Censoring an Iranian Love Story

by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

  Fortunately, however, at least in Khosrow and Shirin’s story, the king does not wake up to the angry face of a Macedonian or a Mongol or an Afghan. Instead he sees his Shirin sleeping beside him like a flower; and at last, he begins the much-delayed labor.

  In an old Iranian text, about four hundred years ago, at a time when censorship was still not so powerful and institutionalized, in describing a scene of 66, an Iranian writer used weaponry and warfare metaphors quite successfully. He wrote: He raised the meaty mace and pounded it against the tallow shield.

  However, Nizami, that delicate-natured poet, did not favor such violence. He instead depicted scenes of lovemaking in this manner. Khosrow loses patience and begins to kiss and fondle Shirin. In other words, he begins to lick sweets and suck candy. Beside these comparisons, like the slow-motion replays of scored goals in sports matches, the poet again compares these actions to planting and gardening:

  At first he began gathering flowers,

  like blooms on that face laughter blossoms.

  …

  Then together, the poet and Khosrow begin picking fruits:

  Of apple and jasmine sugar-plums he made,

  at times with pomegranates and narcissus he played.

  …

  I assume you can discern the body parts that apple and jasmine represent. To increase your knowledge of fruitology, I reiterate that in Iranian literature, pomegranates are generally used to talk of, or not to talk of, small firm breasts that fit in one hand. Narcissus is generally a reference to beautiful eyes, but I doubt that Khosrow, at the height of his excitement, can be bothered to play with Shirin’s eyes. Therefore, narcissus could be a simile for Shirin’s orchid.

  The replay of the scored goal sometimes extends to wildlife:

  Now and then the white falcon the king’s grasp fled,

  now and then the pheasant upon his chest perched.

  …

  Now and then such pleasure came from flight,

  that the dove prevailed upon the hawk.

  …

  These verses are a work of genius in depicting a sex scene in which the woman is active.

  The doe and the lion together travailed,

  upon her at last the lion prevailed.

  …

  Then comes the act of plunging into the jewelry store:

  Wondrously to the treasure-trove’s depth he went,

  with his ruby her agate seal he rend.

  …

  Meaning Khosrow tore the agate seal of Shirin’s virginity.

  Then again we come to a description of Shirin’s food products, and we read of a boneless date, which means a seedless one, that penetrates her. No, it is not over yet. The account of their lovemaking now becomes slightly more human, and in very poetic, beautiful, and perfectly rhyming words we read that: a body has coiled around a body and a soul has reached a soul. No, it is still not over yet. In fact, it is time for the sea and scuba diving:

  An oyster cradled atop a coral horn,

  now water and fire together conjoin.

  …

  And at last it is over:

  From fire and water’s colorful scheme,

  with cinnabar and quicksilver the nuptial chamber teemed.

  …

  Meaning there is silver and cinnabar-colored water everywhere.

  The garden trekking, zoo traveling, fruit picking, and scuba diving of the two lovers takes an entire day and night, and then the two sleep for an entire day and night…

  This too is another discovery of why invaders could occupy our country so easily. When the king spends twenty-four hours in the flower bed, the garden, the zoo, and underwater, and then he sleeps for twenty-four hours, when does he ever find time to run the country?

  I hope that after this rather lengthy example, you have come to understand why censorship is so complicated in Iran and why Iranian literature, which is quite rich, is so difficult to translate and to read.

  Reading sixty-five hundred verses can take a long time, but Sara quickly finished the book. Contrary to her expectations, Dara’s letter in this book was very short:

  “Sara, you probably love Khosrow, a wealthy king, handsome, frivolous, and yet also a strong and brave man who has won many battles and wreaked havoc on the Romans. I don’t think you could love Farhad. A sincere, timid, and poor lover who kills himself when he loses hope of ever having Shirin. Yet he never cheated on his love in order to forget … But I think Khosrow and Farhad are two sides of the same coin. They complement each other. It is when the two are joined that they create a true lover …”

  The next book was Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was impossible for this politico-erotic novel to be among the books at the library. But Sara, following the instructions given to her in the letter, found it hidden behind a stack of dusty books by Avicenna, the legendary tenth-century Iranian philosopher and physician. She first deciphered the letter, and after reading it several times, she read the novel. She read ravenously and of course in many places she became terribly stressed. Many scenes in the book had been censored and replaced with the infamous ellipses.

  Two months have passed since Sara read that first novel, and now the curtains in her room are always open, except for times when she wants to change her clothes. The image of a beautiful girl sitting at the window of a beautiful house is a romantic and male-attracting scene throughout the world. As a result, Sara found a few new admirers. As soon as they saw her at the window, they would line up on the sidewalk across the street from her house and stare at her. But Sara was sure Dara was not among them, because they were all so boorish looking. Some of them were even vulgar; they would whistle at her, or they would make funny gestures with their hands, eyes, and lips. Sara’s father, a traditional man who took great care of his daughter’s untouched flower, had become extremely angry by the constant presence of the young men and had made up his mind to call the police. However, three days later, the pestering admirers had all disappeared.

  Sara was growing more restless and curious by the day to see Dara. Of course she herself had labeled her emotions as mere curiosity. She had created a vague image of his face in her mind and with the aid of her imagination she would add features to this hazy image, and this further fanned the flames of her curiosity.

  In the next letter she read:

  “Don’t worry about those pests. They don’t even dare walk past your house anymore. But you shouldn’t spend too much time sitting at the window either. Not that I don’t like it, but I’m afraid your next admirer may be a roughneck. My left eye is still bruised from one of them punching me … Why don’t you write to me? Haven’t I convinced you that you can trust me? What trouble could you get into if you only encode a few words to me? The letter won’t even be in your handwriting and you can completely deny it whenever you want …”

  A bruised left eye was a good clue. But she didn’t find Dara. Instead, she saw several women with bruised eyes or cheeks from the beatings of their husbands’ fists.

  She had completely given up hope when one day, near her house, she suddenly felt her heart explode and her knees weaken. It was walking toward her. A left eye with a conspicuous black bruise under it. Excited and embarrassed, Sara looked the other way. She even considered turning around and changing course. However, when she managed to regain her composure, she turned and looked at the young man’s face again. She recognized him. He was one of the pestering admirers who used to stand in front of her house. He would hold his thumb and pinky up against his ear mimicking a telephone and then he would point to the wall behind him where in red paint he had written his cell phone number and drawn a broken heart next to it. Sara was shocked and disappointed. She worried that this ugly, vulgar, and undignified man was the Dara of her dreams. The pestering admirer saw Sara, too. But he quickly turned around and with long and rapid strides walked in the opposite direction. In effect, he ran away. Sara breathed a sigh of relief. She was now certain that the man was not Dara. In th
at last moment before he turned around, Sara noticed the young man’s right eye. It too had a bruise under it.

  “Hello Sara,

  “Thank you for writing that two-sentence letter. I am truly honored. But it really did me in. By the time I searched every single page of War and Peace to find the fifty-nine letters you marked, my eyes were all swollen. Even Natasha wasn’t as mischievous as you. To make sure no one discovers your letter, even though it is very unlikely, I erased the dots and returned the book to the library; just the way all the dots from the letters I have sent to you have been erased. Life isn’t so pleasant these days. I may not be able to write to you or to even see you anymore. I used to be in prison. I was released on the condition that I would not leave the city. Once a week I have to go show myself and sign. These days, the more I swear that I am no longer involved in political activities, the more they suspect me. I have even confessed that I have fallen in love and now detest any and all ideologies, but … As always, I wish you happiness …”

  This was the last letter Sara decoded from the pages of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. This book too had been carefully hidden for her behind a stack of dusty books. Sara no longer saw a sign or a dot from Dara …

  Dara disappeared.

  Something was lost in Sara’s life. She felt lonelier than ever before. She read more novels and stories than ever before. She told herself that Dara had read them, too, or was reading them now. Unlike in the past, she looked at the faces of the people on the street; she felt she liked them because one of them may have spoken to Dara or perhaps knew him. She especially looked at the faces of the street peddlers, but she saw no sign of familiarity in their eyes. Sometimes she thought Dara may have had some sort of a physical handicap. Sometimes she thought Dara had tricked her, anyone else would have shown himself to her at least once … Until at last, on that spring day, in front of the main entrance of Tehran University, on the fringes of the impassioned student demonstrations, Dara introduced himself to her and their adventure began …

  Years before Sara and Dara’s first meeting, I had the honor of meeting Mr. Petrovich. In those days I was a young writer who in his solitude had spent years carefully reading novels and stories. I had even extracted the styles and techniques of all sorts of classical and modern writers from their books and had noted them on index cards. I had then concluded that every writer must have his own particular worldview and philosophy. I therefore read as many books on philosophy as I could. To successfully analyze my characters, I read the equivalent of a university degree in psychology. I had Freud and Jung and their followers in one hand, and Pavlov and his followers in the other, until I arrived at American psychology. Next, I told myself that a great writer will never become a great writer if he is not well versed in world history and politics. Therefore, as a social and literary responsibility, and despite my family’s trepidations, I chose political science as my field of study at the university. Before I left Shiraz for Tehran and Tehran University, my father, who was a wealthy self-made man, pulled me aside and said:

  “Look here, son, there’s no future for you in political science. The best jobs for political science graduates are at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But positions like ambassadorships and director generals and whatever else belong to the relatives of the Shah and his royal court. They won’t even make you a mere clerk.”

  My father was absolutely right, and that is why I disagreed with him. He went on to say:

  “What’s more, if you study political science, because you are a very emotional person, there is a good chance you will end up joining some antigovernment political group, you’ll become a Communist, an urban guerrilla, and you’ll end up having to deal with the secret police. By the time they’re done with you, if you are not executed or sentenced to life in prison, because of the hot baked potatoes and the Coca-Cola bottles they have shoved up your ass, you’ll be walking funny for the rest of your life … Go to America, study engineering or medicine, and become the pride of your family and your country.”

  At the time, I could not tell my father that I did not want to become a Communist, nor did I want to be an ambassador … Therefore, against his advice, I went and studied political science. I wanted to go as far as a doctorate degree, but first came the revolution, then the war, and I who wanted to become a great writer told myself that many of the world’s great writers have experienced war, and so I signed up for military service and volunteered to go to the front. The first outcome of the Iran-Iraq War was millions of dead and disabled; the second outcome was that right after peace was established we realized that we were two Muslim countries and therefore brothers. It seems the war also wanted to offer the world another great writer, and for this reason, after eighteen months, it sent me back to my hometown, Shiraz, alive and well. And I, who even in the trenches had spent my time reading novels from the farthest reaches of the world—The Soul Enchanted, David Copperfield, Moulin Rouge, Resurrection, and … and … and had not stopped the exercise of writing, was fully armed and ready to write my first masterpieces and to present them to the world.

  Ask me:

  Was all this self-praise, as with other bigheaded writers, just to claim you are a great writer?

  And I will answer:

  You are wrong again. No, I didn’t say all this to suggest that I am a great writer. I said it all to explain why I have not become a great writer. In other words, I want to say that I was just another young man with Great Expectations of my future as a writer. In 1990, I was thrilled to learn that on the advice of Hooshang Golshiri, one of Iran’s great writers, a reputable private publisher had agreed to publish the second collection of my short stories, titled The Eighth Day of the Earth. Every day I sat waiting for the telephone to ring so that I could hear my publisher’s voice telling me that my book had been printed. I waited for almost a year, until one day I finally heard his voice on the telephone.

  “Shahriar! We’re screwed! I’m ruined … The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has complained of thirteen separate points in your book—all sexy words and phrases … You have to come to Tehran. What a mistake I made investing in a young writer. My capital … I’m ruined!”

  I kept thinking, When did I ever write sexy stories? I could not come up with an answer, so I quickly got on the bus and headed for Tehran. The six-hundred-mile road between Shiraz and Tehran passes by the two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old ruins of Persepolis, it passes by Isfahan, one of the most beautiful cities in Iran which some five hundred years ago served as the capital city of the Safavid Dynasty, it passes by the religious city of Qom, which is the center for educating and producing clergymen, and it passes by two great deserts as well. During the night, when the two opium-addicted bus drivers would change shifts somewhere in the divide between the two deserts, I had ample time to calculate how many pages of the book had to be replaced in order to revise thirteen sentences on thirteen different pages. I concluded that approximately one hundred ninety thousand pages had to be replaced.

  You will likely say:

  Don’t ridicule us! Like all bad writers, some of whom even become best sellers, you too take your readers for fools! What is this? You who claim to have prepared and armed yourself to become a great writer, didn’t you know anything about mathematics?

  As a matter of fact, not only had I studied mathematics, but I had even hammered into my head The Meaning of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by Russell. It is you who lack knowledge of mathematics … Look here! These were the early postrevolution days when publishers would request a permit for a book to leave the print shop after it had actually been printed, and three thousand copies of this sinister book had been printed and bound and were waiting for their exit permit from the print shop. My publisher had explained that to change one word or one sentence on one page, sixteen pages of a book had to be replaced because books are printed in sixteen-page forms. Now let’s assume that to revise thirteen sexy phrases, four sixteen-page forms had to be extracted from the b
ook.

  Four multiplied by sixteen makes sixty-four. Now sixty-four multiplied by three thousand.

  It is your turn to calculate. Even without accounting for the cost of ink and the salaries of the print shop employees, figure out how much oil must be extracted from the belly of my beloved motherland and sold and its oil dollars sent to Brazil to purchase paper, and how many trees in Brazil have to be sacrificed to make all this paper.

  A book for which so much damage is inflicted on nature, whether a masterpiece or trash, is a murderer.

  Now I understand why I was inspired to name the book The Eighth Day of the Earth. And now I understand that if God had not stopped to rest after he created the world and had instead taken on the toil of writing stories and novels himself, there wouldn’t be so much damage done to the beauties of the nature he created.

  In any case, on an autumn day when the air in Tehran was a mix of carbon monoxide, the scent of rain, and the fleeting perfume of a girl who years later would be named Sara, I, with all my ambition, climbed on the back of my publisher’s dilapidated motorcycle and together we headed for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. The rain had just stopped. Mud and slime flew at us from the wheels of passing cars. We rode past Tehran University. There were no demonstrations in front of its main entrance because by then all antigovernment students had been purged, and the preferred students had already enrolled. Of course, much later, they too would become opponents of the government.

  On our perilous journey through the terrifying jungle of Tehran’s traffic, my publisher was thinking that if instead of publishing literature and supporting stupid young storytellers he had published guidebooks for wise young people on passing university entrance exams, especially for the engineering and medical schools, he would have been rich by now, and instead of riding this ten-year-old Yamaha, he would be driving a brand-new Mercedes. And I was telling myself that if instead of all this labor for literature, I had listened to my father and studied engineering or medicine in the United States, instead of this dilapidated motorcycle, I would be driving a Porsche, and I would have stopped in front of this publisher’s bookstore, and just to make him happy, I would have bought precious yet unpopular books for my private library. But the truth is, I was ashamed. It was no small sin that in an Islamic country thirteen sexy phrases had been discovered in a one-hundred-forty-page book. At last, with such thoughts of Fathers and Sons and Crime and Punishment, in an office in the grand and majestic headquarters of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, like two Joseph K.’s we sat facing Mr. Petrovich.