Blog Post: My Sister, Guard your Veil; My Brother Guard your Eyes

I found the style of both The Stuff that Dreams are Made of and Death of a Mannequin to both be reminiscent of a historical account; there was a matter-of-fact tone in both pieces that I believe really tied together some of the themes that were individually being introduced through these short stories. I believe the tone that gave these pieces their ‘historical’ feel came from how closely both of these pieces related to a difficult moment in Iranian history. In Azar Nafisi’s story we get an attention to “the idea of return” (Nafisi 2). Which seems to connect to why Nafisi returned to Iran after leaving and how he wrote about this dictator that effectively pushed any progressiveness Iran was experiencing back centuries “In one swoop the new rulers had set Iran back nearly a century” (Nafisi 3). So when Nafisi returns from an enlightening time in America, he is faced with a dictator that seems to force Nafisi to jump into a new revolutionairy consciousness that was incubated by writers with “imaginative sorcery – the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Mark Twain, Henry James, Philip Roth…and Ralph Ellison” (Nafisi 2).  I really enjoyed the way Nafisi spoke about this sorcery of the imagination, it seemed to be a through line in his piece that symbolized what writing can do for a society falling into an evil dictatorial abyss.

When thinking about this through line I thought about a term I came across in undergrad called ‘imagined alternatives’. Around this time is when I was finding literature more interesting and worthwhile in my academic life. Imagined alternatives referred to the transformative powers of literature. What can be seen in every day life but with a twist (imagined alternative) to society that brightens the pages. That same twist, if it can be acted out in real life, can make a great positive impact on society and this is what Nafisi seems to be calling on in this piece. “I have often asked myself in fact, how it is that under the worst political and social conditions, during war and revolution, in jails and concentration camps, most victims turn toward works of imagination” (Nafisi 9). Nafisi closes his piece with the final form of the evolution of his through line with the term “The Republic of the Imagination” (Nafisi 11) that seems to give new breath and life to the power of imagination and its possible effects on everyday society.

Death of a Mannequin shared the same ‘historical account’ tonal feel as the first piece to me because of its attention to a moment in Iran. What I thought was interesting was the symbol of the mannequin. It seemed like it represented women’s bodies in this new and awful dictatorship that seemed to grow more and more oppressive to women’s rights as the years went on. It seemed that every time a mannequin was censored, a woman lost her right to wear shorts in public and when they cut the heads off the mannequin it seemed like women then had to be veiled from head to toe. But there is also hope present in the writing of this piece “In 2005, dark pink was high fashion in Iran. And the material of Islamic clothing is now more delicate than it ever was” (Kar 36). In this piece there was also attention to cultural customs and the decline of women’s freedom represented by the mannequin. The attention to cultural customs was interesting because it produced a final thought on the language in Iran, noting that there was not a word in their language for ‘feminism’ “ In Iran’s official language, Farsi, there is no actual word for “Feminism”. And a group of Iranian sociologists claims that, of approximately 30 million women who live in Iran, a total of 29 million have never heard the word “feminism” in any other language either” (Kar 36). Language is power because it seems to be an underlying foundation of society through connection and communication. This note to the effects of cultural customs and “feminism” not being a word present in their language to give power to was definitely worthy of exploring.