Sex and Kundera

Sex in the Time of Mullahs operates through dichotomies, starting with the opening line, "You came for the politics, but you will stay for the nightlife" (55).  The outside narrator must be brought into the "hazy Tehran night" "behind closed doors" (55) to witness this nightlight.  Davar, the narrator's friend, leads the narrator and the reader into this seemingly subversive scene of exposure, of "shimmering arms" (56) and "bare-heads" (57), of free love.  But it is not that at all, the narrator argues.  These scenes are a masquerade, similar to the real masquerade party she later attends, where every behavior is in some way or another a response to the oppression of the Islamic Republic.  This nightlife is not the sexual revolution Davar and so many others claim it to be.

The tension is incredible--we flash between Davar's palpable excitement and the narrator's more wary perception, between the illusion of subversion and its breaking.  As Davar tells the narrator, the guests who don't leave the parties in time must wait them out until sunrise.  This "slice of night" (59) is when many sexual encounters happen, just before the inevitable return to daylight, before a return to the world as dictated by the morality police.  The daylight breaks the sense of rebellion.  The oppressive hand of the Islamic Republic was at the party all along. 

There are many dichotomies at work in this piece:  day vs. night, open vs. hidden, what an actual sexual revolution is and what it isn't.  The nightlife takes place at night, it is hidden from the police, it is not an actual sexual revolution relative to the one where "ordinary young people openly swap lovers" (60).  There are so many layers at play here.  The dark night is when the illusion of sexual revolution shines through, a masquerade of Western trappings that ultimately crushes rather than liberates free will.  Instead, the actual sexual revolution, according to the narrator, is occurring in middle-class neighborhoods where there is no attempt to conceal it, perhaps precisely because there is no one bothering to watch it.  The journalists and interested outsiders are all too busy taking in the lavish upper-class nightlife.  The actual revolution is that which is done unselfconsciously, freely, in the light but less seen. 

The frame of Misreading Kundera in Tehran is that of a fairy tale, fitting for an essay that explores the censorship through translation of a book that renders it ungrounded in reality, precluding the opportunity for honest interaction with another culture.  Did the narrator ever interact with Harold?  Perhaps not, as all evidence of that relationship was lost to the morality police.  "Once upon a time" (62) she met him.  Or did she?  The structure of the essay reflects the "interior cover" (70) that the morality police create in people by denying them access to meaningful relationships with "the other" (63). 

Like Moaveni does in Sex in the Time of Mullahs, Zarbafian explores what is concealed verses what is out in the open.  The narrator claims that these gaps in conversations and in texts are creating gaps in the self, in a similar way that the Islamic Republic's policies towards sex ultimately create a "death of romance" (58).  There is an "illusion of dialogue" (73), just as there is an illusion of sexual revolution.  Again, the image of the masquerade.  The brightest students don't recognize what is being concealed, and when the narrator makes them aware of it, they remain resigned to their censored relationship with the text--as well as with the outside world and with themselves. 

The final image we are left with is fitting--that of a dream.  In a dream we don't know that we are dreaming, just like the students don't fully recognize that the dialogue with a censored text and with "the other" is not complete.  But then we move from the dream to "a vision" with a "flickering light" (73), the infinite possible endings of a story or fairy tale.  The hope, the light, that the essay ends with is that the ending is incomplete, not yet written. 

--Gina