Furnishing Our Stories

 

I suppose there are as many reasons to blog as there are bloggers.  Curiosity about the world, a willingness to accede to Durrell’s conviction that reality can be “reworked to show its significant side“ and the pure pleasure of shaping words all have played a roll in developing and sustaining my personal commitment to this strange new phenomenon of our time.

One thing I particularly enjoy about blogging  is the response I receive from readers.  Comments have ranged from challenging to congratulatory to caustic, but no matter their form, I always find them stimulating and engaging.   To my taste, good blogs exhibit a certain tentativeness, exploring rather than defining the subject at hand, and good comments reflect the same qualities.  Writers and readers work together, inching their way forward through thickets of allusion and argument to reach provisional conclusions.  Occasionally they unearth a real, if unexpected, treasure.

Voices from Iran

The days of revolutionaries penning manifestos in candle-lit garrets are over, just as preconceptions about the nature of crowds in the streets are being tested.  When English writer Thomas Fuller said, “The mob has many heads but no brains”, he surely wasn’t speaking of Iran, a nation where the literacy rate is nearly 100%, education is valued and political savvy is common.

photos courtesy .faramarz on Flickr

Today, as events in Iran compel world attention, Facebook and Google pages are being translated from Farsi. The BBC  has increased the number of satellites carrying its Persian television broadcasts to Farsi-speaking citizens in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan in order to counter Iranian interference with its programming.  Twitter, YouTube and bloggers have added to the “citizen journalist” pool, and more than a few commentators, looking particularly at the role Twitter is playing, have recalled another pairing of technology and resistance – the use of fax machines by University of Michigan students to spread word of the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Given the massive flow of postings, it’s been especially difficult to sort facts from gossip, intentional disinformation and pure silliness.  There are credible attempts, however, including Nico Pitney’s live-blogging of post-election events for the Huffington Post. Depending on the time of day, the latest bulletin from the Tehran streets or whether he’s managed to snag a little sleep, his view of things can be expressed more or less sharply, but his sources provide some extraordinary glimpses into the way Iranians themselves are experiencing events.  This poignant posting of a woman’s quiet reflections (with English text below) is an example.

Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow is a day of destiny.
Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before.

Where is this place? Where is this place where every door is closed? Where is this place where people are simply calling God? Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases. It shakes me. I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place that where so many innocent people are entrapped? Where is this place where no one comes to our aid? Where is this place that only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world? Where is this place that the young shed blood and then people go and pray — standing on that same blood and pray. Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?

Where is this place? You want me to tell you? This place is Iran. The homeland of you and me.

This place is Iran.

Across Iran, real people have been making real decisions and dying real deaths, and no matter how events in these days resolve themselves, the need for decision-making will continue. As the cries of Allah-o Akbar echoed across the roofs of Tehran, From Iran pondered  participation in today’s events, looking at life against the horizon of history.

I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed.

I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them.

I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism.

This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, spokesman for Mousavi, seems to understand the process of self-examination and re-commitment happening around the election process.  In a statement published in The Guardian, he reflects on larger issues fueling the resistance.

Many criticize us and wonder what does Mr. Mousavi have that is so special? They argue that after all he is one of the many in that corrupt system of the Islamic Republic and will never act against it.

My argument is that this is not about Mousavi, but about people realizing that they are not followers like a herd of sheep that goes anywhere it is summoned to go. They will know that the individual will does matter and that their actions can be effective and can speak louder than any specific person; this to me is the most important aspect of these events.

Now either Mousavi or anyone else who will end up in power, they will have the understanding of what people want and what they are capable of, and how they can voice their requests. This is the significant and important step and now that Mousavi has chosen to go ahead, we will support him.

Finally, there is this. In the same article from The Guardian, Makhmalbaf notes that, before the revolution,

Mousavi was a religious intellectual and an artist, who supported radical change but did not support the mullahs. After the revolution, when all religious intellectuals and even leftists backed Khomeini, he served as prime minister for eight years. The economy was stable, and he did not order the killings of opponents, or become corrupt.

In order to neuralise his power, the position of prime minister was eliminated from the constitution and he was pushed out of politics. So Mousavi returned to the world of artists because in a country where there are no real political parties, artists can act as a party. The artists supported Khatami and now they support Mousavi.

In a voyeuristic and celebrity-obsessed culture like our own, where politicians seem to prefer celebrity to accomplishment and celebrities imagine good policy can be implemented through press release, the thought of writers, film-makers, painters and poets serving as a party seems fanciful, if not absurd.

And yet, there was a Persian poet of the 13th century whose words seem prescient and perfect for this moment. Still beloved around the world, Rumi adds his own voice to the clamoring voices of Iran and the sudden silence of Neda,  herself the call and voice of a rising movement.

Your way begins
on the other side
become the sky
take an axe to the prison wall
escape
walk out like someone
suddenly born into color
do it now

 

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Voices and Visions

 

Truly good advice rarely comes accompanied by trumpets and tympani. It doesn’t light up the sky with neon colors, or advertise itself like a hot new product with a crack marketing team.  Truly good advice – words of wisdom, if you will – is simply spoken.  It doesn’t need to be remembered because it’s never forgotten.  It applies in circumstances so far removed from its original context you can’t help but be amazed, and its ability to bear time’s testing is absolute.

One of the best bits of advice I ever received was so simple, and so simply put, I’ve never forgotten it, even when I’ve chosen to ignore it or attempted to reject it outright:

Be careful who you listen to, because their voices will influence your own.

The influence of the voices around us is utterly pervasive and often quite surprising.   When I first moved from Iowa to Texas, the Texans with whom I lived and worked asked “Where you from, girl?  You shore do talk funny!”  After three years,  I returned to Iowa from Texas only to have friends and relatives ask, “Why in the world are you talking that way?”   Phrases like “ya’ll”  (and its plural, “all y’all”) and “fixin’ to” had become a part of my speech simply because I heard them on a daily basis.  That’s the power of voice.

To put it another way, what surrounds us, becomes us.  If we listen to hatred, we are more likely to speak in a hateful way.  If we continually hear cynicism and negativity from those around us, we are more like to become cynical and pessimistic ourselves.  If we listen only to Homer Simpson and Spongebob Squarepants, we’ll speak in one sort of voice.  If we listen only to Shakespeare, we’ll speak in another.  The point is not that we should choose one voice over another – Homer Simpson and Shakespeare both have a place in my world – but we need to be attentive to and aware of the quality of the voices around us.  We have the ability to choose which voices we attend to and cherish, and we need to make those choices in order to nurture and protect our own true voice.