The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of and Death Of A Mannequin

Miguel Cervantes

11/13/17

           In reading The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of and Death Of A Mannequin I found myself transported to a world permeated by the undeniable sense of the Orwellian.  These were not tales of fantasy, of a chastened and repressed citizenry crying out for the liberating sacrifice of a singular hero.  Rather, these were accounts of a revolution led by an ethos that held one single vision for all of Iranian society, a vision that would progressively strip Iran’s female population of their rights in such a way as to assault their very identity as women. 

We can see this happening in such a visceral way in Mehrangiz Kar’s description of the gradual dismantling (or perhaps, more accurately, mutilation) of the female mannequins she witnessed in the days and months following the Iranian Revolution.

“The shop owners were confused and did not know what to do to save their businesses from the attacks of the regime.  So all of a sudden, they cut the heads off their mannequins…their spongy breasts were slashed from their bodies…they had no eyes, no eyebrows, no noses, no mouths…the shop owners then chopped off the fingers of the female mannequins and replaced their hands with narrow, extended plastic cylinders.”  (p. 35)

There is an exceptionally powerful and distressing symbolism at work here.  With the rights of Iranian women being taken away in every sphere of life, with “morality patrols” roaming the streets in order to enforce strict codes of dress and with the ongoing censorship of the media and suppression of the arts we are left with the picture of a society convulsing, caught in the midst of competing visions for Iran’s future.  Because our view of the Revolution is focused through the female lens, the image of the mannequin is especially compelling – the public figure of the modern Iranian woman is steadily reduced, body part by body part, as the unyieldingly dogmatic regime of the Ayatollah further restricts the rights of women, and in the steady destruction of the outward display we see the deep, inner wound that the regime has inflicted upon its female citizens. 

It is also clear however that the spirit of the Iranian people was able to weather the oppressiveness of the new regime in ways that went far beyond the ability of censors or morality squads to control.  Azar Nafisi helps us to realize this by pointing to the inestimable power found within the realms of imagination, demonstrating that suppression, imprisonment and even death cannot limit us, cannot restrain our innate freedom, because that freedom is always ours to choose.  Nafisi’s remembrance of her former student’s cellmate, Razieh, and her love for the works of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald strikes us as a potent demonstration of individual freedom, one that is not restricted by the physical, but quickly rises above our circumstances, enabling us to embrace a vision of life as we would have it, rather than allow it to be dictated to us.

“We know that fiction does not save us from the tortures and brutalities of tyrannical regimes or from the banalities and cruelties of life itself.  James, Razieh’s beloved author, did not save her from death; yet there is a sense of triumph in the choice Razieh made when all choices seem to have been taken away from her…Faced with death, she celebrated what lent life dignity and meaning, what appealed most to her sense of beauty, memory, harmony and originality – namely, a great work of the imagination.  Her own portable world.” (pgs. 9-10)

In our own day to day lives, these imaginative worlds inspire us, delight us and compel us to explore their inner workings through our writing; it is both a vehicle of escape and a path toward greater involvement and communication with one another.  Nafisi sheds new light on the importance of these ‘portable worlds’ by pointing out that they represent an intimate connection between our secret, interior selves and our outward vision of life.  The two come together in the world of literature, writing that speaks to us at the level of the spirit, creating an inextinguishable source of wonder within.  For Nafisi’s students this wonder became a lifeline, a unifying and sustaining strength that helped buoy them even in the midst of dark, tragic times. 

I concluded my reading of both Nafisi and Kar’s stories with a newfound appreciation for the power of the human spirit, as well the immense power of the written word.  For most of us, I think, the prospect of having our rights limited in the way the Iranian people experienced after the Revolution of 1979 feels like a distant, intangible threat, hard to conceive of within the sheltered context of our American democracy.  The tyrannical measures adopted by the regime to enforce their laws seem to parallel the actions of despots in our cautionary, dystopian fiction and as a result they seem (at first) to hold a glimmer of unreality about them. 

But these tragic events are real, and by virtue of Nafisi and Kar’s recollections, we are able to gain a better understanding of the violent and totalitarian means of suppression that governments enact upon their own people in the name of a peaceful and harmonious society.  For women especially, the consequences of the societal upheavals in Iran was immense, because it exposed the brittle foundations upon which their civil liberties and individual freedoms rested, leaving it to them to determine – through a shared resilience that lent itself to resistance, protest and action – what the future would hold for their country and themselves.