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Censorship as its own art form: 'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' by Shahriar Mandanipour (review LA Times)
Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Sat 05 Sep 2009 09:43 AM PDT
'Censoring an Iranian Love Story' by Shahriar Mandanipour
In the novel, a writer tries to tell a tale of romance in spite of, and sometimes with inspiration from, the censor.
By Susan Salter Reynolds
Censorship is an endlessly fascinating subject; a puzzle box, a Russian
nesting doll in which the writer's truth is buried and often lost.
Czeslaw Milosz's 1953 classic "The Captive Mind" revealed the insidious
and creative ways that censorship enters and inhabits the mind of the
artist. Shahriar Mandanipour, an Iranian film critic and the editor of
a literary journal in Iran, was not allowed to publish fiction from
1992 to 1997. He came to the United States in 2006. "Censoring an
Iranian Love Story" is his first book published in English. In this
novel, a writer (also named Shahriar Mandanipour and the author's alter
ego) tries to write the story of Sara and Dara, a young couple in love,
and finds himself in a metaphorical burka. He is forced to change his
story, characters and dialogue to comply with the restrictions of the
Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in the person of a
Dostoevskian character, Mr. Petrovich.
"I am an Iranian writer tired of writing dark and bitter stories," he
tells his reader, "stories populated by ghosts and dead narrators with
predictable endings of death and destruction. I am a writer who at the
threshold of fifty has understood that the purportedly real world
around us has enough death and destruction and sorrow, and that I did
not have the right to add even more defeat and hopelessness to it with
my stories." The key word here is, of course, "purportedly."
Censorship, seen as its own art form, is just another way of messing
with reality. It's hard enough to generate one's own ideas without
having someone else's superimposed over them, but the fictional
Mandanipour tries. Nonetheless, things are crossed out, political and
sexual, that will prevent his book from being published. He finds
soaring metaphors to replace simple, yet offensive actions. "In each
other's eyes they read many unspoken and unthinkable words," begins one
section, and then the following, crossed out: "words of repressed
yearnings and desires. And in each other's eyes they see images of
forbidden words, words such as 'kiss,' 'pomegranate,' 'milk and honey,'
and 'oyster.' " He writes a love story that is convincingly, achingly
impossible in a place where men and women cannot even look at each
other in public. The effect (as every good Victorian understood) is
deliriously sensual prose. Even Mr. Petrovich falls in love with the
woman in the story. She is that unrealistic. He asks the writer if he
could somehow meet her. "No," says Mandanipour, "If you wanted, for
example, to meet Anna Karenina, I could perhaps find a way, but. . . . "
The point here is that the whole endeavor is ridiculous and the people
who impose these laws are fools. The only thing a writer can do is
treat the censorship like a new form, a villanelle or a sonnet. Dara's
initial declaration of love for Sara is encoded in a banned book, "The
Blind Owl." Dara places purple dots under certain letters to spell out
his message. This playfulness, the simple recognition of language as
code and symbol, has exactly the opposite effect intended by the
censors: "It is thus that Iranian writers have become the most polite,
the most impolite, the most romantic, the most pornographic, the most
political, the most socialist realist, and the most postmodern writers
in the world." Mandanipour acknowledges that there are many kinds of
censorship, for example the cultural censorship exerted by feminists
over text they find offensive, or the intellectual censorship of
critics. He faces many practical challenges to please his gatekeepers,
for example, how to create a foul-mouthed thug without using foul
language. Sometimes he uses stream of consciousness and other tricks to
throw his censor off the scent. "With this method, I hope to softly
tiptoe around the walls of Mr. Petrovich's cleverness and arrive at the
wide-open plains of my reader's imagination and intelligence."
While the writer is fascinated and forced to be creative, the lovers
are frustrated and afraid. They begin to argue. "How can you keep
silent when they have forced this headscarf on my head?" Sara asks, her
words redacted. Mandanipour's story begins to fall apart. "The
characters are each playing a different tune without being able to
collectively create symphonic harmony. I have to think of something. I
have to do something." The writer has traveled too far on the thin
branch of irony. In an effort to understand his captor (for that is
what the censor effectively becomes), he loses control of his story.
But only for a moment. In making Mr. Petrovich fall in love with Sara,
Mandanipour has triumphed. A "perfect and beautiful story," he warned
his censor, "is the most dangerous story."