Persepolis: A View into the Iranian Revolution

"War. Revolution. Family. Punk Rock. All part of growing up."

For this week's blog (the final one!), I watched "Persepolis", a autobiographical film about a young woman's upbringing in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Marjane Satrapi originally wrote a graphic novel that turned into the poignant, honest, and endearing film that is "Persepolis."

Marjane's story starts just before the Islamic Revolution overthrows the Shah's regime, and the country is thrown into turmoil. Although her family is initially in favor of the regime change, they quickly realize its repressive nature, particularly because of the imprisonment and assassination of Marjane's beloved uncle. But spunky Marjane fights back in her own way, nursing a love for forbidden punk rock. Her nature is so worrisome to her parents that they send her to Austria to complete her schooling. Marjane's story may be her own, but it represents the struggle of so many Iranians dealing with the revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the tearing apart of a society they once knew.

While Marjane's parents adore her rebellious nature (although they are also extremely worried about her safety,) the religious teachers are not as keen on her renegade behavior.

In an article complimentary to "Persepolis" is by Homa Hoodfar and Fatemeh Sadeghi-Givi. They write on the post-1979 women's movement in Iran. After the Islamic Revolution, they claim, women lost the minimal rights they had won under the shah, and many more. Some of the first laws passed by the new regime devalued women's life to only half of men's, made two female witnesses equal to one male, and instated a Muslim orthodox version of family law. Hoodfar and Sadeghi-Givi look at the challenges the women's rights movement faces in contemporary Iran. Most importantly, the "efforts to build solidarity across classes were spearheaded by feminist leaders" (Hoodfar, Sadgehi-Givi 5). In spite of the obstacles, this movement has shown its capacity to reach across class and ethnic divisions, over generations and even bridge ideological gaps.

Marjane Satrapi's story is a poignant example of the struggles people, and women in particular, face in Iran. Her coming of age story is reflective of the larger struggle of the Iranian people, and on a personal note, was my favorite of the semester.

Rana's Wedding; Jerusalem, Another Day

"When the abnormality of barriers and occupation becomes an everyday reality, love and marriage turn into fiction."

The tagline of Rana's Wedding, by Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, is an eerie window into the story of Rana, a young Arab woman living in occupied Jerusalem, who has ten hours to find her lover and marry him. Without success, she faces her father's demands: marry a chosen suitor from a list, or move with him to Egypt.

There were a number of elements in this film that I found particularly intriguing, first and foremost, the use of space. The day in Jerusalem and occupied Ramallah finds Rana in a panic, firstly she cannot find her lover, Khalil, and then when they face difficulties overcoming the physical obstacles in order to perform their wedding ceremony. In the first part of the film, Rana wanders aimlessly through the old city of Jerusalem. The walls of the old city act as a maze, confusing her both physically and emotionally.

Ever-present in the film are Israeli soldiers, always armed and often pointing their guns at Rana. In one scene toward the end of the film, Rana confesses to her friend how afraid she is, repeating it over and over again. Upon rising from the couch, she looks out the window to see a front of armed soldiers, blocking the demolition of a home. This lack of control that Rana holds over her surroundings speaks volumes about the message Abu-Assad is trying to convey.

Rana's Wedding is a beautiful and troubling film because it views very much like real life. The commentary on the helplessness that many Arab Palestinians, living both in and outside of Jerusalem, face, it stark and honest. A day in Rana's life, a day in her Jerusalem, may be just "another day", but for the viewers it is a window into a different and very difficult world.

Caramel

Caramel director Nadine Labaki, with the film's poster.

Caramel, a Lebanese film by Nadine Labaki, follows an incredible group of Beirut women through a warm and convincing narrative. Three young women work in a salon in a mixed, middle-class neighborhood of Beirut, where their love lives take center stage. Having just read Hall’s lengthy exploration of theories of representation, it is helpful to look at Caramel through a more critical eye.

Constructionist theories claims that meaning is constructed through language; things don’t mean, rather, we construct meaning through our language system. The scene that I have chosen to look at through this lens is the scene where the three young women and their older friend, Jamal, an aging actress, are taking a cab to a dr.’s office. Nisrine, a Muslim woman about to get married, is withholding a secret from her fiancé: she is not a virgin. The cab ride scene, without sound, would seem vivacious and bubbly, like many other scenes in the film; the girls are laughing, smiling. However, through their conversation we learn that they are on their way to a dr. to perform a procedure that will “make her a virgin” again, a customary requirement for Muslim women before marriage.

Through a constructionist theory, we see that the material world (4 outgoing women in a taxicab) does not construct any meaning. The language system, the conversation they are having about what fake name to assign Nisrine in the dr.’s office, is what gives the scene meaning. Constructionists say the meaning is a cultural construction; the fact that the women need to come up with a fake name is entirely a cultural concept. In a society, particularly for Muslim Nisrine, where modesty and propriety are valued almost above all-else, the women may seem to be jovial; really they are dealing with an intensely controversial issue in Lebanese society: sexuality before marriage.

Nisrine asserts that she wants a French name (which Layale teases her about because she can’t speak French). Nisrine is darker-skinned than the other women, who are Christian, not Muslim. The cultural meaning behind these social cues are without meaning if we ignore the language system. The constructionist representation theory gives insight to these hidden layers, meaningless without a constructed language system.

Representation, Language, and Culture

Stuart Hall, author of Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, believes that “representation connects meaning and language to culture” (15). And while at first glance this statement may confuse or confound ones ideas of representation, language, and culture, Hall goes on to artfully explain, through theories, critiques, and individual thinkers’ opinions, how the processes of production and exchange between members of a culture are irrevocably linked to how these are represented.

Without visual evidence to the various theories Hall explores, his authors may lose themselves in the theoretical aspect. However, his article is laden with images, to which the reader is supposed to apply a particular understanding of representation, such as constructionist theory, which articulates that things themselves don’t mean, rather, we construct meaning around them. In other words, the material world doesn’t convey meaning, the language system does (Hall 24).

In Viola Shafik’s courageous film Planting of Girls, 1998, she explores the controversial topic of female circumcision, or female genital mutilation (FGM) in Egypt. In this film perhaps more than any other we have viewed in the class up until now, representation is crucial to understanding the director’s goal. And while viewers can gain background information on the topic (in the 1990s around 95% of Egyptian women experienced FGM) the framing of the film relates directly to Hall’s examination of representation.

http://aphaih.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/february-6-international-no-tolerance-day-to-female-genital-mutilation/

Just as Hall’s analysis of the famous Velazquez painting, Las Meninas, shows that the image is not a “true” reflection but rather an imitation of reality, so too is Planting of Girls constructed around not only what you can see, but also what you can’t. The framing of Planting of Girls is difficult to understand; while the film was funded partly by UNICEF, there is still some debate about the intended audience of the film. I believe the West is the primary audience, that Shafik is drawing attention to an issue that is seldom understood outside the region. Still, like the theories that Hall draws us through in his chapter on representation, Shafik does not make a clear statement about how her film is to be viewed. Both, I believe, are leaving the ultimate conclusion up to us.

Ziba, married at age 15, grasps at any claim she can make to pursue a divorce, including insanity on the part of her husband

Divorce, Muslim Style

"Divorce Iranian Style", directed by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, is an expository documentary about the realities of divorce in Iran. Mir-Hossein and Longinotto were granted permission to film in a divorce court in Tehran; their film in particular shows the difficulties Iranian women face when trying to get a divorce. In her chapter “Rewriting Divorce in Egypt: Reclaiming Islam, Legal Activism, and Coalition Politics”, Singerman explains that in Egypt and in the Middle East in general, men have the unilateral right to divorce while it is much more difficult for women, who have to prove “harm” in some way, whether by desertion, imprisonment, sterility, or mental insanity. A number of cases in the film show women desperately trying to grasp at one of these reasons in order to divorce their husbands. Ziba, a schoolgirl who was married off by her parents at the age of 15, is searching desperately to the claim that her husband is insane and insists that he must be subject to a medical test.

Despite the restrictions women face under sharia, Islamic law, efforts have been made to reform family law, including divorce. Annelies Moors writes about the political change throughout the Muslim world in the 1990s that led to the ability to publicly discuss family law reform. Throughout the Muslim world, including Morocco, Mali, Yemen and Palestine, debates over family law were beginning to take place. Singerman looks specifically at Egypt, which passed the “Law on Recognition of Certain Terms and Procedures of Litigation in Personal Status Matters” in January 2000 and the coalition of “activists, lawyers, government officials, civic leaders, legislators and scholars” that pushed it through the courts (Singerman 162). She believes that without the help of lawyers and legal activists, it could not have passed.

Kecia Ali takes a strong stance on the issue of family law reforms, and I find her fascinating and compelling. She specifically focuses on the history of Islamic jurisprudence and believes that “there is not now, nor has there ever been, a single, unitary Islamic law” (Ali 167). While the Quran talks about dowry, polygamy, and certain paths to divorce, the regulations around marriage largely stem from sharia, which is interpretation. This role of human agency is key because it makes interpretation not divine, and therefore cannot be unilaterally applied.

In the film, the young daughter of the court secretary, Paniz, visits the court every day after school. My favorite part of the film is when she sits up in the judge’s seat and begins acting out an imaginary scene in front of her. She scolds invisible men for not treating their wives correctly and later, says she doesn’t want to marry because of what she has seen in court.

All of these different images of divorce in Islam paint a complicated and tumultuous picture. While some authors focus on the politics of divorce, such as Moors and Singerman, others, like Ali, analyzes the family law code as representative of the larger patriarchal system of marriage in Islam. "Divorce Iranian Style" adds visual images to the debate: the bureaucracy of the courts and the struggles of the women are powerful. Jamileh, whose husband was spending days at a time outside the home, supposedly with another woman, ends her segment by saying “if I respect him, he should respect me.” And Westerners should begin to respect the complexities that lie within Islamic jurisprudence.

The Veil.

It's impossible to look at issues of gender in the Middle East without addressing the veil; it is a visible sign manipulated by all different interest groups, organizations, political orientations, as well as outsiders, to boost an argument or prove a point. This week, amid blizzards and snowstorms of historic proportions in Washington, DC, I headed to the Middle East through readings by Leila Ahmed, Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, Feber Armanios and Homa Hoodfar, to look at this polemic and fascinating issue that is the veil and its representation.
Leila Ahmed, as always, takes a unique historical approach to analyzing the veil and its implications. She reminds the readers how colonial powers used the veil as a visual representation of the supposed degradation of women. As we saw in Hollywood Harems, a film by Tania Kamel Eldin, Middle Eastern women were portrayed in Hollywood as an indiscriminate group of all characteristics Chinese, Persian, Indian, as well as Arab. Furthermore, these women were often portrayed either as slaves or concubines. One aspect of these early Hollywood films I found particularly interesting was how the veil was used by the "saviors", typically Western men, to liberate these poor Arab women. The veil was often ripped off of these women's faces, revealing beautiful, and of course, grateful smiles beneath. Ahmed believes that this representation of the veil by colonial powers ignores the veil's other meaning, its "sign of propriety and a means of protection against the menacing eyes of male strangers" (Ahmed 11). Even in the contemporary Middle East today, women I know who work outside the home, control their own finances, and lead lives independent of their husbands, use the veil in public as a means of protection and seclusion from unknown males.
Sonbol's article looks at the legal system of Jordan and the injustices it poses to gender issues. A women, supposedly equal under the constitution, still requires a male guardian to stand by her in marriage, is denied full legal competence by the law, and can be denied access to work outside the home without permission of a guardian (usually father or husband.) She looks at the sources of Jordanian law to better understand this quandry, focusing on Islamic, tribal, European, and international law. She concludes that while Jordan's personal status law, like many other Muslim countries, is based on sharia, it is difficult to change with regard to gender because of its origins in the Quran and the Hadith. She also believes that there are large discrepancies between theory and application of this law.
Armanios looks at Coptic Christian society and the 6 million Coptic Orthodox Christians who live in Egypt. She examines the two representations of the female prototype, one as the wife/mother, who is the spiritual guardian of the family, and the other as the virgin/saint. The Virgin Mary is unique among women, because of her position as both a Mother and a Virgin. While I found the article interesting, I had never studied anything about the Coptic Orthodox community, I did not exactly see its relevance to the topic of the veil we were studying this week.
I did, however, enjoy Hoodfar's article, especially how she pointed out the history of the veil prior to Islam, that it was an honor reserved for upper class women. I think this point, along with Ahmed's article about the use of the veil as protection for women, poses some very interesting questions about the role of the veil during colonialism and its position among women during liberation and suffrage.