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e343e6a
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Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind us of some acute pain or pleasure, something silenced or ignored? We miss not only their presence, or how they felt about us, but ultimately how they allowed us to feel about ourselves or them. (prologue)
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mother-daughter-relationship
father-daughter-relationship
iran
iranian-revolution
memoir
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Azar Nafisi |
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71c07e9
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As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press--which was one half of the pun about 'covering'--had been naive if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?
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human-rights
women
iran
amputation
carnegie-endowment
covering-islam
iranian-kurdistan
iranian-revolution
khomeini
mohammed-reza-pahlavi
shiism
stoning
women-and-religion
women-in-iran
women-in-islam
theocracy
september-11-attacks
middle-east
edward-said
media
womens-rights
new-york
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Christopher Hitchens |
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3dae2d1
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They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that's banned.
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fear
iran
iranian-revolution
secret-police
censorship
police
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Marjane Satrapi |
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ee132a2
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When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream?
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iranian-revolution
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Azar Nafisi |