Blog post: Sex in the time of Mullahs and Misreading Kundera in Tehran

I felt like reading the essay Sex, in the time of Mullahs was very similar to the writing prompt given to class in writing about the dark side. The tone of this piece was successfully detailing the subversive Iranian culture that bloomed from the over bearing dictatorship that ruled Iran. This also gave the reader a chance to look at how some of the inner workings of Iranian culture let out steam from failed revolutions. Moaveni details this deviant culture that arose in response to the cultural pinnings that were oppressing women and men and turned into something that would put Amsterdam to shame, as Moaveni puts it. Though, there still seems to be an attending to some of the rules of Iranian culture because of a man getting kicked out of a party for having no shame “the second course, feeling like a second choice, declaimed loudly that he had no shame (an altogether more serious charge in Persian than in English) and had him swiftly removed from the party” (Moaveni 57).The dark side was this image and picture of something so opposite of the day time rules of the dictatorship that ruled over Iran, forcing women to cover themselves from head to toe. This seemed to be describing the swing of a pendulum going back and forth in dramatic swoops from darkness to light. One way is the dictatorship that rules Iran by day and alternatively the swing goes towards the deviancy that can only exist at night.

What was interesting to me about this swing is the truth of the matter; the “day time” of the dictatorship is more like a dark side to me and the swing towards the “night time” of the deviancy is more like a release of the dark side, pushing away at the strictness that kept them from their own selves. I saw a connection to the light side of the madness of darkness with how Moaveni ends her piece “…she wrote that when her life had become nothing but the tick-tock of a clock, she discovered she “Must love, Insanely” (Moaveni 61). We see here that from all of the madness, there is a flower of hope threatening to bloom and release bearable hope.

I really enjoyed the set up of Naghmeh Zarbafian’s essay. I liked how she sometimes spoke to the audience in a way, with lines such as “Thus finished the first episode of my story” (Zarbafian 63). It makes the reader feel like this essay is in conversation with the author of it, as she reveals the inner workings and her thoughts that revolve around the editing of a novel by Milan Kundera entitled Identity. So I might have to check out the uncensored version of this novel. But as it relates to light and dark Zarbafian seems to metaphorically speak about it through the guise of “the other”. “The Other” seems to be the dark side, the side that makes the subject feel normal but only to the subject. Metaphorically the darkness was the passion and love portrayed in the novel that was edited out because it did not align in with the “lightness” of the current state of Iran. What continued to interest me about the censorship of Identity was what was considered worthy of censorship. Zarbafian explains “Yet the words “procreate,” “copulate,” and “coitus,” described by one of the character as “the sole purpose of human life,” are not censored. Neither is the word “rape.” To the translator and the censor, these words are the harmless ones. So sex as a dialogue between two bodies is cut off, whereas the aspects of sex that deals with banality and violence is “morally” approvable” (Zarbafian 66). Here we get an allusion to the social construct of the censorship in this novel. The language that constructs and gives voice to the violence to me is also a dark side that was shown light because of its moral stand point in Iranian culture that saw it differently.