literature matters -- literature as life
DISSIDENCE AND LITERATURE
by
MARINA NEMAT
____________________________
Marina
Nemat was born in 1965 in Tehran, Iran. After the Islamic Revolution
of 1979, she was arrested at the age of 16 and spent more than
two years in Evin, a political prison in Tehran, where she was
tortured, repeatedly raped and nearly executed. She came to
Canada in 1991 where she has been living ever since. In 2005,
she was a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards in the Creative
Non-Fiction Category, and in 2006, she produced a documentary,
Walls Like Snakes for CBC Radio. Her memoir of her life
in Iran, Prisoner of Tehran, was published in Canada
by Penguin Canada in April 2007. Her website is http://www.marinanemat.com
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 18 or 19 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.
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.
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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