"The Stuff That Dream Are Made Of" and "Death of a Mannequin"

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

            Before anything else, I just have to say – wow. Azar Nafisi is one hell of an inspirational writer. She starts off talking about her sense of home. That Iran had always been the home that she wanted to go back to when she was studying abroad and that classic novels and poetry became a sort of home for her. Then she tells us that she finally did go home to Iran only to find that it was not the home she remembered. She arrived to witness the stripping of rights and freedom, of creativity and imagination. Lastly, Nafisi challenges her readers to ponder our own humanity.

            Her words are eloquent and impactful. They’re the type of words you’d expect to hear from a great leader. She started slow and worked her way up to a profound ending. I didn’t expect the beginning, where Nafisi describes herself as a spoiled brat running around an airport, to lead to her plea for the return of humaneness in our world. How she goes about this evolution is interesting. First, using “home” as a running theme to carry her story into the deterioration of the Iran she knows, then using the words of Huckleberry Fin and the sayings of important writers to support her claims of the importance of imagination to our humanity.

Death of a Mannequin

            In this piece, Mehrangiz Kar uses mannequins as a metaphor for femininity. She details the sequence of changes that occur in the mannequins’ appearances in parallel to the changes enforced on the female population of Iran during the revolution. Kar states, “the mannequins and the alterations in their appearance became my passion during the vety hard and lonely years of the revolution. I felt united with these dolls. The mannequins somehow accurately reflected the systematic aggression against our individual identities”(pg. 31).

            It started with the mannequins needing longer skirts. Then, they were required to wear a veil. The control and repression of the mannequins’ appearances progressed until they “were left with only a round face made out of cardboard. They had no eyes, no eyebrows, no noses, no mouths. The ideal woman for a fundamentalist was a woman who did not have eyes to see, a tongue to speak, and legs to run away”(pg. 35). The mutilation and hopelessness of the mannequins mirrors the oppression of Iranian women and is strongly felt by the reader.

-Erin