After I write these lines, Dara’s perspiring and provoked stream of consciousness cuts to an image of grueling march exercises at the military base. To the sound of masculine heaves, muscular booted legs rise in unison, and with the power that raised and ruined the Tower of Babel and the towers of Metropolis, they pound against the belly of Mother Earth. Now, Dara’s mind, in Remembrance of Things Past…, travels to a childhood memory of his grandmother. The old woman tells a seven-year-old Dara to stick his fingers in his ears.
“What do you hear, my boy?”
“It sounds like the wind …”
“No, press your fingers deeper into your ears. Listen! What do you hear?”
“It sounds like the roar of fire.”
“Excellent! This roaring fire is that same hell into which we descend for our sins. There are snakes there as long as streets from fear of which sinners take refuge with the dragons. Pits filled with boiling pungent water, our bodies blister, we burn to a crisp.”
Suddenly Dara feels a burning sensation in his hand. He jerks his arm away from its proximity to Sara’s bare arm which he has seen in his mind’s eye. Dara’s stream of consciousness continues, and here I must be able to write with even greater creativity than James Joyce, because the last effort made by Joyce, his Iranian translator, and his publisher to obtain a publishing permit for the Farsi translation of Ulysses met with failure. At the time, Mr. Petrovich, who tried to be lenient with Iranian writers and translators and wanted to somehow work out their problems, suggested that the stream of consciousness voiced by Molly, the female character who has visions of adultery, be printed in Italian in the Farsi translation. Thus, not only would the book not suffer heavy censorship, but the Iranian reader would not suffer sexual provocation … In Italian, not in English, because Italian is not a widely known language in Iran, and curious readers would not be able to quickly find a dictionary to translate the sentences and become sexually aroused.
Still, I have too many problems of my own to worry about Joyce’s publishing predicaments in Iran. One of my current problems is that in his room, as on so many other nights, Dara is suffering from insomnia. Sara’s voice still echoes in his ears and in his thoughts. He remains in a dreadful struggle with himself, so that other than Sara’s ankles, he imagines the rest of her body only in a coverall and headscarf. Not only because his sexual abstinence will otherwise be compromised, but because he believes that if he imagines Sara in any way other than what she herself has allowed, he will have betrayed her … and he finally concludes that to avoid being unfaithful to Sara’s image, he must try to drive her out of his mind. Therefore, as on so many other sleepless nights, Dara lies down on his back and stares at the white ceiling. If he can slowly forget the weight of his body, if he can concentrate, if he can stop himself from blinking even when his eyes begin to tear, after about an hour, little by little, magical colors will begin to emerge on the white of the ceiling like water stains, they will connect, and a full-color image will appear before his eyes. The image of a blind Al Pacino dancing with that beautiful stranger in Scent of a Woman. The scene has always brought tears to Dara’s eyes. Years ago, one of his dreams was to see this film, and his other favorite films, on a large screen with surround sound so that he could enjoy the full frame of the film and the director’s work. Yet, in the past twenty years, Dances with Wolves has been one of the very few American films that has been screened in movie theaters in Iran. Of course, after having been censored. Therefore, it is impossible for Dara to see the beautiful dance of a blind man with a stunning woman on a movie screen. However, one of Dara’s secrets is that he doesn’t need to go to the cinema ever again. For him, the magic of cinema, not the magic that you see on IMAX screens around the world but the real magic of cinema, started several years ago. It started when he served seven months in solitary confinement.
You most likely have no concept of the agony and horror of a solitary prison cell, and by no means do I want to reproach you for this. In fact, I want to congratulate you for having led such a civilized life that you have no understanding of what solitary confinement is like. Anyhow, as I write these sentences, I find it likely that at some point in time I will be confined to a solitary cell for having written them. I don’t know whether I can find a way to survive and not to break in a windowless cell so small that one cannot sleep with outstretched legs.
Dara was arrested for renting and selling videotapes of banned and immoral films.
Now you may say:
So your story’s Dara is not as squeaky clean and as upstanding a character as you have described, because he used to deal in porno films.
You are wrong. Dara was renting out and selling copies of cinematic masterpieces, and only films by his favorite directors, such as John Ford, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Antonioni, Bergman, Kubrick, Polanski, Oliver Stone, Jarmusch, David Lynch, and …
Now ask:
Do you really mean to tell us Dara was thrown in solitary confinement for selling and renting artistic masterpieces of the cinema?
So that I can answer:
No. In my beloved land no one is sentenced to solitary confinement for distributing banned films, unless he is believed to be an agent of the CIA or MI5 and on a mission to destabilize the moral, cultural, and religious values of the Iranian society, and particularly if he has previously been implicated in antirevolution activities. Please don’t say anything. I know the plot has become more snarled. We must therefore visit the past. As I mentioned earlier, the story is that, years ago, Dara was arrested for being a member of a leftist political party, and he was sentenced to two years in prison. While in prison, he had signed several sworn statements that after his release he would no longer participate in any political or antirevolution activities. On his second day of freedom, Dara visited the Fine Arts College of Tehran University to see what his status as a student was. Prior to his arrest, he had completed all the required credits for film direction. To earn his degree, he had only to hand in his thesis, a comparative and semiotic study of The Trial, directed by Orson Welles, and The Trial, written by Franz Kafka.
At the college, no file or record belonging to a former student named Dara M. can be found. After searching for some time, the impatient newly hired clerk returns to his desk, looks suspiciously at Dara, and asks:
“What did you say your name was?”
“Dara … Dara M., … brother.”
In those days, it was quite common and highly advisable for a man to be addressed as “brother” and a woman as “sister,” instead of “sir” or “madam.”
The clerk behaves as though he is dealing with a deranged lunatic.
“Are you sure that is your name?”
“Yes, brother.”
“What kind of a name is Dara? You should go to the General Register Office tomorrow and change it. They have a list of all the good names there. In case you don’t already know, Dara was the name of a tyrant, pagan, idolater king who used to attack Arabia and capture Muslims seven hundred years ago. He used to pierce a hole in their shoulders and run a rope through it so that they wouldn’t escape.”
Dara, trying to mask his anger, says:
“First of all, Dara was king about two thousand years ago. Second, at the time, the Prophet of Islam had not even been born. Third, Dara was not a pagan, and as a matter of fact, Alexander, who attacked Iran and brought about Dara’s death, is the one who was the idolater. Fourth, the king who pierced holes in the Arabs’ shoulders was Shapour. And if only he had not done so, the Arabs would have escaped, tasted freedom, and later a group of them would not have created the Baath Party and Al Qaeda …”
Dara stops himself. The new clerk is glaring at him with a look that suggests:
Kid, your words are bigger than your mouth.
Still, Dara continues:
“Fifth, when I was born, the name Dara was in first-grade textbooks.”
The clerk bursts into laughter:
“So, little Dara, you’re still in fir
st grade. Why are you here saying you were a university student. Get out of here and don’t bother me again.”
Dara protests:
“Sir, why are you making fun of me? I was a student at this college two years ago.”
The clerk raises his voice:
“Listen, boy, you dimwit, how many times do I have to tell you, we did not and do not have a student named Dara M. I spent a lot of time looking for your name in the computer system, and then I searched through all the archived files.”
He shows Dara his dust-covered hands. From his pocket, Dara pulls out his transcripts, all with excellent grades, and shows them to the clerk.
The clerk glances at the documents and throws them down on his desk.
“I will do you a favor and ignore these scraps of paper.”
“Brother, I don’t need you to do me any favors. These are documents that this very college gave to me.”
“Now I’m sure you’ve lost your mind. Look here, I can simply call security and have them arrest you.”
“On what charge?”
“On the charge of forging confidential university documents.”
“But these documents are authentic. Look, they have the seal and signature of the university president.”
The clerk carefully examines the seal and signature of the university president.
“Forget it! The brother who used to be the university president was dismissed last year, and now he’s a ticket agent at some cinema. Go see him, maybe he’ll give you a job.”
“Then you agree that these documents are not forgeries.”
“Don’t insist that I agree. If I do, I will have to call university security to come and arrest you.”
“On what charge?”
“Theft. Do you know how long the prison sentence is for stealing government documents?”
“You mean to suggest that I stole my transcripts from the university archives?”
“Yes. Precisely.”
“Well, if I stole these transcripts from the university archives, then I must have been a student here.”
“No, you were not, because we only trust the documents that we ourselves have.”
“If I accept that I stole my transcripts from the university, then you must accept that I was a student here.”
“Who do you think you are to tell me what I should or should not accept?”
“First of all, I’m not telling, I’m truly asking. Second, I am a nobody, I’m not even a human being, I am these scraps of paper that prove I was a student here.”
The clerk pounds his fist on his desk.
“No, you were not. According to our documents you were not.”
“Then put it in writing and give it to me.”
“I can’t do that. If I do, starting tomorrow there will be a thousand crazies like you lined up here asking for affidavits that they were not students here.”
Dara finally loses his temper and yells:
“I will file a complaint. I will go to the university president and file a complaint.”
“Go see any idiot you want.”
Their quarrel escalates. Now Dara is yelling like a madman and flailing his arms. Two other newly employed clerks come to their colleague’s aid and, not so politely and not so impolitely, they throw Dara out of the building. Confused, shaking with anger, with eyes ready to cry out of despair, Dara sits next to the box trees of Tehran University. He is sitting exactly where years later a hunchback midget will fall and hit his head against a cement edge … Dara watches the students walking out of the old college buildings of Tehran University with envy. He doesn’t know Mr. Petrovich, otherwise he would have recognized him among the doctoral students of literature, who, with his Chinese-made Samsonite briefcase, wearing telltale facial stubble and a white untucked shirt, haughtily distances himself from the undergraduate students.
And Dara sees Jafar ibn-Jafri, hefty tomes in hand, heading toward the College of Physics. A smile of recognition appears on the man’s lips, but he quickly regrets this and turns away from Dara. Dara sighs:
“What should I do? What should I do?”
He is starting to think that perhaps he never was a university student and that all the sweet memories he has are fantasies from his prison days. But just as he begins to doubt even his own name and wants to head home to see whether he has only imagined their house, too, someone calls his name from the other side of the box trees. Dara peeks behind the trees and sees one of the old college employees sitting there. Trying to keep his voice down, and without looking at Dara, the old employee hurriedly says:
“Don’t look at me, boy. Sit right there with your back turned to me and just listen.”
Dara sits back down and listens to the old employee whisper.
“You dimwit! What did you come here for? You’ve been expelled from the university. Don’t make unnecessary trouble for yourself. Go home and think of something else to do with your future.”
Dara bursts into tears.
“But I studied here for six years. All my grades were excellent.”
“Whatever … I took a risk out of sympathy and came here to give you some advice … Don’t cry, you’re a man. Men don’t cry. Get up and go home; and don’t tell anyone I talked to you. Many of the old employees were purged. My file is on the purging committee’s desk, too. Go and be strong, boy … Good-bye.”
Dara followed the old employee’s advice and decided to be strong and to not be a burden to his family. He set out to look for work. But month after month as he grew stronger, he realized more and more that finding a job was impossible. Hoping to find work in his favorite field of study, he naïvely applied to the television stations, but as soon as they found out that he used to be a political prisoner they politely showed him the door. Dara applied to the filmmaking studios hoping that perhaps they would give him a job on one of their productions, those very films that he considered mundane and moronic. (In those days, the creative directors of Iranian cinema were restricted to their homes and barred from working.) After the film production companies, Dara headed for the advertising agencies, those very agencies that he had in the past deemed to be the makeup artists for the vulgar face of the bourgeoisie. By now he was no longer a Communist, nor was he a socialist or a liberal. In other words, he had successfully become a man with no political convictions. Even at home, when his mother would complain about the rising cost of life’s necessities, Dara would say:
“Mother! You too? This is all a rumor spread by the antirevolutionaries. According to government statistics, inflation in Iran is only five percent, which is quite normal.”
Of course, without his mother noticing, he would try to eat less bread and rice.
In any case, when Dara gave up hope of ever finding a proper job, he thought of turning to the illegal occupation of selling and renting movies. At the time, movie theaters that had survived the torchings of the early days of the revolution were facing bankruptcy because screening Western films was banned, and the state-operated television stations, other than a few mind-numbing series and talk shows on morality and ethics, kept rerunning a handful of old movies. Even if they wanted to broadcast new films, they couldn’t. The station managers, as well as we, the Iranian population, had newly discovered that there are very few films in the world that do not feature women, and fewer yet in which women adhere to the Islamic dress code.
As a result, while VCRs and videotapes were banned, a significant number of Iranians owned a decrepit Sony T7 or a newer VCR model. From Dara’s point of view, his work was neither illegal nor immoral, because unlike the underground networks that dealt in American action movies, porno films, and trashy films made in India and Hong Kong, he only sold and rented copies of the world’s cinematic masterpieces. The problem, however, was that he had very few clients interested in his films, and their numbers were dwindling by the day. Apparently, tastes were changing, and some Iranians were growing particularly fond of a certain genre of shoddy Iranian movies made before the
revolution. During the Shah’s regime, these films were often made in only a week and featured characters that were by and large thugs, lowlifes, and prostitutes, and they generally featured scenes of the thugs drinking in cheap cabarets with half-naked fat women singing and dancing, followed by a brawl between the drunken thugs. Oftentimes, a dancing girl or prostitute would fall in love with the knife-wielding thug and would regret her profession. Then the chivalrous thug would beat the mean thugs to a pulp and he would take the dancer or prostitute to a holy place and pour the water of repentance over her head and they would get married and live happily ever after.
It was under such circumstances that Dara believed his work to be a truly valuable cultural endeavor, and he was sure that if he were ever arrested, as soon as the officers saw his inventory of films, they would actually commend him. But one night as he was leaving a client’s home on foot, a patrol car from the Campaign Against Social Corruption pulled up next to him. The officers searched his bag and discovered seven video tapes. The Trial, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Z, Blowup, the uncensored version of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Bahram Beizai’s Downpour, and the animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
If Dara, during his interrogation at the bureau of the Campaign Against Social Corruption, had cooperated, expressed regret, and written down the names and addresses of all his clients on the investigation report, he would have been sentenced to only a few months in prison, or sixty or seventy whiplashes, or just a monetary fine. Contrary to his assumptions, the interrogator was not a harsh man. He was a young man, about the same age as Dara, who wore prescription glasses with very thick lenses. In a dark and dank room, he sat behind a rusty metal desk covered with dents. Dara stood in front of the desk. The interrogator looked into his innocent eyes with kindness and curiosity and in a gentle voice said:
Censoring an Iranian Love Story Page 9