The Double "I"
Roumina Parsa on Malu HAlasa
When I was born, my mother and I were alone together. I suppose this is how it always goes, but with no family no hand holding and no epidural, each lack more circumstantially absent than the next, the pain of being almost alive was singularly ours to bear. ‘The walls, the walls, the walls,’ writes Woman Life Freedom contributor Jiloofar Rasooli of the restricted existence of women in Iran, and it speaks to me of that maternal memory of pale hospital rooms. Mothers sighing into a communal blue as their babies were born and born and born; the fathers, elsewhere, this circumstance shared amongst us children because the world we entered into was post-revolution Iran.
All of us being born alone together on International Women’s Day, nineteen years to the eve of Iran’s newly appointed leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, as he declared mandatory veiling and conservative dress for women as part of the Islamic Revolution. To Khomeini, an unveiled woman was a ‘naked’ woman, and to the conservative forces that supported this notion, violence was the necessary tool of its implementation where the formal law faltered. Despite protests across the country, restrictions persisted, expanded. The growing power of the Islamic regime translated to women (by law, for those over the age of nine) not only having to comply by veiling laws in places of work and study as they were originally intended, but in all public spaces. And so, my birthday marks this: a reminder of Khomeini’s choice poetic injustice, the decision to mar International Women’s Day with a message to Iranian women that in their homeland, a man was a man (and still not a God!) and a woman, a woman … well, a woman was even less.
These ‘walls of gender apartheid’, as Rasooli notes with an accuracy that is as lyrical as it is wretched: ‘... have appeared one after another … sprung up like mushrooms in the recent history of Iran … but all scratched up, by women living behind them’. It’s these markings, the evidence of unfaltering resistance, that Malu Halasa, the editor of the anthology Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women’s Protests in Iran, has committed herself to, making them seen by those who have never known such suffocating blue.
A sort of kismet, then, that the idea for Halasa’s first novel Mother of All Pigs came to her in 1979, the same year the Islamic Revolution occurred. Though it wasn’t until 2017 that its manuscript—criticised, rejected, and refashioned to position the story within present politics, asked to include more narratives of civilian activists—was finally able to be published. It tells the story of three generations of women in the Middle East, plus a pig—hidden, bred, and slaughtered. And isn’t that how it always goes?
Woman Life Freedom is not Halasa’s first anthology on the Middle East however, neither is it her first with a particular focus on Iran. Kaveh Golestan 1950–2003: Recording the Truth in Iran (2007) showed the Islamic Revolution through the lens of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Golestan, who died after stepping on a land mine while on assignment for the BBC; while Transit Tehran: Young Iran and its Inspirations (2009) shared the writing and photography from youth who came of age under the Islamic Republic’s chokehold.
Yet the Woman Life Freedom anthology positions itself within an unchartered social context: in that it has allowed the Western public—who has broadly been restricted to viewing Iranians through the Orientalist caricature of ‘fanatical Muslims’—to turn its gaze intensely, and perhaps more compassionately, towards Iran. Recognising this, Halasa holds two crucial points at the core of her work. The first is that Woman Life Freedom—an Iranian-led initiative sparked by the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini in 2022 for allegedly failing to adequately cover her hair—is a movement of art and culture, and which directly opposes the strict artistic censorship led by the theocratic regime. While the book is certainly inspired by the clenched fists and wildly beating hearts of demonstrators on the streets, it equally displays the art that reflects Iran’s shifting energy brought about by the protests. As contributing writer Vali Mahlouji shares in his essay, ‘What is different about the current movement is that it is not from oppositional political mandates, foreign adversaries or internal power struggles, but from individual citizens’ civil acts of human pleasure and delight: dances, songs, kiss-ins and liberally swaying bodies’.
The second key point is the awareness that stories which have shaped Iran’s global narrative (at least in the anglophone world) have rarely been those told by Iranians themselves. As Halasa acknowledges in a panel with SOAS University of London, the Iranian identity has largely been delegated to operating within reductive prisms, framed by a general, Western-centric understanding of the elusive/backwards/barbaric Middle Easterner. Paired with the censorship of artists under the rule of the incumbent regime, Iranians are forced into a double-fold silence. The publication of Woman Life Freedom then is, as Halasa states in another interview with The Lede podcast, not only ‘a way of inspiring activism, but also activism itself’. It is the continuation, and preservation, of the revolutionary conversation(s) generated by the eponymous movement, expressed directly through its primary vehicle: creative production. Through compassion, solidarity, and a focused political sensitivity, Halasa has responded to Iranian demands for a platform. The publication of 30 contributions from writers, artists and graphic designers in Iran is an act of undoing the silence; of centering Iranian voices in the narration of their own complex stories that both the regime and western imperialists seek to repress. Woman Life Freedom is a world stage to hear Iranians speaking, and the words they are saying are of revolution.
The anthology is book-ended by two letters from an anonymous writer who spent a month in solitary confinement at the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, the primary site for housing political dissidents against the regime. Although Halasa states in the introduction that this writer feared further persecution in submitting work for the anthology, her desire to stand in solidarity with the other contributors outweighed the costs. As she writes:
Every day I spend hours on YouTube and other websites, I see what’s going on outside Iran. Why should there be such a divide between us and the rest of the world?
This is not a new question; it is perhaps the one that Iranians have become the most fatigued in asking. But with the birth of Woman Life Freedom, its utterance has reached a crescendo, its echo reverberating through generations of repetition growing loud enough to gain public attention, alchemising the sentiment from the individual exasperation into a collective movement. The directness of the anonymous writer’s question makes it clear, and which none of us are absolved in answering—certainly not me, an Iranian in diaspora who must spend every word demonstrating what I have done with the divide I have crossed. So we begin Woman Life Freedom at the head of the splintered edge that is the Iranian experience: an anonymous voice speaking to us through Halasa, positioning us to witness what the editor calls ‘people find[ing] a way through the cracks’.
By foregoing the route of publishing the piece using a pseudonym, this anonymous writer immediately contextualises the anthology within the reality of artistic censorship and control led by the Islamic Republic. The immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution saw film, photography, music, performance, and literature come under the legislative rule of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (in an unintentionally symbolic move, the head of the MCIG was Mehdi Argani, a blind man). With the Farsi language once referred to as the ‘main pillar of being Iranian’, literature was targeted with a particular scrutiny by the MCIG. Reading, writing, and sharing texts that contradicted the doctrine of the Islamic Republic—including references to revolution, Marxism, westernised behaviours, or anything that could be deemed ‘blasphemous’—were considered an act of treason against the new state. This extended to translated works, with Ignazio Silone’s Vino e Pane (Bread and Wine), for example, only being able to be published in Farsi as Nan va Serkeh (Bread and Vinegar). The attempt made on Salman Rushdie’s life in 2023 for The Satanic Verses can too be traced back to the rulings of the Islamic Republic, since it was Ruhollah Khomeini’s death penalty fatwa that was first issued against the Indian-British author not long after the publication of the novel in 1988. These realities render our hidden speaker as representative of the risks the anthology’s artists are accepting in the creation of their work, and further, the value of a collective through communal dissemination.
As Mahlouji self-referentially commentates, ‘At the heart of theocratic rule is the struggle against the collective body’, one which resists the tyrannical silencing of their voices. He continues, ‘As the physically subversive carrier of desire, the body is central to all fascist experiments.’ By outlining the corporeal as the site of oppression, both individual and communal, Mahlouji allows the anthology to speak directly to the human, rather than solely to the political. The body is life itself; it is what we are bound by. It is no accident, then, that it is this truth which the regime directly weaponises: Iranians cannot opt out of being Iranian. And so, it is through the regime’s definition of what constitutes ‘an Iranian’—via culture, law, and punishment—that control is exerted.
It is the body and the regime’s violence against it after all that is central to the Woman Life Freedom movement. And it was the highest form of the control, which resulted in the murder of Jina Amini, that catalysed the multitude of bodies in revolt. As such, Mahlouji invites the reader to experience a proximity to Iranian liberation, to reimagine that Eastern ‘other’ as closer than historically perceived.
What is perhaps missing from this discussion is the consideration that the Islamic Republic has not been alone in its attemps to uphold a singular narrative of what or who can be defined as ‘an Iranian’. Iranian humanity has been similarly defined through oppressive rule by western imperial powers. Despite politically positioning themselves as in opposition to the Islamic Republic, western nation-states have—then and now—aided and abetted the former in muzzling the self-expression of the Iranian public. As noted by Edward Said in his highly influential work Orientalism, it has largely spoken of and for the Eastern ‘other’:
[he] can speak for the civilised world, the West ... he knows how they feel since he knows their history, their reliance upon such as he, and their expectations … what they might have to say, were they to be asked and might they be able to answer, would somewhat uselessly confirm what is already evident: that they are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them better than they could possibly know themselves.
In practice, this inherent mindset has resulted in the publication of literature by western voices that work to portray Iranians as mere extensions of the Islamic regime; a monolith of religious extremists that not only approve of the regime’s authority but wish to see it enacted internationally. One such work, Not Without My Daughter (1987) by Betty Mahmoody, is credited as being ‘the most conspicuous and influential mediawork operation’ in negatively stereotyping Iranians as primitive and violent. The orientalising impulse that Said mentions is reflected in the book’s blurb: ‘Appalled by the squalor of their living conditions, horrified by what she saw of a country where women are merely chattels and Westerners are despised, Betty soon became desperate to return to the States. But Moody, and his often vicious family, had other plans. Mother and daughter became prisoners of an alien culture, hostages of an increasingly tyrannical and violent man’. The book sold 12 million copies with its first publication, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was later adapted into a film starring Emmy award-winning actress Sally Field.
Circumventing the suppression of Iranian voices is thus a multilayered task. It requires Iranians to transcend the physical, to come up against the outlines of the prescribed Iranian identity. Halasa’s consideration of art as a curled fist is at its most striking in her interview with Pamela Karimi, art historian and author of Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice (2022). When Halasa asks what the function of art in the Woman Life Freedom movement has been, Karimi states, ‘The lines between art and activism have been blurred … activism in turn has become a kaleidoscope of aesthetic modalities that transform the grit of politics and dissent into art.’ This unique quality to the politics of Iranian art—and art made under repressive regimes more broadly—is further bolstered by contributing cartoonist Mana Neyestani, who writes that Iran’s closed political system is what makes artistic creation one of ‘the only ways to breathe’. Within Neyestani’s and Karimi’s words lies the admission that imbuing such power to artistic work is not always a good sign, but at the same time it is from the very lack of public autonomy that Iran’s artists are equipped with such influence. Such an argument ladens the book with the weighty yet necessary realisation that the creation of art for art’s sake is a privilege not yet afforded to Iranians.
This power cannot be understated. The regime itself has been known to specifically target musicians, filmmakers, poets, writers, and actors during times of political uproar. Notably, the Woman Life Freedom revolution saw Iranian singer Shervin Hajipour arrested for his song ‘Baraye’ (‘Because Of’), which would go on to win a Grammy in the Best Song for Social Change category, ironically presented by US First Lady Jill Biden. As Halasa poetically states in her introduction, ‘Under circumstances like these, the imagination becomes a place of both refuge and defiance’. Here arises the greatest weapon against the regime: the imagination as something it cannot control, the product of which is this very book expressing it. This meta characteristic of Woman Life Freedom, of creating Iranian art about the value of Iranian art, charges the anthology with a palpable sense of unity and strength. It is evident that the artists understand the terms. They create for survival, and yet, risk their survival by creating.
Central to the anthology then is the awareness that Iranian artists must perform a double act when challenging the boundaries of their two-fold silence. To revolt is to be both seen and unseen, visible and invisible, recognisable as a collective, mobilised unit, but simultaneously indistinguishable as individuals who could be singled out for punishment. Halasa emphasises the manner in which these opposing forces have found a place to coalesce amongst the Iranian people through the utilisation of the internet (to be seen) as well as the carrying out of anonymous activism (to be hidden). Khiaban Tribune’s piece presents street art as one of the central avenues Iranians have taken to directly skirt the borders between visibility and invisibility. Avoiding the state’s extensive facial recognition technology, artists would spray paint the faces of the women killed by the regime onto walls at night, the results of which would be photographed and shared extensively online. When I see these images printed within the anthology, I am genuinely moved at the reality of a temporary art form made permanent, the dead given an infinite lifetime through literature. It is a moment that will be enshrined forever.
As Alexander Cyprus Poulikakos poignantly comments in his piece ‘Revolution of the Anonymous’, ‘Jina and her fallen sisters have become the true signifiers for the uprisings, omnipresent through the directionless acceleration of flow and multiplication in the digital realm. Therefore, a unity of places has become possible, temporarily, without unity of time and physical space.’
Poulikakos’s use of the word ‘omnipresence’ to describe the murdered women is a skilful manipulation of the regime’s own, particularly that of God, the ever-omnipresent being, as a way to justify their religious extremism. Reflecting the defiance of the Iranian people, Poulikakos signals: if God is everywhere, now so are we. With this, the collective body can be thought of as the vehicle of transcendence itself. The body, which as Mahlouji writes, ‘vents and performs itself; its painful honesty acts out across public space and its overwhelming energy swarms the city streets.’ The image of the pained, raging body is visceral—yet it remains intangible through its multitudes. It is at once individual and collective, made of hot pulsating blood, the shared heaving breath. It is universally, humanly recognisable, forcing that great divide between Iranians and the rest of the world to continue to turn in on itself, as the edges of the static Iranian identity become no longer so easily traceable.
Alongside the anonymous forces of resistance, the hypervisibility of the deaths themselves are portrayed to the reader as being of equal importance. Most memorable is Rasooli’s additional piece on Ghazaleh, an Iranian woman who recorded her own shooting and subsequent death at the hands of the regime to the chant of ‘natarsin, natarsin, ma hame baham hastin’ (‘don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, we are all together’). Rasooli writes of the moment: ‘and then she is fatally shot. We are all fatally shot.’ It is evident that this ‘we’ is everywhere, in every piece. Rasooli tells of Ghazaleh’s mother who wasn’t able to retrieve her daughter’s body until she cut a vein in her hand in front of the authorities (‘blood comes to save a dead body’). Omnipresent indeed, the ‘we’ that is both no one and everyone, threading through life and death—those of us who live are called to action with the blood we all share as human beings.
Halasa displays a thorough and inventive comprehension of these overlapping energies with her purposeful formatting of the anthology. Sandwiched between the two anonymous letters by the unknown contributor are the artworks, names, and faces of Iranians. Photographs of girls who dye their hair in bright blues, pinks and purples, staring directly into Shiva Khademi’s lens, quoted as saying ‘I’m made of colours’; Iran’s most iconic women—such as poet Forough Farrokhzad and singer Googoosh—painted in Soheila Sokanvari’s webs of geometric patterns, which as art historian Dr. Jordan Amirkhani says ‘reflect[s] the way in which women were indeed “caught” within a web of conflicting social practices’. A favourite of mine, Shokouh Moghimi’s personal essay on sisterhood and loss, sees a sibling taking the shape of the shadow left by another. Seen and unseen, visible and invisible, it is unmistakable that the duality at play within the works in Woman Life Freedom directly reflects the delicate balancing act underlining the movement itself, infusing the anthology with the essence of the revolution at its most authentic.
It is additionally unmistakable that space—and most importantly, authority—have been given to the artists in Woman Life Freedom. Halasa delivers on her promise of a collection that consists not simply of theory but actual voices, both established and less heard of, with perspectives that overlap and contradict; in doing so the complexities of the Iranian identity is thus emphasised. Amid the struggle for revolution, Halasa doesn’t hesitate in also showing us the weariness of it. There is deep, true, unresolvable sadness in Steffi Niederzoll’s piece on Reyhanneh Jabbari, the woman hung by the regime in 2014 for killing her rapist. There is bitterness, skepticism, wisdom: from an Iranian taxi driver in the work of Habibe Jafarian (‘a revolution whose spokespeople are a bunch of folks living in America and Europe, in homes that you and me wouldn’t dare dream about. What kind of revolution is that? Give me a break’); from Jafarian’s own mother (‘the full-bellied traveller knows nothing of the one who is hungry, and the rider on horseback knows nothing of the one who must walk on foot’); from filmmaker Sara Mokhavat (‘apparently, the world has heard our voice this time. At least that’s what we’re told’).
Most tender for me was Tasalla Tabasom, who writes plainly and confessionally: ‘My friends and I struggled with conformity and the need to hide our true identities. We felt depressed. We were queer but in secret. We partied in secret. We could never see our favourite bands or wear our favourite tops out in summer. We were hot. We swam with full hijab in the sea.’ It is perhaps these short sentences that best enact Halasa’s mission with Woman Life Freedom; the disclosure of the hidden, the look beyond the veil which reveals not the image of an ungraspable, mystifying other, but humanness at its most familiar. A hot day, a favourite song. The desire to be loved, to be seen.
The return to our anonymous narrator in the final piece is sobering. We are powerless as we watch, almost inevitably, the Iranians who Halasa allowed us to know so intimately slip back behind the walls. Or perhaps it is us, the readers, who have moved to stand on the other side. On finishing the book, I think of ‘Persia’, that once revered land of ours which denoted exotic imagery that was not threatening but alluring in its renderings of spun silk textiles, crushed saffron flowers, long black hair and exposed olive skin. Yet ‘Persia’ is a myth, a name given to the land by the European superpowers who dubbed it after the Greek Persis. It has always been Iran to Iranians, derived from the ancient Farsi ‘Arya’, meaning freedom, a sad and special irony missed by most.
As vital to Iranian liberation as such anthologies are, there is a sorrow in the necessity of its existence. The understanding that to have to write consistently of freedom means it is yet to be won. Perhaps most regretfully, a collection of Iranian voices speaking solely of their oppression in English highlights a second layer of struggle. That like the protestors of Woman Life Freedom dressing as handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Iranians are still having to explain themselves by way of the west. As Iranian phenomenology researcher Mammad Aidani has stated, this act of attempting to ‘give meaning to an experience that does not come from the English language’ results in one ‘always tracing the sedimentation of the experience’. I wonder if true Iranian liberation through art doesn’t begin with the creation of works that are not consistently having to pivot from this political centre; if telling only stories that align with the western narratives of an eastern dystopia will be sufficient in breaking down those walls. But I wonder in equal measure if we will ever be given the chance of otherwise—the privilege to create art for art’s sake.
There is no answer in the anthology’s pages that satisfies the question posed to us at the start of our journey: ‘Why should there be such a divide between us and the rest of the world?’. The ‘why’ remains inexplicable, suspended in the fragments of Iranian politics, history, and lived reality. Though in closing the distance, Halasa shows us that a step towards liberation begins with a story, and it continues with listening.
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Works cited
✷ Mammad Aidani, Displaced Narratives of Iranian Migrants and Refugees: Constructions of Self and the Struggle for Representation, 2007.
✷ Safura Borumand, ‘Historical Perspectives on Iranian Cultural Identity’, in Iran Revisited, edited by Ali Pirzadeh (Springer Cham, 2016).
✷ Safura Fotouhi, ‘An Analysis of Literary Representations of Iranian men in Diasporic Iranian literature’, PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2014.
✷ Malu Halasa, ‘Art, Music and Freedom in Iran — with Malu Halasa, Nahid Siamdoust and Danny Postel’, Listen Notes, 2023.
✷ Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, Vintage Books), 1979.
✷ The Woman Life Freedom Movement in Iran: One Year On, SOAS, 2023.
Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer living in Melbourne on Wurundjeri land. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Catalyse Nonfiction Prize, and her work has previously been featured in Kill Your Darlings and Farrago.