At this week's Writers' and Literary Translators' International Congress (WALTIC), Shahrazad proudly presented a panel of distinguished Iranian writers and human rights activists - Parvin Ardalan, Pegah Ahmadi and Asieh Amini - who discussed the current situation for women and freedom of expression in their home country. The discussion was moderated by Fataneh Farahani. We are happy to publish Mrs Amini's contribution to the discussion here at Stories for life!
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"Before I begin, please allow me to take a moment and to mention my imprisoned friends and colleagues. These are women and men who have been subjected to worst types of violence and their only crimes have been the mere acts of writing and thinking. Allow me to speak to you of all my imprisoned friends and colleagues and ask all of you, who are writers and poets from different countries, to act and to take your pens and ask others to do the same, in support of the freedom to write and the freedom of thought.
Let me speak of Shiva NazarAhari. Let me speak of Bahareh Hedayat, Shabnam Madadzzade, Atefeh Nabavi, Hengameh Shahidi, Alieh Eghdamdoust, Mahdieh Golroo, Ronak Safarzadeh, and writers and journalists such as Bahman Ahmadi Amouie, Ahmad Zeidabadi, Isa Saharkhize, Koohyar Goudarzi, Majid Tavakoli, Milad Asadi.. The list goes on and on.
But it seems that I am here to speak about the situation of female writers and journalists in Iran and the conditions and challenges that I and many of my friends and colleagues have had to contend with. I want to tell a story and perhaps in this one example, the conditions under which we have been forced to write will come to light.
I have friend who is a graphic artists and we used to work in the same paper together. This person used women as a symbol in much of his artwork and was a staunch feminist. One day, dismayed, he confessed to me that "I am constantly being warned about my work. Why do the women you draw have breasts? Why have you drawn them with hair? Why are the women in your drawings tall? Why do the women have hourglass figures?" With great regret said that "I don't know any women who don't have breasts, or hair. This woman who is being demanded of me does not exist."
With this example I want to demonstrate that the subject of women, from the first year following the Revolution in 1979, was transformed into a platform that symbolized the Islamic identity of the Islamic State. Unfortunately in the last thirty years since the Revolution, women, because of their Islamic dress, have served as a model, which the government of Iran wants to present to the world, as an example of its accomplishments. It wants to reinforce itself, its religious identity and its Islamic Governance through this symbolization and the creation of this model throughout the world. For this reason, it has needed to draft laws and regulations to make sure that the ideal symbol transforms into a reality. On the other hand, cultural organizations in service to the government have worked for thirty years to nurture and foster this ideal.
Toward the realization of this goal, they first adopted the overarching slogan that the demand for the freedom of women is a Western concept and began to eliminate that which was feminine from society. Hejab or Islamic dress became mandatory. Very stringent laws designed to push women out of the social sphere and strip her of her human rights and responsibilities. Harsh punishments for those who undermined these concepts and laws too were also approved.
In essence a cultural war with the western world was initiated and women served as the weapons of this war. The was not only that women were victimized, but they also lost many of their freedoms and as a result all that was feminine and associate with women was veiled and concealed, including literature and the language of the feminine, women's needs, women's perspectives, phrases associated with women and so on.
From then on, a major part of our literature and our media was forced to observe strict censorship or self censorship in writings and in images of anything that was associated with women. Language moved toward euphemism and a type of complicated and difficult writing, became the fashion of the day. Some believed that the growth and the richness of our contemporary literature and writing is a positive result of this massive self censorship. But I believe differently. In my opinion people need to be allowed to express their thoughts freely. In a free society, those who prefer more complicated forms of writing and expression can also find their audience, but we should not justify cultural and gender tyranny under the guise of valuing complicated and euphemistic writing styles.
This censorship was even more serious. Because the print press is the not the place where you should take up complicated and euphemistic writing styles, the issues facing women were banished from our papers and the print press, in a very noticeable manner. I have worked for 17 years as a journalist in Iran and these are my personal experiences which I am relaying. Even our most progressive papers view "equal rights between the sexes" as a red line not to be crossed. In the last paper in which I worked as the editor for the social section, I received warnings on several occasions for addressing issues related to feminism. These warnings were issued in an environment where there is much self censorship to begin with, because we journalists know that our papers are constantly on the verge of being shut down and we on the verge of being arrested. We have all turned into censurers!
But in this environment we came to count the internet as a blessing that works toward promoting freedom of speech and freedom of women as well. I do not consider the internet as a technological development alone, rather I think of it as the precursor to a Gendered Revolution.
Between 2003 and 2005 while still employed at a print daily, I served as the editor of the first online publication on women, called "Iranian Women." Working on the editorial board of these two publications simultaneously was indeed a strange experience for me. At the time, the government of Iran did not view the internet as a serious threat yet, and this relaxed approach allowed the internet to serve as a medium for free expression. On numerous occasions, I would sit in front of the computer to start an article, and would quickly become confused. I wasn't sure what I could write and what I could not write about. Or I would be confused about which types of articles I could publish and which I could not, because there still were no laws designed to control the internet, and writings on the internet were not addressed by laws governing the press.
In this daily website, we had a section called "Women's Experiences." One of my most interesting experiences on writing about women is related to this section of the "Women in Iran" website. For example, once I received a very passionate article about the sexual feelings of a woman who had had one of her breasts surgically removed because of breast cancer. In a simple and beautiful prose filled with humanity, she wrote about her fears of having intimate relations with her husband and had explained about the problems she was facing in this respect. When I read this article, I began to cry uncontrollably. But when I finished, I asked myself: "do you want to publish this article?!"
In essence this question came to my mind because of the fear I had learned to harbor working in the printed press-a fear, which had become a part of all of us. I was confused, could we publish the article or not. Finally I decided to publish it and realized not only that there were no consequences, but that the article was well received by our readers, who sent numerous letters in its applause. A similar development occurred later with respect to women's rights. When print publications refused to publish articles I had written about women who had been sentenced to execution and stoning, the internet for me was transformed into a major support. The internet turned into a place where I could publish my writings but also facilitated the development of a huge network of human rights and women's rights defenders with whom I worked collaboratively to address these issues.
Of course, later the Internet was faced with tyrannical anger. One of the main targets of this anger was indeed women. The censorship was so extreme that the term "Gender" was broadly filtered and any site or blog which used this term was not accessible inside Iran. Even terms related to women's bodies, such as breasts, were filtered and blocked and as such many of the scientific and health related sites which included these types of terminology were blocked.
Of course we did not take this assault quietly. In all these years, Iranian women have been able to bypass all the restrictions that exist in the social, scientific, academic, literary, cultural and artistic fields and have continued their non-violent struggle within society. Perhaps you have heard many theories and analyses put forth that point to the fact that the developments and struggles in Iran witnessed by the world over the last year were based on the models developed and fostered by the Iranian women's movement. This is a reality, of which we are all proud.
In the end, I want to implore upon you, as writers and free thinkers, once again, to support those imprisoned in Iran because of their pen. We writers are all members of the same family and we need one another's support in creating a better world."
Translated from farsi by Sussan Tahmasebi.
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