Censoring an Iranian Love Story Read online

  In response to such criticisms, numerous experts and ministers from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, as well as film directors, cinematographers, and other crew members involved in movie production, have in lengthy and frequent articles and interviews explained: “Gentlemen! Don’t worry. In scenes where it appears that an actor and an actress are alone, there are, in fact, behind the scenes, meaning a little farther away from the camera, tens of crew members present—including the director, the assistant director, the stage assistant, the cameraman and his assistants, lighting crew, and …” Despite these explanations, several of the complaining gentlemen have suggested:

  “Let us assume it is so. But the audience only sees a man and a woman alone in a room. And the fact that a man and a woman are alone in a room will lead the audience’s imagination to a thousand sins.”

  I hope this introduction has helped you understand why publishing a love story in Iran is not a simple undertaking …

  Now ask me how I hope to write and publish a love story, so that I can explain:

  I think because I am an experienced writer, I may be able to write my story in such a way that it survives the blade of censorship. In my life as a writer, I have come to learn Iranian and Islamic symbols and metaphors very well. I also have plenty of other tricks up my sleeve that I will not divulge. The truth is that a long time ago, I never really intended to write a love story. But that boy and girl who meet each other near the main entrance of Tehran University and in the chaos of political demonstrations stare lovingly into each other’s eyes have convinced me to write their story.

  They have known each other for about a year and have shared many words and sentences. But it is on this spring day that the girl for the very first time casts her eyes on that boy’s face … Don’t be surprised by the paradox in my last two sentences. Iran is a land of paradoxes … If you ask:

  Did they meet on a matchmaking Web site?

  I will emphatically say:

  No…

  And even more emphatically I will suggest that these two characters are far too innocent and fictional to meet on a matchmaking Web site or on Web sites where one seeks a sex partner … In fact, such Web sites are banned in Iran. But allow me to tell my story.

  As you have realized, the girl’s name is Sara. And the boy’s name is Dara. Don’t ask, I confess, the names are pseudonyms. I don’t want the real characters to face any problems for sins or illegal acts that they may commit in the course of my story … Of course, selecting Sara and Dara as pseudonyms from among thousands of Iranian names has its own story, which I must tell:

  Once upon a time, long ago when I was in school, Sara and Dara were two characters in our first-grade textbooks. Sara was there to introduce the letter S and Dara to introduce the letter D … Long ago in Iran, not an Islamic regime but a monarchist regime ruled. From that regime’s perspective, there was no problem for Sara and Dara, after having been introduced to schoolchildren, to appear alone in a room in other lessons to talk, for example, about a parrot so that the letter P could be taught. In those bygone days, Sara was illustrated with long black hair and wearing a colorful shirt, skirt, and socks, and Dara was drawn wearing a shirt and pants. They were beautiful, but we schoolchildren used to draw a mustache for Sara and a beard for Dara … Years later, I mean when I was a student at Tehran University, we Iranians grew tired of the monarchist regime and started a revolution. Our reawakening began when the Shah, following the advice of U.S. president Jimmy Carter, claimed that he wanted to give the people of Iran political freedom and the freedom of speech and thought, and to demonstrate his goodwill he dismantled the Rastakhiz Party—the only political party in the country which he himself had created. We shouted “Freedom!” … We shouted “Independence!” … And a few months after the start of our revolution, to our shouts we added “Islamic Republic!” … Across the country we set fire to banks because, according to the covert and overt propaganda of the Communists, banks were symbols of the bloodthirsty regime of bourgeois collaborators. We set fire to cinemas because, according to the covert and overt propaganda of the intellectuals, cinemas were the cause of cultural decay, the spread of Westernization, and the increasing influence of American Hollywood culture. We burned down cabarets, bars, and brothels because, according to the covert and overt propaganda of the devout, they were centers of corruption and propagated deadly sins … Well, a few years after the revolution’s victory, in first-grade textbooks, there was a headscarf covering Sara’s black hair and a long black coverall hiding her colorful clothes. Dara was not old enough to grow a beard, therefore only his father grew one. According to our religious teachings, a Muslim man must have a beard and must not groom his face with a razor lest he look like a woman.

  If I remember correctly, a few years later, Sara and Dara completely disappeared from textbooks, and another girl and boy replaced them— siblings with no recollection of the Shah’s corrupt and tyrannical regime … Now I think you have come to understand that selecting the names Sara and Dara is an Iranian storytelling trick. Without giving Mr. Petrovich an excuse to chastise me, they will remind my Iranian reader of the appearance and disappearance of Sara and Dara from textbooks, rather like Mr. Clementis, a persona non grata whom Soviet censors airbrushed out of a photograph, yet the hat he had lent to a man posing with him remained on that person’s head.

  By the time Sara and Dara were being transformed, my daughter was in first grade, and there were nights when my powers would fail and I could not come up with a new story to tell her. I had therefore bought her storybooks with tales that were better than mine because they came with illustrations. One night when I opened Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to read to her, I saw to my horror that Snow White was wearing a headscarf and two thick black lines were covering her bare arms. My little girl asked:

  “Why aren’t you reading?”

  I closed the book and said:

  “We don’t have a story tonight. Sleep so that you will have a beautiful dream, my girl … Sleep, Brn.”

  We called our daughter Brn at home. But her name in her birth certificate is something that neither I nor her mother intended to name our daughter. Hence, the name Brn too has a story, which I will tell you another night. Now, with your permission, I must return to my love story:

  Ask me, given that an encounter between a man and a woman is so unlikely in Iran, how do Sara and Dara meet?

  As I said before, although Sara and Dara come face-to-face for the first time on the fringes of the students’ political demonstration, they had in fact started writing their love story a year earlier. And this is the story that I now want to tell you:

  Sara is studying Iranian literature at Tehran University. However, in compliance with an unwritten law, teaching contemporary Iranian literature is forbidden in Iranian schools and universities. Like all other students, Sara has to memorize hundreds of verses of poetry and the biography of poets who died a thousand, seven hundred, four hundred … years ago. Even so, Sara likes contemporary Iranian literature because it stimulates her imagination.

  This literature creates scenes and words in her mind that she has never dared imagine or utter, and of course, this literature too has not dared write those words and scenes openly and explicitly. In fact, when Sara reads a contemporary story, she reads the white between the lines, and wherever a sentence is left incomplete and ends with three dots like this “ …,” her mind grows very active and begins to imagine what the eliminated words may be. At times, her imagination goes farther and grows more naked than the words the writer had in mind. If she is as clever as an intelligence agent and has the power to decipher the codes that lie in the shadows of the petrified phrases and in the hidden whispers of the conservative words of Iran’s contemporary literature, she will find the very things she likes. Sara loves these three dots because they allow her to be a writer, too … But she never borrows any contemporary literature from her college library or the central library of Tehran University. Even i
f she wanted to, I don’t think she would find any books by writers such as me.

  Ask me why, so that I can explain:

  I hope in countries where people are proud of their democracies and live confident of a secure future, no one ever has to worry about the books they borrow from a library. I pray that whenever they want, without fear of the future, they can at least read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair or the dull and artless The Iron Heel, a bad work by a relatively good writer who drank too much whiskey and wanted to replace American democracy with Animal Farm democracy.

  As I was saying, we Iranians, having lived under the dictatorial rule of kings for twenty-five hundred years, have expertly learned that we should never leave any records or documents behind. We are forever fearful that the future will bear even harsher political circumstances, and hence we must be extremely vigilant about our lives and the footprints that linger in our wake. It is for this reason that records of our history are often limited to the travelogues of Westerners and reports by Western spies. Sara knows that the circulation system at Tehran University’s library is computerized and that any book she borrows can someday be used as evidence against her and she could be expelled. Of course, circumstances in my dear Iran still allow a few crumbs of freedom, but Sara prefers to borrow her favorite books from a public library and has become a member of the one in her neighborhood. Exactly a year before the political demonstration I told you about, on a spring day—and in most old Iranian love stories there is a beautiful spring day with the song of nightingales and other pleasant-sounding birds resonating from sentences—Sara appears at the public library. The small reading room in this library has been divided into two sections by the library catalogs so that the boys and girls seated at the tables cannot see each other.

  Now you probably want to ask, What are the boys and girls supposed to do if they need to discuss a school assignment or exchange ideas?

  If you ask one more question like this, I will be forced to say:

  Madam! Sir! Why can’t you imagine any culture other than your own? What kind of a question is this? Clearly girls and boys in Iran have no school-related discussions and no need to exchange educational information. Like everywhere else in the world, discussing Derrida’s “Différance,” debating the Planck wall or the chaos theory and the butterfly effect, are consciously or unconsciously excuses for a girl and a boy to establish a private relationship that will end in sin. For this very reason, if they speak to one another on university grounds, they will receive a written warning from the Disciplinary Committee. They are not only prohibited from talking to one another in libraries, but they cannot even climb over the Planck wall with the language of their eyes to exchange information … So please let me continue with my story.

  Sara walked toward the librarian’s desk … With this sentence the love story I want to write and hand over to Mr. Petrovich continues.

  Sara asked the librarian:

  “Do you have The Blind Owl?”

  The librarian firmly replied:

  “No, miss. We don’t have The Blind Owl at this library.”

  Sara did not give up.

  “Of course I know you don’t have The Blind Owl on the shelves. I meant if it is among the books you have removed from the shelves, could you make an exception and lend it to me for a few days … I study literature and I have to read The Blind Owl for an important project.”

  The librarian, this time more sternly, said:

  “Miss! I told you we don’t have these banned books; and by the way, you’re the idiot, not me. I know there is no way they would give you a project on The Blind Owl at the university.”

  Sara, having given up on getting her hands on a copy of The Blind Owl, walked out of the public library. She didn’t notice that in her wake a young man walked out from the protected men’s section and at some distance followed her all the way home. Consequently, the next day when she saw the same young man near her house, she did not recognize him. The young man was selling used books, which he had laid out on a few sheets of newspaper spread on the sidewalk. Surely the paperback edition of The Blind Owl was among his books. But Sara, proud of her beauty and accustomed to ignoring the people around her, walked to the university without stopping. The neighborhood butcher was skinning a green baby dragon hanging on a hook suspended from the ceiling …

  The next day, the same young man was sitting in the exact same spot. Of course he had fewer books. The same was true of the days that followed.

  In Iran, book lovers distrustful of the entire world sometimes think that the street peddlers who sell banned or rare books are agents assigned to identify and track readers.

  On the seventh day, Sara finally stopped at the peddler’s spread and browsed through the books and, suddenly, she saw The Blind Owl. She asked its price. Contrary to the general practice of selling rare or banned books at a much higher price than the list price on the back cover, the young man asked for very little money. And in a trembling voice he added:

  “… The price of one Winston cigarette, miss. On the condition that you read it carefully. Please cherish this book … Read it very carefully, much more carefully than you would other books … Carefully, accurately …”

  No street peddler or bookseller had ever spoken to Sara in this manner. She thought, Here’s another one of those mentally disturbed people whose numbers are growing in Iran. She happily bought the book and put it in her handbag. The book was transmitting a mysterious energy to her. During her first class at the university, while the professor was busy explaining and explicating a lengthy poem composed seven hundred years ago that was replete with complex and unfamiliar Arabic words, Sara opened the book under her desk and started to read that surrealist story which in Iran is famously believed to make its young readers lose hope in life and commit suicide—the same way that years ago its writer, Sadeq Hedayat, committed suicide in Paris. However, aside from the strange power of the opiate and carnal words, the book seemed to hold another secret, a secret that Sara thought she had seen in the book peddler’s eyes. That day, Sara went home from the university far more quickly than usual. She closed the door to her room, lay down on her bed, and began reading the book from the beginning.

  I guess by now you have realized that the crossed-out words in the text are my own doing. And you must know that such fanciful eccentricity is not postmodernism or Heideggerism. In fact …

  And by now you have surly grasped the significance of “ … ” in Iran’s contemporary literature.

  On page seven, Sara noticed several purple dots. She paid no attention to them and continued reading voraciously. The Blind Owl is a novel that begins with the nightmarish incidents in the life of an Iranian artist who paints on ewers. One day the artist goes to the storage alcove in his house to fetch a bottle of old wine that he has inherited from his mother—an Indian dancer who danced with a Nag serpent in a Linga temple. As he reaches for the wine, he sees a hole in the wall to the wasteland behind the house. He sees a stream. There is an old bent man sitting under a willow tree, and on the opposite side of the stream there is a beautiful woman, as beautiful as the women in Iranian miniatures, leaning forward and holding a single black lily out toward the old man. The next day, the artist realizes that in fact there is no hole in the wall of the storage alcove. But he has fallen in love with that ethereal woman and now spends his days wandering across the wasteland around his secluded house searching for her, for the stream, and for the willow tree … On page seventeen, Sara thinks whoever the previous owner of this book was had either not valued it or was a book abuser to have marked and defiled its pages with purple dots … And the blind owl who cannot get that ethereal woman out of his mind continues to search for her. One night, returning from a disappointing search, he sees the woman sitting next to the front door of his house. He takes her home and gives her some of that old wine. A wine that we learn is laced with poison from the fangs of a Nag serpent. The woman dies with a taunting look in her eyes, leaving the mysterious i
mage of her gaze forever etched on the artist’s mind. The blind owl cuts up her body, which is surrounded by golden bees, and puts the pieces in a suitcase. Outside, it is as if the world has transformed into a nightmare. In the dark, an old man with a rickety horse-drawn hearse is waiting for him. The cart travels to the ancient ruins of the city of Rey. While burying the suitcase there, they discover a centuries-old clay pot with the mysterious eyes of a woman painted on it… The same image that the blind owl will for the rest of his life paint on clay ewers …

  On page sixty-six Sara realized that the purple dots were not random and that in fact they had been placed with great precision under certain letters in certain words. She went back to the first dots on the first page of the book. They appeared under the letters S, A, R, A, H, E, L, L, O. It did not take her long to realize that the first four letters spelled her name and the rest spelled the word “hello” … The mystifying tale of The Blind Owl had a maddening lure, but Sara had fallen captive to the marked letters on the pages of the book. She flipped through page after page and carefully found them. She wrote them all down on a sheet of paper and began connecting them together. At times she would connect one or two letters too many, and at times too few … But finally, eight hours later, the complete letter sat before her.