Seriously, why do we love the stories of resistance against tyrants?
The Tragedy of Ferydoun (qamnūme-ye fereydūn, in Persian) is the latest summer sensation in the 2017 Iranian cultural scene. Written by Peyman Ghadimi, the bestseller is an audio story featuring some very popular Iranian cinema stars who voice act in the play. Hossein Alizadeh, a globally praised Iranian musician, has composed the breathtaking score for the musical.
The tragedy tells the story of a village where people, including the protagonist, Fereyduon, and his beloved, Hicha Gol, are happily living in peace. Fereydoun is fond of joy and in love with Hicha’s smile. One day, the story’s later villain, Mirza Ghashamsham comes to the village to take Hicha away with him — most probably to marry her, albeit the purpose remains unspecified. Outraged by Gahshamsham’s move, Fereydoun publicly shames his romantic rival and, with the help of his fellow villagers, kicks him out of the village. Deeply afflicted and disgraced, defeated in the romantic competition and irreparably offended, Mirza Ghashamsham returns later with a decree from a higher authority assigning him as the new head of the village. Despite Fereydoun’s open objection and bold disobedience, the village’s headman, Kadkhoda, swears his allegiance to Ghashamsham and compels the scared others to follow him and do whatever the new head says. Villagers are promised to be rewarded by God, if they obey Ghashamsham’s orders. Fereydoun’s attempt at questioning Ghashamsham’s legitimacy is futile. Ghashamsham is now the village’s new leader. As the first order of business, to spite Fereydoun and Hicha, the other two vertices of the romantic triangle, Ghashamsham forbids laughter and orders villagers to be sad at all times. As Ghashamsham instills the fear of otherworldly punishment in the heart of villagers, the joyous haven where their village once was suddenly turns into a sad, depressed place. Melancholy takes laughter’s place. One day, after Fereydoun attempts to start a rebellion to restore laughter on people’s lips, so he can see Hicha’s smile again, Ghashamsham’s people arrest him. Unable to bribe him out of his position, the interrogator goes to Ghashamsham for guidance and comes back to the prison with Fereydoun’s death sentence in hand. The executioner hangs Fereydoun at the next day’s dawn. In his will, written in the form of a last letter to Hicha, Fereydoun asks her not to weep and mourn when she learns about his death. Upon reading the letter, Hicha takes off her dark outfit, puts on a colorful dress, and laughs. Fereydoun is the standing, tall tree that wishfully falls so fellow humans can turn it to firewood to warm their houses and hearts.
The tragedy, told in the tradition of oral literature, immediately reminds the audience of a massively famous pre-Revolutionary play, The Town of Tales. Still extremely popular, The Town of Tales hasn’t lost its lure as a robust social critique decades after its production. Existing in multiple formats, from an audio story to a stage play and from an animation to a cinematic film, The Town of Tales, a fable about social conformity, has been conveying a political message to its audience for decades — a message that has proved to be valid both prior to and after the 1979 Revolution. Listeners to The Tragedy of Fereydoun have likewise been fast to interpret the story as a political criticism. They have quickly deciphered its symbolism, gone beyond the play’s imaginary land and fictive characters, and linked it to actual events and real people. They’ve been listening to the story as if it’s a contemporary tale of democratization attempts and resistance against tyranny in Iran.
But, the aesthetics of the artistic work — the music, lyrics, and voice acting — aside, is the story’s received political message — that we should resist tyranny with whatever it takes — really the reason why people have liked the story to a great extent? Maybe… However, probably there is another, radically different reason too that can justify the musical’s popularity. A reason we, the listeners, don’t like to admit.
Upon a closer reading of the work, one can see that although seemingly about honest-to-goodness, oppressed people of the village, the play unconsciously reveals the oppressive attitudes of the villagers too. Is it possible that we, the audience, at a different, more subconscious level, relate to the little tyrants dwelling within the minds of the freedom-seeking villagers? In other words, can not it be true that we are on the side of the oppressed, not despite but because of, we admire the villagers’ innocent tyranny? Don’t we both foster modern democratic values and support the traditional organization of the society, linked in our views to tyranny?
For one, the freedom-seeking people of the village are, at least to the extent we learn from the story, patriarchally-minded. Women are not present in the public life of the village. They are not at the town square, meydoun, when Mirza Ghashamsham arrives. They watch what is taking place to the village and its people from rooftops. They play no active part in the solution Fereydoun formulates in his last letter to Hicha. In his plan to end the tyranny of Ghashamsham, Fereydoun writes in his letter that the village’s men (and not women) should unite. Also, Hicha, whom it might be argued is mainly valued for her beauty (smile), needs to be passively protected by a man of the same local roots and blood, Fereydoun, from a threatening foreigner, Ghashamsham. Hicha’s purity as well as the purity of the village must be guarded from the harm of a foreigner. What Hicha and the village have in common, in other words, is that, at least prior to Ghashamsham’s arrival, they are both purely beautiful or beautifully pure. Ghashamsham’s arrival at the village threatens the chastity of both the beloved motherland and the beloved Hicha. The living, female body of Hicha stands for the land mass and boundaries of the village, whereas the dead body of Fereydoun represents the male defenders of the same village. Never in the play does Hicha, or any other women for that matter, stand up for the villagers’ rights. Likewise, all that mothers do is to mourn the death of their sons, the village defenders— supposedly died to protect the village, their mothers, sisters, and wives — while carrying their corpses on their shoulders to the village’s cemetery.
When it comes to the art of government, it seems that Ghashamsham, indisputably a true tyrant, respects (or pretends to respect) legal procedures. He arrives at the village with a decree in hand that has the force of law. When he wants to have Fereydoun executed, he issues a written decree (hokm) and justifies the sentence with an accusation, albeit a bogus one. On the other hand, the villagers seem to rely on a more traditional means of governing and managing conflicts. In a short scene at the village’s coffeehouse, an elder go-between urges the disputing parties involved in a conflict seemingly over water resources to kiss one another’s cheeks to end the dispute, because “it’s unpropitious if they remain unfriendly.” The conflict ends, as they usually do, with a silencing “congratulations” followed by a salavaat, an invocation made by saying a certain phrase praising the Prophet, with the explicit goal of preventing further arguments, so the two sides agree with whatever decision the mediator, usually an elder person, makes. Also, while Mirza, the title preceding Ghashamsham’s name, marks, among other things, a literate or bureaucrat, making him theoretically a fit for the job, it sounds Fereydoun is jobless with no properties whatsoever: “Neither a herd of animals, nor a garden, a farm, a piece of land or an adobe; neither a horse, nor a donkey.” He is, to be blunt, a wanderer, an idler (allāf).
If traditional mediation is used to settle disputes among locals, bullying is the means for settling conflicts between locals and foreigners. When Ghashamsham comes to take Hicha away, Fereydoun gets the people of the village together and they collectively ridicule and bully him out of the village.
Ido not, of course, mean to imply that Ghashamsham is the true hero or Fereydoun is the actual villain. Let’s be clear: Ghashamsham is a ruthless tyrant and Fereydoun is a freedom fighter who sacrifices his life for a great cause. But is not it interesting — and if I may say, paradoxical — that the audience of the work — those whom, at the risk of being stereotypical, I would characterize as well-to-do, middle class, cosmopolitan Tehranis who waited for hours in line at a culture center in an affluent North Tehran neighborhood to get their expensive signed limited-edition copies of the play — find themselves on the side of a traditionally-minded, patriarchally protective, jobless idler? If asked outside the context of the story, they would express a sharp disapproval of anti-modern procedures, values, and institutions Fereydoun and other villagers represent, including patriarchy, traditional mediation, promotion of purity, and non-participation in economic production. Other than their passion for freedom, the audience of the work would agree with none of the villagers’ values, if directly asked. They would see no commonalities between their own democratic, cosmopolitan values and the oppressive values of those for whom women have no place in the public life or bullying is considered an appreciated means for responding to disputes.
Why do we love the stories of resistance against tyranny? The aesthetic qualities of the musical aside, which one is the textual reason why the audience has been receiving the work so positively: the explicit narrative of a defiant young person fighting the extreme tyranny of a dictator or the implicit narrative revealing the oppressive qualities in the oppressed — that the honest villagers are in fact themselves small-scale, albeit non-governing, dictators of sorts? I think it’s both, though we tend to only acknowledge the former and overlook the latter. Although not admitting it openly, do we, at least at a subconscious level, not enjoy that people who fight for their freedom found new or salvage old hierarchies — hierarchies that are oppressive toward others?
In reality, there are opposites in this messy world of us, many of them in fact, that are destined for one another — like freedom and tyranny that are, despite our denial, being produced and reproduced in tandem and we seem to be content with it as long as it is us who benefit from the salvaged or newly founded hierarchies. In his book, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity, Joshua Gamson, for instance, shows how some nonconforming groups gained “acceptability” at the expense of other nonconforming groups: gays and lesbians were normalized on the US TV talk shows at the expense of bisexual and transgendered people, who were portrayed as abnormal, because they either did not follow the natural rules of monogamy or did not recognize the truth of anatomy. The freedom of one group therefore came, not despite, but because another group was repressed. Gamson (1998, p. 135) writes: “Bisexuals and transgendered people pay the price for daytime television’s progay moral cheerleading. The moral defense of homosexuality, in fact, is shaped by the frequent dismissal of transgendered and bisexual people on TV talk.”
Similarly, in the early years after the 1979 Revolution in Iran, when there were calls for a ban on music, because it was considered to be an illegitimate form of entertainment linked to the intoxicating cultural policies of the pre-Revolutionary regime, traditional Iranian musicians started to brand their own type of music as an “authentic,” (asīl) “distinguished” (fāxer) art form that should not be outlawed. They kept their own form of art legal (mojāz) by portraying the pop music created by some of their fellow musicians as “vulgar” (mobtazal) and a sign of “Westoxification” (qarbzadegī) — an inauthentic non-art that deserves to be outlawed (qeyr-e mojāz). Traditional Iranian musicians did not object, as one may expect, the proposed ban on music as a whole. They created a new hierarchy in which their own music represented a superior form of art, diverted existing accusations to pop music, the newly-created inferior type, and gained acceptability by disowning some of their fellow artists. Several years later, when it was pop music’s turn to gain acceptability and be legally produced inside Iran, pop musicians did the same to another group of musicians. They helped the legitimization of their art by creating a narrative in which the pop music produced by Iranian musicians in diaspora (mūsīqī-ye losānjelesī) was condemned: if you, the government, let us produce our own pop music inside Iran, Iranian youth will not fall prey to the music produced by those who escaped the country after the Revolution — the morally depraved remnants of the evil culture fostered by the previous regime! Again, acceptance was gained at the expense of another group’s delegitimization.
These examples are only a few instances that show the human condition is anything but straightforward. Our world is full of opposites that are destined for one another: freedom and tyranny, acceptability and silencing, legitimization and outlawing… Want another example? How about a contemporary tragedy told with the help of a depressing music with the goal of propagating joy and happiness?!
Gamson, J. (1998). Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Originally published here.