-and-dysfunctional-child memoir has been one of the most prominent features of this trend. There is no more grappling with big ideas in the culture; instead there’s the obsessive focus on the minutiae of miserable everyday life and on the unique ways in which individuals suffer their particular wretchedness.
It’s a fucking bore! Leon Wieseltier agrees with me (sorta)!
The decline of The New York Times remains worthy of comment, as does the poverty of imagination in American theater and film.
I’m no expert, and there are plenty of people discussing the culture, in depth, all over the interwebs. What I am, though, is a very disappointed reader and movie-goer, because I’m not being presented with any big stories and big themes—books or music or movies or plays that address things that are way larger than individuals and larger even than the sum of individuals—that get my juices flowing.
Two decades ago Tom Wolfe called for more novelists to stalk what he called the “Billion-Footed Beast“ (subscription to Harper’s required). You can read all about it here, at the NYT blog Paper Cuts.
Wolfe has for decades complained that in about 1960 American novelists made the decision to turn inward, to take their work in abstruse directions and to reject realism. All this was a disaster, Wolfe has maintained, especially because the social changes in America during this period offered such rich material. With “Bonfire,” he set out to reclaim the ground once occupied by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell and the other Americans of the first half of the 20th century who wrote in the tradition of Balzac, Dickens and Zola.
About two years after “Bonfire” came out, Wolfe published a famous essay in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” (subscription required) laying out his theory in detail, and what really struck me while reading it again was that he could have written it yesterday and hardly changed a thing. He has gained no followers. [e.a.]
More’s the pity. There is one exception: Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections was in fact a correction to the obsessive inward-looking trend in writers—a sprawling social novel in the tradition that Tom Wolfe had talked about (albeit, one with postmodern touches as well)—as James Collins notes in Paper Cuts:
The only book I can think of that has reached for something like the same realistic density, sweep and accessibility is “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. But the core of that book is a bourgeois family drama, and so it is really more like a gargantuan short story than a novel of the type that Dickens or Balzac would recognize.
Franzen himself addressed the discouraging landscape of contemporary fiction in a 2002 essay titled “Mr. Difficult,” in the New Yorker. It’s not available online. It provoked a dispute between him and Ben Marcus a few years later; discussion here.
Though Marcus’ essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. In particular, Marcus focuses on Franzen’s 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, and more generally with the modernist-inspired ideal of “difficult” literature—the belief that “the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study.” Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are “Status” authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: “Contract” authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.
While I’m waiting for all these novelists to sort themselves out and to start to grapple with 21st-century realities—and there’s a new generation of writers who seem eager to engage—I enjoy dipping into old pop culture favorites.
Like this 1961 movie (based on—gasp!—a trilogy of books! in French! which inspired a Broadway musical!), which was featured on TCM last night:
Do the echoes of agitprop help or hurt Barack Obama?
Meghan Daum examines the issues:
Fairey told me he thinks it’s solely his use of red that makes some people uneasy. I’m not so sure. He’s an artist; his adoption of propaganda tools — the graphic style, the underground distribution, and, OK, the color red — is at least in part ironic, a comment on political-machine communiques, a subversion of them. Although, let’s be honest, most people don’t look at the world through the meta-tinted glasses that this genre of art requires. They may get a whiff of critique, but what if they get a stronger whiff of something they can’t quite identify? And what if that confusion leads to some form of heebie-jeebies when it comes to Obama?
Still, the most radical aspect of this whole phenomenon is not the artwork itself but how it conveys Obama’s sharp divergence from the generic, easily digestible cultural coding that’s always been associated with getting elected. As Fairey says, Obama has “radical cachet.”
But if you like Obama and you’d like to see him elected president, it’s worth asking yourself exactly why none of the other candidates has dipped an ironic toe into agitprop, and whether their freedom from images that conjure mass idol worship, however archly, might not help them in the end. [e.a.]
One of those images was mounted on a fence around the corner from my polling place. It creeped me out—because I know agitprop, and I didn’t like it associated with Obama: it was a huge turnoff.
Daum claims there’s Hillary merchandise too, so:
It’s all commodity. As a result, no one’s commenting.
Maybe. For now. But things change.
Here’s Em, blasting “White America”:
“White America”
America, hahaha, we love you, how many people are proud to be citizens of this beautiful
Country of ours, the stripes and the stars for the rights that men have died for to protect,
The women and men who have broke their neck’s for the freedom of speech the United States
Government has sworn to uphold, or
(Yo’, I want everybody to listen to the words of this song) so we’re told…I never would’ve dreamed in a million years I’d see,
So many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me, who share the same views
And the same exact beliefs, it’s like a fuckin’ army marchin’ in back of me, so many lives I
Touch, so much anger aimed, in no particular direction, just sprays and sprays, and straight
Through your radio waves it plays and plays, ’till it stays stuck in your head for days and
Days, who would of thought, standing in this mirror bleachin’ my hair, with some peroxide,
Reaching for a t-shirt to wear, that I would catapult to the forefront of rap like this, how
Could I predict my words would have an impact like this, I must’ve struck a chord, with somebody
Up in the office, cause congress keeps telling me I ain’t causin’ nuthin’ but problems, and now
They’re sayin’ I’m in trouble with the government, I’m lovin’ it, I shoveled shit all my life,
And now I’m dumping it on…[Chorus]
White America, I could be one of your kids, white America, little Eric looks just like this,
White America, Erica loves my shit, I go to TRL, look how many hugs I get, white America, I
Could be one of your kids, white America, little Eric looks just like this, white America, Erica
Loves my shit, I go to TRL, look how many hugs I get…Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like yourself, if they were brown, Shady lose, Shady
Sits on the shelf, but Shady’s cute, Shady knew, Shady’s dimple’s would help, make ladies swoon
Baby, {ooh baby}, look at my sales, let’s do the math, if I was black, I would’ve sold half, I
Ain’t have to graduate from Lincoln high school to know that, but I could rap, so fuck school,
I’m too cool to go back, gimme the mic, show me where the fuckin’ studio’s at, when I was
Underground, no one gave a fuck I was white, no labels wanted to sign me, almost gave up, I was
Like, fuck it, until I met Dre, the only one to look past, gave me a chance, and I lit a fire up
Under his ass, helped him get back to the top, every fan black that I got, was probably his in
Exchange for every white fan that he’s got, like damn, we just swapped, sittin’ back lookin’ at
Shit, wow, I’m like my skin is it starting to work to my benefit now, it’s…[Chorus]
See the problem is, I speak to suburban kids, who otherwise would of never knew these words
Exist, whose mom’s probably would of never gave two squirts of piss, ’till I created so much
Motherfuckin’ turbulence, straight out the tube, right into your living room I came, and kids
Flipped when they knew I was produced by Dre, that’s all it took, and they were instantly hooked
Right in, and they connected with me too because I looked like them, that’s why they put my
Lyrics up under this microscope, searchin’ with a fine tooth comb, its like this rope, waitin’
To choke, tightening around my throat, watching me while I write this, like I don’t like this,
Nope, all I hear is, lyrics, lyrics, constant controversy, sponsors working ’round the clock, to
Try to stop my concerts early, surely hip-hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston,
After it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom, so now I’m catchin’ the flack
From these activists when they raggin’, actin’ like I’m the first rapper to smack a bitch, or
Say faggot, shit, just look at me like I’m your closest pal, the posterchild, the motherfuckin’
Spokesman now for…[Chorus]
So to the parents of America, I am the derringer aimed at little Erica, to attack her
Character, the ringleader of this circus of worthless pawns, sent to lead the march right up to
The steps of congress, and piss on the lawns of the White House, to burn the casket and replace
It with a parental advisory sticker, to spit liquor in the faces of in this democracy of
Hypocrisy, fuck you Ms. Cheney, fuck you Tipper Gore, fuck you with the freest of speech this
Divided states of embarrassment will allow me to have, fuck you, [vocal melody],
He, hahaha, I’m just playin’ America, you know I love you…
