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Verbal Hygiene: The 2008 Purification of a 1921 Iranian Ballad

What does the omission of a single line in the cover of an old song tell us about power, language, and identity?

In 1921, the armed forces backed by the Iranian central government gunned down Colonel Pessian, the popular head of Gendarmerie in the province of Khorasan who had risen up against the prime minister, Ahmad Qavam. Soon after, Aref Qazvini, a hugely celebrated Iranian lyricist and musician, commemorated Colonel’s death in a ballad, Gerye Kon (Do Cry!). A couple of years later, Qamar Vaziri, the legendary Iranian singer, sang the ballad in a concert on the Grand Hotel’s stage in Tehran. Her performance is believed to be the first appearance of an Iranian female singer without the hejab on a public stage, singing in front of a mixed audience. Fast forward to almost a century later and Gisoo Shakeri, a singer self-identifying as a feminist activist in exile, recorded a cover of the song in her 2008 album “Gisoo Sings Qamar”. Produced and distributed outside Iran, the album is a tribute to Qamar’s socially and politically responsible art.

Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri (1905–1959)

“Do Cry!” is one of the most well-known songs in the history of Persian music and has been performed, since Qamar, by many singers of different calibers — famous or less so . A few lines in the middle of the ballad read:

The heart cannot run away from this grief. [del ze dast-e qam mafar nadārad.]

All that the eyes can offer is a pour of tears; [dīde qeyr-e ašk-e tar nadārad;]

And it’s not only limited to Muharram and Safar! [īn moharram o safar nadārad.]

During a 40-day period, starting in the month of Muharram and concluding in Safar, Imam Hussein’s martyrdom is grieved annually throughout Shi’a-majority Iran. The last verse above, therefore, involves a hyperbole, a rhetorical device, to convey the graveness of Colonel’s death: while grieving for the third Shi’a Imam may end after the 40 days in Safar, the tears shed for this occasion will not be brought to a close at the end of the mourning period; we will grieve Colonel Pessian’s death forever.

Although Qamar, in the available recordings of the song, naturally sings all the words and verses of the ballad, Shakeri in her cover excludes that last line above containing words Muharram and Safar. To keep the melody intact, she instead repeats the previous line twice.

But why does Shakeri not sing that one verse? There is only one reason I can think of as to why she does not include that particular line in her cover: the allusion to a religiously significant event, even if it is part of a figure of speech, does not fit the singer’s secular ideology. Censoring out the verse, Shakeri therefore “cleanses” the lyrics from any religiously-charged words, so the language reflects her views — probably that she disdains religion or perhaps its influence on arts.

Deborah Cameron famously coined the term “verbal hygiene” in a book of the same title and defined it as “motley collection of discourses and practices through which people attempt to ‘clean up’ language and make its structure or its use conform more closely to their ideals of beauty, truth, efficiency, logic, correctness, and civility” (Cameron, 1995:vii).

The specific verbal hygiene Shakeri engages with in her cover suggests that in her secular and seemingly egalitarian and progressive view, there are still forms of censorship in arts and literature that are justifiably admissible. In her view, particular values can and must be symbolically upheld by barring certain words of others and purifying their language.

Although I have a more or less firm opinion about this specific purification of language, my point, at least here, is not whether these practices of verbal hygiene are good or bad. There are arguments and counterarguments to back each of the two sides, if one is to make a value judgement: “It’s immoral to engage in any act of censorship;” “True, but it’s also far from honesty and therefore is unethical, if an artist utters words she doesn’t believe in;” “Maybe, but she shouldn’t have politicized the language and art of others;” “Yes, but this particular work of art has already been a political statement and its creates were political activists of sorts;” “True, but their verbal and musical art engages with politics at a serious level; they don’t address the question of power by a pitiful attempt to censor out a figure of speech, only because it is associated with a religious event;” etc.

Beyond making a value judgment, the point here, though, is that these practices of verbal hygiene are important to take note of, because they indicate something more significant.

First, this practice of verbal hygiene does not take place in a socio-political and historical vacuum. As such, it alludes to facts about social groups and their struggles over power in a specific context. This instance of verbal hygiene particularly shows that a group’s attempt to gain a public voice is not a straightforward endeavor to open up an equal space among multiple already-existing voices.

The inclusion of one voice (e.g., that of Shakeri and what it represents) may come together with the exclusion of the whole or parts of other voices (e.g., those of Aref and Qamar and what they represent) whose language, according to the first group, has no place in the public sphere and whose words must be omitted.

Abolghasem Aref Qazvini (1882–1934)

Secondly, Shakeri’s act of language purification also indicates an irony, speaking to the contradictions of struggles over power in the society. In addition to being artists, Aref, Qamar, and Shakeri, all have one thing in common: they all seemed to care for democratic values, in general, and women’s rights, in particular. In spite of their generational differences, there seems to exist a strong affinity between them. Aref was a true freedom fighter who helped the Constitutional Revolution with his art. In several of his poems, he also appears to be a champion for women’s rights and education (e.g., the ghazal titled “Civilization without Women’s Education [Is Only] a Half-traveled, Incomplete Journey” [tamaddon bī tarbīyat-e nesvān — safar-e nīme-rāh]). Qamar, as I mentioned earlier, appeared without the veil on stage and performed for an audience that included men — a radical move in its time for which police summoned her and forced her commit to not singing in public without the veil again. This is perhaps one reason Shakeri, who self-identifies as a feminist, thinks of Qamar as a role model of sorts.

The irony is Shakeri, a feminist artist, censors out the words of two other artists — Aref, a freedom fighter and women’s rights champion, and Qamar, a pioneer and a role model, despite their seeming affinity in viewpoint. Shakeri’s practice of verbal hygiene, therefore, shows that struggles over power are not restricted to those between opposite social forces. They also happen between those whose viewpoints seem similar.

Thirdly, there is one final reason I believe verbal hygiene is important to study. In addition to indicating facts about the socio-political and historical backdrop against which these practices take place and likewise revealing the contradictions of struggles over power, they also usually point out an important fact about language: language does not simply represent the identity of those using it. Language, moreover, contributes to the creation of those identities.

That particular line of the ballad is not simply excluded from the song so the singer’s identity can be reflected more accurately in her work of art. Its omission, in fact, contributes to the creation of her identity as it defines Shakeri in contrast to anything that is in any shape or form related to religion — even if it is a figure of speech or a rhetorical device.

Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal Hygiene. London & New York: Routledge.

Originally published here.

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The Tragedy of Fereydoun

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.

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The “Something Else” of Written Words

In the chapter on the “Wonders of Shapes Drawn and Carved” of the 12th century Persian encyclopedia of extraordinary creatures and strange things, Ajayeb al-Makhlughat, the author, Muhammad ibn Mahmud Tusi, tells the story of a house guarded by Christian deacons, somewhere in Andalusia. When Tariq ibn Ziyad arrived in the town where the house was located, he resolved to open the house’s door secured by 24 locks. The guardian deacons swore there was nothing inside. The Berber commander trusted their word and forsook the house. When Roderic, Tariq’s counterpart, came upon the same house, he alike decided to unlock the door to appropriate the treasure he thought should be inside and therefore so dearly protected. Promising the house was empty, the guardians pleaded with the Visigothic king of Hispania not to open the door and to instead name what he thought the supposed treasure was worth so they could pay him in cash in its place. Roderic declined the offer and unlocked the door, seeing inside the empty house a drawing of an Arab riding a camel holding a spear. Above the drawing was put in writing “Once this house is opened, the army of Arabs conquers Andalusia” (Tusi, 1382 [2003], p. 333). The rest is history: Arabs triumphed over the entire Andalusia and killed Roderic.

The encyclopedic entry is very short, lacking any extraneous details, including the name of the city, except for one detail: the number of locks on the door. Why, one would naturally ask, was this particular detail included in the story? Why 24 locks?

First, the too many locks on the door indicate that the drawing on the wall inside the house and the accompanying epigraph were there for many several decades. Tusi makes this point clear by quoting the sobbing deacons telling the already regretful, incensed Roderic: “Every king before you who came upon the house added a lock. You opened them all” (Tusi, 1382 [2003], p. 333). So, the history of the epigraph on the wall went back at least 24 generations of kings. This temporal detail is included to ensure the reader that the epigraph and the drawing did not, as it is common, commemorate what had already taken place in the past. Quite the opposite, what eventually happened in the future followed the knowledge of epigraph’s words written far back in the past. The 24 locks added by the 24 preceding kings therefore signal a far past wondrously dictating the events of a future — a future that recreated the epigraph’s message. The event in the future — the ultimate Arab conquest of Andalusia — retroactively revealed the true meaning of the figures on the wall by showing the direct relations, in terms of similitudes (Foucault, 1989, p. 19), between the sign and what it, in hindsight, signified. Without the ensuing Arab conquest after the unlocking of the house, the epigraph and the accompanying drawing did not really make sense. The relation between the epigraph and the event it prophesied is not thus a simple relation between a signifier and a signified (Foucault, 2002, p. 100). The figures and the epigraph are instead signatures that “always already slide into the position of the signified”(Agamben, 2009, p. 37). As a signature the epigraph guaranteed an event in the future. In other words, the unlocking of the house and the Arab conquest of Andalusia, as the epigraph’s message clearly stated, were the same: the exposure of the epigraph was the same as the fate of the war. The signified and the signifier are not clearly separate as the house guarded by the deacons and the Christian land were the same thing: exposing the former makes the latter defenseless. The epigraph thus uses the same verb — gošūdan — for both opening (of the house’s door) and conquering (of Andalusia). In other words, the house was Andalusia, folded in upon itself (Foucault, 1989, p. 29). Keeping information and matter on the same level, the epigraph did not simply signify the event of conquest, but moreover granted the future event it signified.

Secondly, given the power it had in allowing events, the too many locks on the door were there to restrain and remand the force of the signature. The epigraph, like any actual signature verifying the authority it carries, had a force — a force that needed to be carefully sealed not by a single but 24 locks. The locks kept the two similar worlds of different nature — the marks and signs on the wall and the actual event — separate so the force of the former would not make the latter to imitate the information in the former. But once the seal was broken, the epigraph’s force made the events echo its message in a concrete emulation and made its meaning a reality. By concretizing its meaning, the force in the marks on the wall moved them from the domain of graphical signs to the domain of political transformation. In other words, the epigraph’s force made the marks on the wall effective as the conquest would not have been complete, if Roderic had not unlocked the door. The excessive number of locks therefore indicates an excess in the marks on the wall — i.e., the force and its efficacy. In the absence of a horizontal plane on which both information and matter can be placed, this excess cannot be accounted for. The wonder of the epigraph — that it was decisive in the conquest — is due to the fact that it is “a sign that exceeds the sign” and marks “the irreducible excess of efficacy over signification” (Agamben, 2009, p. 50). The excessive number of locks denoted the efficacy of the words and marks on the wall. The excess in the marks that was secured by an excessive number of locks could not be reduced to the meaning of the marks and the meaning of the marks would not have been materially realized without that excess. That excess, in other words, is “something else” (Foucault, 2002, p. 100): although it is an “else,” without it no “something” would exist. It is the outside that constitutes the inside.

The tale from Ajayeb al-Makhlughat is thus an account of a peculiar relationship between the event and its material expression in that the event follows its expression. It is an account of an animated force that is in excess of the sign and actualizes its meaning. But does the force of the written words on the walls of a house in an unnamed city guaranteeing what happened in 712, that enigmatic “something else,” reflect an archaic nature of language? Or it is still felt by writers in their mundane practices of writing? I think it is, has always been, a contemporary nature of language. However, the dominant regime of writing has bracketed this “something else” for the fear of falling into an irrational view of the world in which written words do not conform to the pre-thought ideas of the human thinking subject — a world in which the nonhuman words in their materiality are immanent to the human.

Agamben, G. (2009). The Signature of All Things: On Method. New York and Cambridge: Zone Books.

Foucault, M. (1989). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London and New York: Routledge.

Foucault, M. (2002). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge.

Tusi, M. i. M. i. A. (1382 [2003]). Ajayeb al-Makhlughat va Gharayeb al-Mojudat [Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing] (M. Sotudeh Ed.). Tehran: Elmi va Farhangi.

Originally published here.

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Don Draper on Journal-keeping vs. Strategic Writing


What is good writing? Why and when should we write? What should it do for us? The representation of writing in a season-four episode of Mad Men — Blowing Smoke — and in the episodes leading to it throws some light on the answers the dominant ideology of writing in our culture provides for these questions.

The episode depicts a crisis in the newly founded advertising agency. The agency has lost its major client, Lucky Strike, a tobacco company, is not successful in landing new accounts, and is on the verge of bankruptcy. To defy the agency’s seemingly inevitable demise, without consulting the other partners, Don Draper, the pensive, mysterious, and incredibly creative protagonist who is a founding partner at the agency, decides to do something which in the eyes of others has nothing short of a business suicide. In what that seems like a fully-fledged fuite en avant, he writes an open letter stating that he is happy that his agency no longer advertises tobacco, a product that he knows kills customers, and posts the letter as a full-page ad in the New York Times.

But writing the letter is not the only act of writing Draper is shown to undertake. Before he decides to write the open letter, we see him picking up the habit of writing his thoughts and memories in a journal. In fact, while the journal-keeping practice is meant to steady his mind after the death of a close friend, swimming as well as reducing alcohol consumption are meant to help him improve his physical health. In other words, we see that before the NYT open letter, Draper is a good old diarist who takes on writing to maintain his sanity — to fix something inside him. But when he wants to actually do something in the real world outside himself — to alter the fate of the agency and solves a problem by writing the open letter — we see that he affectedly rips out his journal entries and throws them into the garbage.

But why should he throw the journal pages in the garbage before writing the open letter? Could not he find a fresh page in the journal to pen a draft, put a blank paper in his typewriter, and start writing the open letter? Is it not true that the scene with ripping out of the journal entries exists because the creators of the show want to tell us that writing a journal is boring and uncreative? Don Draper is a cool guy and his character is all about creativity. It is simply his job to be creative. Do the series’ creators then not want to convey that writing a journal is out of character for Draper and that when the time is right, he abandons the boring task of writing a memoir and emerges as the cool and creative person he truly is?

In the eyes of the creators and probably in our eyes, what Draper does is totally in line with his character. He is a forward-looking person who always creates new opportunities for himself. He once did it by changing his own identity, because he hated his past, and now he is doing the same thing by writing the letter. Someone of Draper’s caliber knows that nothing valuable can be created by writing a journal.

Is it not then like what faithful journal-keepers have most likely heard at some point from friends and family: “Why do you waste your time writing diaries? Do something useful with your life.” “You are a good writer; why don’t you use your talent to write a novel? Why do you keep that all for yourself?” “If you had spent that much time studying, you could have got two PhDs by now!” “Dairy writing? That’s a children’s hobby. No. That’s what retired people do. Either way…productive people don’t waste their time writing journals.”

Also, the series’ creators show us in details that for writing the letter, Draper goes through a meticulous process. After giving it a good thought while staring at his friend’s painting, he initially, writes a handwritten draft on a fresh page in the journal before typing a first draft on his typewriter. He then carefully reads and revises the typed draft. We even see a shot of the page with actual mark-ups. By contrast, Draper’s journal-writing scenes show that writing a diary is both effortless and also inconsequential to the outside world and moreover does not involve any precision and care. The creators do whatever they could to convince the audience that the open letter, in contrast to the diary entries, is a well-thought and serious piece of writing with real-world consequences.

If the episode reveals the dominant ideology of writing in our culture, cannot we conclude that in this view writing is valuable only if it does something; and it does something only if it changes something in the future? The dominant ideology of writing manifests itself in the episode by contrasting two types of writing: (1) writing a journal which does not need to be thought and whose humble goal is to steady the writer and (2) writing a strategic and even deceitful open letter whose goal is to achieve a planned business advantage. While the former revolves around the self and is pointed inward, the latter is written for others and looks outward. Also, while the former is directed towards one’s past history, the latter looks forward to future business. Finally, while the former is thought to be unaffected, the latter is deliberately constructed and worked on. As a result, whereas the former is a reflection that creates nothing new as it only at best fixes an already made self, the latter creates new opportunities as it seeks to change the world outside. In other words, in our dominant view of writing, when it is untouched, directed inward, and towards the past, it is not considered to achieve anything in real world and is therefore eventually futile.

I will write more about the dominant ideology of writing and its consequences for how people understand their practices of writing.

Originally published here.

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Regimes of Writing: A Shift in Our Relationship with Written Words

In possibly his most famous short story, East of Violet (Šarq-e Banafše), Iranian novelist, Shahriar Mandanipour (1999) recounts a love story that takes place in Shiraz of post Iran-Iraq war when romantic relations are still deemed to be a sin that must be kept hidden from the eyes of inquisitive public and interrogating moral police. Celebrated for its remarkable prose that bears the unmistakable marks of several illustrious Persian poets and prosaists, Mandanipour’s highly intertextual story narrates the romantic pursuit of Zabih and Arghavan, two strangers, who fall in love with one another at the wrong time in history. The two primarily communicate through secret codes they place inside the borrowed books of the library housed inside the Hafeziyeh — a garden with both touristic and spiritual significance in the northern edges of Shiraz, where the tomb of Hafez, the fourteenth century legendary poet, is located. Members of the Hafeziyeh library, Zabih and Arghavan convey their romantic messages by leaving small purple dots underneath the letters printed within the borrowed books, ranging from Leyli and Majnun, a long love poem by the twelfth century poet Nezami Ganjavi, to the Persian translation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The narrator who might be the spirit of Hafez himself[1] gets to know the protagonists by putting the marked letters next to each other and deciphering the codes. The story’s language alters to reminisce the language of the books the two borrow.

East of Violet, a very well-known short story among the fans of Iran’s contemporary fictional literature, is usually construed as a tale that brings the mystical love of the classic Persian literature — a love characterized by becoming one with the beloved — to the contemporary life of the readers, the purportedly undeserving progeny of the said classic poets, who know nothing about true love. The lovers in the story, although living in the late 1980s, in fact belong with the chapters of the twelfth century prose book, Tazkirat al-Awliya, or Biographies of the Saints. It is therefore not a coincidence that Biographies of the Saints is the last book the couple shares as it implies that the lovers’ life (singular, as they are united in a death, the mystical fanā, that is much worthier than any imaginable life) must be understood in relation to those of famous Sufis and their miracles depicted in Biographies of the Saints — an indication that Zabih and Arghavan’s love which like other true loves needs no cause and reason has nothing to do with the this-worldly and calculated present-day notions of love known to the readers of the story.

It however is not simply the different meanings of love in the two periods of time that are contrasted in the short story. The story also alludes to a shift in the regimes of writing — a shift in the relations between the self and writing from material expression and mimicking to an emphasis on meaning and understanding. Contrary to us (i.e., the readers who primarily look for meaning of the short story, like what I am doing here) the meaning of the words in the library books is at best secondary in the eyes of Arghavan and Zabih. All they care is the purple dots. They may not even read the books they borrow from the library, since for example Arghavan conveys in code: “I must have studied the Conference of the Birds for my exam; but all I saw were the marked letters inside the book. I understood nothing of the book itself” (p. 23). For the couple, the books are therefore stripped of meaning and dealt with in their mere materiality as they are first and foremost a constellation of meaningless printed letters underneath some of which they put the dots. Nevertheless, the dotted books affect Zabih and Arghavan as they become the hapless heroes of the borrowed books whose words are paradoxically emptied out and whose content, meaning, and story are bypassed. The story, for example, ends with the couple dying the well-known death of the Little Prince through whose book they have exchanged a message at one point in the story: the lovers are sent home by two snakes Zabih finds at his house earlier in the story and like in The Little Prince, the narrator is unable to find the bodies. In other words, the library books are not in fact read for their meaning and content; but are unconsciously imitated by the lovers.

The common analysis of the story is therefore not wrong in discerning that Zabih and Arghavan belong to a time and age different from, and in a nostalgic way better than, that of ours — the readers who are more or less their contemporaries. However, what this common understanding gets wrong is that this asynchrony is not simply a result of the different cultural meanings of love upon which the protagonists and we, the readers, draw. It is instead a consequence of the fact that protagonists’ relation with writing is different from our (i.e., the readers’) relation with written words. Comfortably detached from it, we read East of Violet, or any other text, and analyze its discourse and cultural meaning, while Zabih and Arghavan’s life is tied in with the library books whose effect is rooted in the materiality of the written words and whose heroes are unconsciously or otherwise mimicked by the couple. Whereas those particular books in the Hafeziyeh library in their material form with dots in them are the only copies important to Zabih and Arghavan and other copies of the same books are of no value to them, to us it does not matter which copy, print, or edition of the literary works Mandanipour uses to create his intertextual story as the content, the only thing required for us to decipher the short story, is similar in all prints and editions. Finally, while our minds seek the meaning behind Mandanipour’s words, the printed letters inside the library books affect the protagonists’bodies­ and their very life and death.

Similarly, in one of his most representative pieces epitomizing the originality of thought in what later came to be known as the German media theory, Friedrich Kittler (2015) looks at a parallel shift in the relation between individuals and words by contrasting Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Wertherand the story of Francesca and Paolo in Dante’s Divana Comedia, to conclude that whereas the Francesca and Paolo’s “story speaks of bodies” and the power-effect of books on bodies, the Werther and Lotte’s story, written some 450 years later, “speaks of souls” and the reader’s incessant search for a meaning (p. 18). Following Lacan who writes “slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier […] changes the whole course of history” (cited in: Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1992, p. 104), Kittler argues that the change in the relation with written words illustrated in the contrast between Dante and Goethe, represents a shift in history.

But how well do the two — relations between the self and writing which is part of an era’s regime of writing on one hand and historical periods on the other — correlate? Have written words totally lost their “power over bodies” (Kittler, 2015, p. 17)? Do we, the so-called moderns, merely “process texts as deposits of meaning” (Winthrop-Young, 2015, p. 4)? Are written words no longer all about “power, and not knowledge or information” (Favret-Saada, 1980, p. 9)? It might be true that presently meaning, and therefore the signified, is paramount in our relation with written words; but is it also not true that our understanding of East of Violent, for instance, equally depends on the written intertextuality in the story that reshapes the already established meaning (Briggs & Bauman, 1992)? Answering a question about the story’s audience, in an interview with BBC’s Persian Service (2012), Mandanipour declares that his audience does not already exist, but he creates it with his stories. Is his response not an indication of the fact that, in spite of our focus on referential function of language, the written words have not lost all their power-effect as they are able to create people — just like the written words of the library books that created (or exterminated, depending on our view) the lovers?

Works Cited:

BBCPersian. (2012). Tmasha’s Interview with Shahriar Mandanipour. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/2012/10/121012_mandanipour_tamasha

Briggs, C. L., & Bauman, R. (1992). Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2(2), 131–172. doi:10.1525/jlin.1992.2.2.131

Favret-Saada, J. (1980). Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kittler, F. (2015). Authorship and Love. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(3), 15–47. Retrieved from http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/32/3/15.abstract

Lacoue-Labarthe, P., & Nancy, J.-L. (1992). The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Mandanipour, S. (1999). East of Violet (Šarq-e Banafše). Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz.

Mandanipour, S. (2009). Censoring an Iranian Love Story: A Novel (S. Khalili, Trans. 1st ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Winthrop-Young, G. (2015). On Friedrich Kittler’s ‘Authorship and Love’. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(3), 3–13. Retrieved from http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/32/3/3.abstract

Footnotes:

[1] He makes another appearance in Mandanipour’s (2009) first English novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story.

Originally published here.