Essays
Ripple Effects
Posted by Words At Large Guest on August 20 at 12:35 PM
I believed that once I put my memories on paper,
the past would go away. But it didn’t. Instead, it became larger
than life, magnified through every single word. I promised myself
that the pain would disappear once I shared my story with the world.
But it didn’t. So I charged ahead, fueled by a desperate need
to find closure, to make sense of all that had happened, of torture,
death, rape, betrayal, forgiveness–and my survival.
With my book being published in 20 countries, I had to travel around
the world to promote it. City after city. Two continents. Tens of
interviews. And every interview left me emotionally exhausted. Like
a seed in fertile soil, the past had sprung back to life from the
shards of my broken silence.
Dissidence and Literature
by Marina Nemat
Last August, when I was at Lake Como to speak at an event, a teenage
boy asked to interview me. I was exhausted, but I decided not to
say “no” to him, because I remembered that I was about
his age, maybe a little younger, when I began writing articles against
the Islamic government in my school’s newspaper. I had grown
up during the time of the Shah, the king of Iran, and I had had a
rather idyllic childhood. I was 13 when the Islamic revolution succeeded
in my country in 1979 and turned my world upside down. I was not
from a political family and had never been political. How political
can you be at the age of 14? I was a young girl who had grown up
listening to the Bee Gees, watching Little House on the Prairie,
reading C. S. Lewis and Jane Austin, and wearing bikinis at the beach.
I had dreams of becoming a medical doctor, which was quite possible,
and I wanted to marry a handsome young man like Mr. Darcy one day
and raise a family. Then, I ended up writing articles against the
Islamic regime in my school, which the government had turned into
one of the first fronts of the Islamic Cultural revolution. Immediately
after the revolution, there was some freedom of speech in my country
as the new government was trying to define itself and write its laws.
During this period of relative lawlessness and anarchy, all political
groups that had been illegal during the time of the Shah surfaced.
I had no idea what a Marxist was and now they were everywhere, selling
their magazines and newspapers. The doors of the world had been opened
to my generation, who had lived most of their lives in the controlled
society of the Shah, and we were very curious and excited and eager
to understand the world and to change it for the better. The word “democracy” made
our hearts beat faster, and our young minds were completely unaware
of the complexity and danger of the road ahead. After all, at the
age of 14, you believe you’re invincible.
But things took a turn for the worse. Finally, the government did
write its law, which was based on sharia law, was very severe, and
had been created to pave the road for a totalitarian dictatorship,
one probably harsher than we had ever experienced before. In the
new system that governed my country, the Supreme Leader, who was
Ayatollah Khomeini at the time, had complete power over the government
and could even veto the decisions of the parliament. In my school,
our wonderful teachers, who had taught us literature, history, geography,
math, and science, were replaced by fanatic young women, members
of the Revolutionary Guard and Islamic Committees, who were eighteen
or nineteen years of age, were not qualified to teach at all, and
were appointed as teachers to brainwash us and deliver the government’s
propaganda. Soon, the rights of women came under fire: the hijab
became mandatory and the new family law granted all the power to
men, giving them the right to abuse their wives without consequence.
Most of my friends were Muslim girls and they were angry about this,
and I, who was a Christian, was furious. This was when I began to
write, and, as a result, the new principal of my school, who was
also a member of the Revolutionary Guard, put my name, along with
many other young girls from my school, on a black list, which she
submitted to the Courts of Islamic Justice. The waves of arrests
began in 1981, and, eventually, we were all arrested and taken to
Evin Prison. Evin was a political prison built during the time of
the Shah, where political dissidents were tortured and executed.
When Khomeini returned to Iran with the success of the revolution,
all political prisoners were freed, and Evin was supposed to turn
into a museum, but it only expanded and became more horrific. In
1981 and 1982, the Islamic government of Iran arrested thousands
of young people, 90 percent of whom were under the age of 18. Almost
all these young people were tortured and many of them were executed
under the name of “antirevolutionary” and being a threat
to national security.
At the beginning of this talk, I told you about a young man who
wanted to interview me at lake Como. When we sat down together and
he turned on his voice recorder, I was ready for him to ask me the
typical questions most journalists asked me, either about my book
or about the political situation in Iran, but he pleasantly surprised
me. He asked: “Why do we have to read books?” I have
two teenaged sons, so I have a great deal of experience when in comes
to the reluctance of the youth to read. I said: “Why did Hitler
burn books? Why did Mao do the same thing? Why did Khomeini ban books?” The
young man seemed satisfied with my answer.
Technologically, the world has come very far in the recent years,
but still, dictatorships follow the same path as they always have,
but of course, now they do it in a more sophisticated way. They still
burn and ban books, but now they also try to limit and control the
use of the Internet, because it is through the internet that the
written word can reach millions of people in an instant and bring
them the information that these governments and powers have tried
to hide. In the past, once a writer was in exile, he/she would be
more or less disconnected from his/her people, but today, this is
not the case at all. Books and articles can be written and be made
available on line. Discussions can be made, and the truth can rise
to the top. Of course, this age of technology has its own complications.
Just the same way that writers and dissidents can use the Internet
to reach people, dictatorships and their agents and supporters can
do the exact same thing and try to distort the truth. But this is
a battleground of a very serious war that goes on without pause and
to which every writer needs to remain dedicated. The future belongs
to the young generation, and in order to make this future better
than the present is for the older generation to succeed in giving
to the youth the burden of history it has carried. However, let’s
not forget that history can be abused and twisted. For example, there
are still those who say the holocaust never happened, even though
the holocaust is a very well documented event of recent history.
As human beings, we have a tendency to turn our backs on what causes
us sorrow, pain, and despair, especially when these are historical
events that bring our conscience, whether personal or social, under
a microscope. So a writer who writes about such matters is always
faced with a great deal of resistance. Also, let’s not forget
that governments and extremist political groups have and will use
literature as a tool of propaganda. Of course, it’s needless
to say that when literature becomes a tool to serve a certain ideology,
it automatically loses its soul and becomes lost. Any intelligent
reader can spot such a condition without effort, no matter how skillfully
it’s done. Literature is not to serve a certain ideology, but
to become the honest bearer of the human experience and condition,
whether in the fiction or non-fiction form.
There are also those who take the power of literature too lightly.
Without words and literature, we become secluded and imprisoned in
our own bodies. What is the use of experience if it cannot be shared?
I learned more about the holocaust from Anne Frank’s Diary,
Ellie Wiesel’s Night, and Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness than
I have ever learned from any history books. This is because these
amazing works of literature not only tell us about what happened,
but they tell us about how people felt as they experienced such horrors,
so that we can put ourselves in their shoes and not only know but
feel their experiences. Without literature, history and the human
experience, which is a very important part of history, becomes a
cold and impersonal recitation of numbers and words that can rarely
bring tears to anyone’s eyes or touch anyone’s heart.
I am a practical person by nature, and as I told you, I wanted to
become a medical doctor, but I ended up becoming a political prisoner
at the age of 16 and spending more than 2 years in prison, and then
I became a writer. I have always admired those who act on their convictions
for a good cause: doctors who risk all and work in war and poverty
torn regions to save lives, human-rights activists who are at the
front lines of humanitarian disasters, journalists who risk their
lives to bring us reports and images about events happening across
the globe, engineers who build roads and schools in remote areas
or bring clean running water to those who need it, etc. What is the
role of the writer? In my humble opinion, every writer is a part
of humanity’s collective conscience. As a writer, I am here
to remember and to make sure that the world knows and remembers.
Some people say, “but these are only words.” I would
say that these are the words that contain our humanity. We’re
here at this conference to speak about dissidence and literature,
but I would like to ask you “what is dissidence?” To
you, is dissidence a political act or a human one, or maybe both?
I believe that when dissidence is mainly political and serves a certain
ideology or religion, it should be left to politicians. However,
when literature enters the arena of dissidence, in order for literature
to keep its soul and humanity, it has to serve the human conscience
without serving an ideology, and if it manages to do this, it would
deliver to the future generations the truth of our experience, humanity,
and imagination. But this is easier said than done. As human beings,
we are very much prone to letting our political views cloud our judgment.
So when a writer allows his/her ideology to shape and define her
work and become its blueprint, we see the death of good literature,
which bears witness to human and historical conditions, and, we see
the rise of a phenomenon which I choose to call “literary propaganda.”
In Iran today, before each and every book is published, it has to
be examined by the Ministry of Information. For thousands of years,
Persia produced world-famous writers and poets, but since the success
of the Islamic Revolution, the only books that officially make it
to the printers in Iran are the ones that promote the government’s
ideology and propaganda or the ones that are deemed “harmless.” As
a result, most writers and poets choose to leave Iran in order to
write freely in Diaspora, and this is one of the reasons why during
the recent years, there has been such a surge in the number of Iranian
writers being published abroad. And, naturally, most of these writers
are women, because they are the ones who have suffered the most and
have the most fascinating and intriguing stories to tell. A point
that I have to bring up here is that, unfortunately, there is the
danger that dissidents who live in their own countries or in the
Diaspora might also fall into the trap of creating literary propaganda
in the name of literature. If a dissident writer is overly dedicated
to a certain ideology or religion and lets this affect his/her work,
then literary dissidence loses soul and meaning, because it has now
become a mere political tool.
Today, we live in a war-ravaged world where certain countries invade
other countries based on lies and false information and in the name
of justice and democracy, breaking international laws without being
held accountable. And our world is also plagued by terrorism and
religious fanaticism that pretends to be serving God while killing
innocent people and promoting hatred and violence. Also, we hear
of countries where any form of dissidence, even in its mildest form,
is never tolerated. In these countries, torture and execution is
commonplace. I ask you: “Can one wrong correct another wrong?” The
interesting thing is that each and every of these sides, countries,
and political groups use their own literary propaganda to tell the
world that they are the “good” and that the other is
the “evil.” Please correct me if I’m wrong, but
I do not see much goodness in any of them, and this is when as a
writer, I have to tell the story of the victims and of those who
suffer and are in the danger of being forgotten.
We have all grown up reading books like Cinderella and
the Sleeping Beauty, in which the world is divided into
absolute good on one side and absolute evil on the other, and we
have a tendency to adhere to such a simplistic view of the world
even as we get older, because the simplistic way is the easy way.
However we have to realize that most of the world, of course not
all of it, is different shades of gray and is neither black nor white.
Once we decide that a person is evil and there’s no goodness
in him/her, this would justify our holding a gun to that person’s
head and pulling the trigger, and this is where extremism, terrorism,
and genocide are born, and they can happen to anyone, whether atheist
or religious. When I was in prison at the age of 17, I was forced
to marry one of my interrogators, and, under the name of marriage,
this man raped me over and over again, and I hated him from the bottom
of my heart. Then, I found out that during the time of the Shah,
he had been a political prisoner himself in the same prison that
I was in now. He had been tortured one day, just like me. He had
been a victim, just like me, and now he was a torturer. This situation
told me that a victim (the good) could become a torturer (the evil).
And this understanding changed my view of the world and made me understand
that the line between good and evil was quite easy to cross.
In a country like Iran where 70 percent of the population is under
the age of 30, it becomes even more important for literature to be
accessible to the youth. First let me explain that in Iran, almost
every book, whether foreign or not, is available in the underground
market. Even though these books are illegal and they are never officially
published, people have found ways to stay under the radar of the
government and import, translate, and publish books. Iran is a rich
country, and in big cities there is money in people’s hands
and many are curious to read the banned books. Also, in Tehran’s
large cities, the majority of people are now quite well educated.
After the period of the Islamic Cultural Revolution in Iran, during
which I was a teenager, when universities were shut down for “restructuring” and
history, science, literature, etc. in high schools was replaced with
political and religious propaganda, the government of Iran realized
that it needed to train doctors and engineers, so the regular subjects
returned to schools and the universities reopened, but, of course,
the government did squeeze in a good amount of political and religious
rhetoric into the curriculum. Still to this day, students are forced
to line up in the schoolyard before class and yell “Death to
America” and “Death to Israel” and many other things.
Young people are curious by nature, and in a young county like Iran,
where the majority of the population is young and literate, literature
becomes even more important, especially in its relationship to dissidence.
In a country like Iran, or anywhere, in order for literature to be
able to make real changes in people’s understanding of who
they are, where they are in their history, how they arrived here,
and where they want to go, it has to be accessible and readable.
Long complicated sentences, which go on for 10 lines, even though
very impressive, lose the young reader. The story needs to be relatively
easy to relate to, void of messages and propaganda, and honest, so
that it can reach the youth and touch their minds and hearts. And
to truly change a country for the better and to prepare it to become
a cradle of democracy, the best route is to reach the heart and soul
of its young generation, and the worst possible way is to invade
a country in the name of democracy and have foreign soldiers armed
with the best and most deadly weapons march its streets.
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