"Death of a Mannequin" and "The Stuff that Dreams are Made of" Response

Arya Samuelson

Both stories challenge the idea of a “singular historical moment.” Nafisi makes it clear that every action of the regime pointed backwards. Ayatollah Khomeini claimed to be “restoring women’s dignity and rescuing them from the degrading and diabolical ideas that had been thrust upon them by Western imperialists and their agents, who had conspired for decades to destroy Iranian culture and traditions” (3). In other words, Ayatollah Khomeini insisted that he was trying to make Iran great again.

As Nafisi counters, “in formulating this claim, the Islamic regime not only robbed the Iranian people of their rights, it robbed them of their history” (3). She goes on to discuss the powerful “process of self-questioning and transformation” that comprised the acquisition of rights for women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.  By the time of the revolution, “women were active in all areas of life in Iran.”

This section prompted me to consider the distinction between rights and history. It’s fascinating to me that Nafisi’s comment suggests that to lose one’s history is perhaps even more egregious than to lose one’s rights. I wrote my undergrad anthropology thesis about sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa and spent the year considering how rights are equated with modernity, with democracy, with progressive nations. Considering the paradox that South Africa has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world with regards to women’s rights, and yet has one of the highest rates of sexual violence... I was interested in how “rights” indicate newness that was not previously recognized or spelled out – i.e. now that a country has rights, the country is “modern.” How the acquisition of rights is indelibly linked to the project of nation-building, to projecting a particular global identity. South Africa’s apartheid “problem” was considered fixed because they had new rights in place to prove it.  

It’s interesting because Nafisi is exploring an a very different kind of history in Iran – women’s rights were hard-won by grassroots efforts and she writes about a kind of mutual respect among religious and non-religious women. And then the regime stripped away these rights in the name of restoring the country to a “purer” history, which really meant undoing all these historical gains. What does it mean to lose one’s history? To mandate a culture to forget where it comes from? To try and undo the cultural imagination that drove a society to invent itself over time? Nafisi’s essay made me think about the absence of a singular historical moment – how a culture’s history is continually turning back and in on itself and how the very notion of returning to a “singular historical moment” is a totalitarian myth.

Kar’s essay too makes clear that forgetting their history was not truly possible – “For many years, foreign journalists never knew that liberty, the pursuit of happiness, modernity, entertainment, and even interactions with the opposite sex existed under the cold and repressed surfaces of the cities.” Though the West portrayed Iran as a reformed nation that had succumbed to religious fervor and oppression, Kar writes about the distinctions between the private/public life of Iranians: “It took two decades for the world to learn about schizophrenic existence of the people of Iran, and especially about the resistance of Iranian women” (35). I’m interested in Kar’s notion of “forgetting” or “conforming” as a place of friction/tension, rather than an all/nothing situation. Iran didn’t just turn back the wheels of time, as the regime (and perhaps Western narratives) might claim; there was resistance, even if it was not necessarily evident to journalists watching from the outside.

Craft-wise, I’m so impressed by how Nafizi and Kar distilled such complex ideas into very short essays. Kar’s focus on mannequins was also very interesting and compelled me to think about the simultaneity of history and how it plays out even right before our eyes. She keeps coming back to the motif of the mannequins and the restrictions imposed on them as a way of foregrounding the oppressions that would eventually play out – even though Kar writes that initially, “pedestrians, still wearing short skirts, would stop at the windows and laugh at this sudden transformation” (30). There were two simultaneous historical narratives happening: the re-writing of a social narrative about women as shown by the mannequins, and the embodied narrative of women who recognized the state’s narrative was totally incongruent with their own sense of themselves. Through highlighting these places at the margins, Kar takes us “beyond the historical moment.”

Nafizi’s focus on the novel was also fascinating – how “the democratic form of the novel, which frames a multiplicity of voices – from different and at times opposing perspectives – in a critical exchange where one voice does not destroy and eliminate another” (6). This definition made me think about how novels model a certain kind of cultural history –  like novels, cultures are complex and there are many perspectives that must be accounted for. Nafizi uses the motif and metaphor of banning novels in Iran (and the expansiveness of imagination and critical thinking that reading/writing a novel calls for) as a stand-in for the ways in which Iran’s cultural history has been collapsed into a “single story.”