Dual book reviews on a recent Iranian novel

Shahriar Mandanipour and the Failure of Love in Iran

by Kevin Cross

Recently, and particularly in cinema, authors have not only written themselves into their stories, they have inserted themselves into stories about themselves writing stories.  Because it blurs the bounds between the real and imagined, critics call this postmodern, implying deviousness on the author’s part as he deconstructs our perceptions.  Deconstruction has become a buzzword, a subversive act now brought to you by everyone from ad agencies to nation building forces.  In this age of avatars and identity without borders, the crumbling of boundaries is more than a buzzword of the most useless tribe in the faculty lounge—it’s the spirit of the age. 

Despite its tweedy connotations, the term deconstruction is useful for describing what Shahriar Mandanipour does in his new novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, in which Mandanipour deconstructs the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime whose fundamental purpose is to resist and halt such deconstruction.  Mandanipour, however, is no mere revolutionary shouting, as recent protestors have, “Death to tyranny!”  His heroine holds a sign reading, “Death to Freedom, Death to Captivity.”  Certainly, this is a strident slogan, but what does it mean?  Mandanipour’s novel is full of such riddles; it is as if Mandanipour, once himself an author who faced the censorship of the Iranian regime, is still wary and has encoded his feelings deep within the story. 

Code, in fact, is a recurring theme of the novel.  The lovers speak to each other by placing dots in books they borrow from the library, the love story must—to escape censorship—bury the lovers’ lust for each other in metaphors and “…”, finally, in the unfamiliar—the deconstructed—structure of Censoring an Iranian Love Story, we must decode the many riddles of Mandanipour’s narrative.

The decoding can be confusing and frustrating.  The reader suppresses outrage,  “Just explain to us the evils of censorship, Mr. Mandanipour, instead of beating around the bush!” we implore.  We are confused, because we are used to love stories that move in the way that love stories move – toward tragedy or union and bliss.  Authors don’t show up in their love stories and give their hero a stern lecture and yet, that is precisely what Shahriar Mandanipour does.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story is, as the title implies, not a love story; it is rather a story about writing a love story in Iran today.  The love story trope is merely one of many structures Mandanipour flouts.  He is, in fact, quite a compulsive nose-thumber:  he flouts the boundaries of authorship, stealing his antagonist, Porfiry Petrovich, from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (significantly, the character is neither Muslim nor Iranian, nor indeed much like Dostoevsky’s Petrovich); he steals his lovers, Sara and Dara, from the old Iranian reading primer where they had, until the 1979 revolution, performed the role of Dick and Jane; he includes text that he crosses out; he kills then obliquely resurrects each of his lovers in turn; in short, he deconstructs. 

Thankfully, the novel’s unconventionality yields profundity, at least to those willing to think about the purpose of the unconventionality. For example, by stealing Petrovich – a creation of the Iranian censorship regime – from literature, Mandanipour likens the founders of the Iranian Islamic Republic to a great novelist—a rich comparison.  Like writers, they actualized an imagined story; only they did so in a state rather than merely on paper.  In doing so, like Mandanipour, they too were deconstructionists—how else to describe their attempt to deconstruct the real and the imagined?

In his essay, “Wheatfields or Apple Orchards,” Mandanipour likens the act of creating a story to growing wheat and uses the image to make a plea for individual self-expression:  “What is important is for each of us—all the storytellers of the world—to bring our own apple orchards, or wheatfields, to harvest, in our own time and our own seasons.”  In the end, in Mandanipour’s deconstructed world, the best we can do is to scatter our seeds to the ground—not only to love, but to try to tell the story of love—and thus construct our own stories.

Kevin Cross is a second year MA candidate in Middle Eastern studies.

Death to Freedom, Death to Captivity

by Richard Kaufman

It is with this phrase, that Shahriar Mandanipour begins and ends his psychedelic and quirkily humorous novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story. Mandanipour has taken a unique approach to the romance novel and presents the reader with an entirely new kind of experience.  If his love story seems disjointed and fails to inspire lovers the way most traditional love stories do, it is because Mandanipour intends the book to be a satire on the Iranian political system.  By portraying two young lovers Dara and Sarah and their inability to enact humanity’s simplest and most popular narrative – the love story, Mandanipour implicates the Islamic Republic and its supporters in stifling basic human emotion.  The story revolves around political protest; from Sarah’s initial attendance of the university protest where she almost gets killed, to Dara’s past as a political protester.  A telling example is the story of Dara’s father, a “defeated communist”, who was imprisoned and tortured by the Shah’s regime and liberated by the revolution only to be jailed under the Islamic Republic once more for the same reason, being a supporter of the communist party (pp 199-200).  The interrogation methods described at the bureau of The Campaign Against Social Corruption are reminiscent of infamous internal security networks such as the East German Stasi and the Russian KGB.  By naming the censor, Mr. Petrovich, after a detective in a Russian novel, Mandanipour could be leading the reader to make unconscious parallels between the Islamic Republic and Stalinism.

Nevertheless, Mandanipour does not reserve all his criticism for the current regime.  By drawing from historical examples of poetry such as Khosrow and Shirin, he pokes fun at his own culture the way only a native can.  Mandanipour’s irony hints that Iran’s plight can neither be blamed on malevolent outsiders nor a single regime. Instead, he blames his country’s plight on self-serving Iranians who he typifies in his characterization of Sinbad. Sinbad is not a supporter of the revolution at the outset.  Rather, he is simply an apolitical and hard working young man, until he receives a magically fast-growing beard and wins support among the Islamic revolutionaries.  It is solely his outward appearance, in the form of his magically growing beard, which gains him his position. 

In contrast, Mandanipour portrays Dara’s character as a poor house painter and former political dissident who has no money and little hope of marrying a beautiful and virtuous woman like Sarah.  In this sense, Mandanipour shows some Marxist leanings in his book.  However, it is not only the rich elite who are an obstacle to Dara and Sarah’s happiness.  Their parents and neighbors also stand in their way. 

Not only does Mandanipour’s book carry some strong political messages, the author also comments heavily on social norms such as gender equality.  This is especially true in Sarah’s comments about the headscarf.  “How can you keep silent when they have forced this headscarf on my head?” she demands of Dara (p. 183).  Here, Mandanipour implies that by not objecting to the subjugation of women for example, everyday Iranians are liable for the injustices practiced in their own country. 

Mandanipour equates censorship with murder.  In his introduction of himself into the narrative in the form of the assassin who is trying to kill Dara, Mandanipour creates the metaphor of himself having to remove Dara from the story in order to please his sensor Mr. Petrovich.  In this way, and in the way that he has been forced to censor many characters, words and actions from books that he did manage to publish, Mandanipour believes the regime is suffocating him and his countrymen.  In a vein reflecting Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, Dara shouts at his maker, “You shouldn’t have written me like this… [y]ou wrote me so that no matter what they do to me, all I can do is squirm and bear the pain.  You wrote me like this to pass your story through censorship.” (p. 231)  Yet rather than it being the outsider’s depiction of Dara that turns into a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the Islamic Republic wants people to believe, Mandanipour’s version is different.  In his version, through state-sponsored censorship and ordinary people turning a blind eye, Iranians are forced into writing themselves this way.  Mandanipour’s message is that we are all responsible for our own collective fate. 

When Sarah finally commits herself to Dara, Mandanipour writes of her, “[a]nd she starts to walk against the current of the stream.” (p. 278) This statement is suggestive of the role every-day people must play in ending the tyranny of censorship that Mandanipour sees enchaining his land.  As the Persians have for so long shouted “marg bar Amrika, marg bar komunisi…” Mandanipour now calls on them to reject blanket ideologies and think for themselves.  Perhaps this is what he means by, “Death to freedom, death to captivity.”

Richard P. Kaufman is a second year M.A. candidate in Middle Eastern Studies.