The Iranian Culture Police in on this couple's tail. Author Shahriar Mandanipour records his protest against theo-cracy in his new novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story
The Iranian Culture Police in on this couple's tail. Author Shahriar Mandanipour records his protest against theo-cracy in his new novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story
When young Shahriar Mandanipour was schooling in Iran, he once had a composition assignment to hand in. As he stood up and began to read his essay about shepherds, and a golden wheat field ready for harvest, his teacher interrupted with a shout. Wheat fields weren't harvested in autumn, she said. He continued to read; she, to shout.
Writing about that episode years later, the acclaimed writer made a poignant statement: "I have managed to cross over the walls of a sterner censorship than my teacher's that afternoon in Iranu2026I write to bring a wheat field to harvest in my own words, in my own autumn."
After nine volumes of award-winning fiction, we finally get a taste of Mandanipour in English, with his first novel Censoring an Iranian Love Story.
Two narratives dovetail within its pages the first about a writer (also named Shahriar Mandanipour, and functioning as an alter ego), the second about a love story he wants to write involving two teenagers called Sara and Dara.
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The latter are in love, but must manage their blossoming relationship under the gaze of an almost-Orwellian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
Mandanipour understands his subject better than most. In the past, his work invited harassment and censorship by the Ministry in Iran. Between 1992 and 1998, he wasn't even allowed to publish. Hints of the intimidation of those years surface time and again in the novel, and in surprisingly witty ways.
As Sara and Dara break laws for something as innocent as a cup of coffee, we begin to understand Mandanipour's own struggle against a belligerent and ultimately absurdist theocracy. Much like fellow Iranian Marjane Satrapi, and her French graphic novel Persepolis, Mandanipour talks about love, and art, under a repressive regime.
We'd love to send our own moral police copies of Censoring an Iranian Love Story. They don't really read though, do they?
'Despite all your darkness, there's me, who will write'
How would you describe censorship in Iran?
Censorship has certainly had a negative effect on contemporary Iranian literature. At times, it has driven it towards artificial complexity, at times it has forced it to take greater refuge than necessary in symbols and metaphors, which results in the works becoming opaque. At times, censorship has forced the artist to turn to non-contemporary subjects, and at times it has forced a work to be aborted. In any case, censorship is suffocating. I believe that in the history of our literature, censorship has two intertwined and interconnected roots:u00a0
Institutional or governmental censorship whose apparatus officially began functioning approximately a century ago.
Societal censorship which is as old as Iran's history. Its source is fanaticism, religious narrow-mindedness, and a lack of social tolerance. As an example, I'd mention the destruction of Iranian cultural and artistic masterpieces following the occupation of Iran by the Arabs, the migration of Zoroastrian Iranians to India during the religious austerity of the Safavid dynasty.
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How did the 5-year censorship change the way you approached the writing of fiction?
Despite all the defeats and failings, the occasional despair, the constant sorrow and nostalgia for dreams that have fallen by the wayside, living under the hegemony of censorship keeps the love of writing, the passion, the rage and the madness to write persistent. It is not important what the writer writes about. What is important is for a story to create art even when the hope of being published is non-existent. In living under the rule of dictatorship, every creative work will be political. What is important is the creation of literature, what is important is for the writer to be able to raise his head and to say to the dictator's censorship that despite all your darkness and all your efforts to mould everyone into shapes that you fancy, there has been, and there is, me and other mes, who've written and who will write.
You are among a surprisingly small number of high-profile writers for children. Why do established writers shy away from children's literature?
I don't know why. But I am certain that the writer who is reluctant to do so, or who believes that he will belittle himself by writing for children, is missing something. To write a children's story, the writer must be able to become a child despite all the complexities of his mind. He must be able to recreate child-like language.
Excerpt
In Censoring An Iranian Love Story, the Ministry censor Mr Petrovich the name, incidentally, of a detective in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment argues about phrases he wants removed from a fictional story being written within the main narrative.
Lines are pre-emptively struck out in the event of Petrovich accusing the writer of arousing readers, harming Islamic values or even igniting a revolution.
Up in the pulpit, the preacher preaches about the seven stages of hell. Fire, pits filled with foul-smelling boiling liquids, women who have violated the Islamic dress code hanging by their hair, snakes with bites so painful that fearing them hell's residents take refuge with the venomous vipers, and other infinite horrors.
Then he proceeds to describe the beauties of heaven. Streams of milk and honey, fruit trees that bend their branches down to heaven-dwellers who crave their fruit, beautiful heavenly nymphs with skin so translucent that their insides can be seen.
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The lot of every male heaven-dweller is seven thousand of these nymphs who are all virgin and who after every sexual encounter become virgins again, and each sexual encounter lasts approximately three earth days...
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Then the preacher begins to talk about the deceased poet. Of course, he mispronounces his name and makes no mention of his pseudonym.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story published by Hachette India. Available at all leading bookstores for Rs 550.
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