In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

-Abbas Kiarostami

I dream not of being invisible, but imperceptible.

-Gilles Deleuze

 

On July 4, 2016 when the world awoke to the devastating news of the passing of Abbas Kiarostami, many netizens, including the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, paid tribute to the late director by replacing their avatar on social media with a black screen. This “non-image” stood as a shroud of mourning, lamenting Kiarostami’s untimely demise, but it also contained within itself the very force of his cinematic art and pedagogy of the image. In his films Kiarostami gave us both lessons of silence and lessons of darkness,[2] communicating a different vision of cinema. His cinema often plays with withholding sound, visuals, and discernible forms, all of which otherwise would rely on representational models of recognition. Babak Tabarraee has previously expounded on a variety of auditory absences in Kiarostami’s “cinema of silence,”[3] and my intention here is to focus on visual absences, or black screen sequences, in such films by Kiarostami as Taste of Cherry (1997), The Birth of Light (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), ABC Africa (2001), and Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003). These black screen sequences are not simply extended structural cuts to black. Following Saige Walton’s conception of baroque cinema, they can be approached as folds, in which light is folded into darkness and darkness into light, not contrasted or opposed, but enmeshed and entangled. Walton explores the affinities between cinema and the baroque in her writings, finding inspiration both in Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notions of the flesh and the chiasm.[4] In particular, she analyzes baroque darkness, as found in Claire Denis’s films, describing it as ominous and threatening. As opposed to Walton and for my own purposes here, I will approach the modulation of darkness in Kiarostami’s films as vitalist, enabling, and liberating. To avoid sinister undertones, I will refer to the analyzed material as “black screen sequences,” not as “dark screen sequences.” In these sequences darkness acts as a camouflaged environment that takes us beyond established meanings, recognizable figures, and limits of perception.

In this essay I argue that the black screen sequences in selected Kiarostami films trigger a process of becoming-imperceptible through creative deterritorialization, transfiguration of surrounding environment, and transformation of registers of perception informed by habitual modes of living and being, including modes of institutionalized reception of images. These moments in his films encourage us to conceive of cinema not in terms of the passive reception of representation, based on the subject-object identification and the “dualism machines” of binary thinking,[5] but rather invite us to approach images through a non-representational lens. To facilitate the task at hand, this essay sets in motion a number of Deleuzian concepts that offer novel ways of engaging with cinema in a non-representational regime, such as “becoming-imperceptible,” “any-space-whatever,” “the fold,” and the “genetic power” of the black screen. As Brian Massumi famously observed, there is “no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect,”[6] and hence we could say the same of non-representation; however, Deleuze’s unique conceptualization of the world permits speaking nearby,[7] if not directly about, non-representation.

 

Non-representational theory gained momentum in the mid-1990s, originating from within the field of human geography, where it set about to describe embodied everyday practices of social life .[8] According to Phillip Vannini, non-representational theory is an experimental, nomadic, and non-dogmatic approach, engaged with works that aim “to rupture … and reverberate rather than report and represent.”[9] Often linked to the philosophy of Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it offers a much-needed break from the succession of “-posts,” but is still rather underdeveloped in terms of its methodology. Recently, such fields as art, philosophy, media theory, and film studies have also begun exploring the potential of “negative” prefixes, such as non-philosophy, non-photography, non-cinema, and non-representation.[10] As Gregory Seigworth observes, there is a tendency in affect studies to make use of such prefixes and “pre-” or “–non,” as in “pre-personal” or “non-representational.” With respect to the latter, however, it is important to understand that “-non” does not equal “anti-,” nor is it a negation or elimination; it is “not less.” Instead, the attention is shifted to “the ‘more than,’ the ‘other-than,’ the ‘different-than,’” or, in other words, “the saturating/magnetizing circumambience of everything,”[11] which destroys identity and imitation as such. In contrast to the legacy of structural, post-structural, and psychoanalytic models of analysis, heavily informed by the language of representation, meaning, and signification, these new approaches deal more with experience, emotion, and force of sensation. As Simon O’Sullivan aptly notes, this signals a shift from hermeneutics to heuristics, as a result of which an operative set of more familiar terms such as “representation,” “identification,” “subject” and “object” gives way to an alternative terminology of “movement,” “flux,” “assemblage,” and “transmission of affect.”[12] Such a turn in the cultural condition and visual regime underscores new modes of perception that offer unprecedented capacities and affordances for our emotional states.

“ [W]e see through a glass, darkly.”[13] The public has grown accustomed to the images of Kiarostami wearing dark glasses, even on the set of his films.[14] Kiarostami once confessed that he wore dark glasses both in public and in private for medical reasons:  “The retina in my left eye has remained open, and no matter what I do it remains open, and it lets too much light in. I have no idea what happened.”[15] Such a medical condition might be considered a handicap for a filmmaker, but Kiarostami’s (im)personal vision of the world through dark glasses signals a change in habitual perception, an attunement to the unseen and the imperceptible. In answering the question, “What Is Baroque?” in The Fold, Gilles Deleuze observes that the art of the historical baroque announced a new age of light and color, one in which the worlds of light and shadows are separated by the thinnest of lines, however, not set in opposition but effectually enfolded. Specifically, he asserts: “This is a Baroque contribution: in place of the white chalk or plaster that primes the canvas, Tintoretto and Caravaggio use a dark, red-brown background on which they place the thickest shadows, and paint directly by shading toward the shadows.”[16] Kiarostami’s practice of filming through dark glasses, his heightened sensitivity to the indiscernible, can be read as analogous to the Baroque artists’ application of a dark background instead of a white primer for their canvases. In this manner, that which would normally be obscured or overlooked in contrast to brighter figures is now engaged in the dynamic interplay of light and darkness, if not necessarily in equal measure. Kiarostami’s own photosensitivity demands that we reach outside of normative subjectivity and switch our registers of perception from representation to non-representation.

Kiarostami’s black screen sequences have been addressed before as part of an analysis of separate films, but not in comparison to one another as a unique characteristic of his cinematic style.[17] In many of the black screen sequences under consideration, feeble sources of lighting and dark shadows obstruct representational content, focusing on the material plane of the image and inviting the force of sensation rather than offering any form of signification. The low-light conditions reduce cinema to its essential resources of light and movement, so that “cinema is … distilled as an aesthetic that relies less upon light and more upon dark.” These types of “sunless images,”[18] according to Nadia Bozak, are dependent on “withholding light sources and thus foregrounding how the constant availability of this cinematic ingredient has become naturalized as part of viewing expectations.”[19] Despite their apparent minimalism, however, Kiarostami’s black screen sequences are incredibly rich. For example, one can trace a variety of light sources in them, whether natural or artificial. There is a gradual switch from the prolonged darkness of night to the first rays of solar light at the end of The Birth of Light and Five; lunar light is present in Taste of Cherry and Five; and we see flashes of lightning in ABC Africa, Taste of Cherry, and Five. In addition to natural atmospheric light, artificial light sources include a lantern (Where the Wind Will Carry Us); a lighter and car headlights (Taste of Cherry); a flashlight, hotel floodlights, and matches (ABC Africa). As Bozak states, the history of cinema can be traced to the energy of the sun, which is “the heart of cinema, its fuel and perhaps even its spirit.”[20] In the course of its development cinema depended on both outdoor sources of light as well as artificial light: “The cinema originated, at least in part, within the same imagination as the electric light bulb.”[21] So the condition for the appearance of images and cinematic technology in general lies in the interrelation between natural and artificial light. But as Bozak further observes, even though the cinematic image relies on the availability of light, it also requires darkness as the condition of its emergence.[22]

There is a characteristic switch from darkness to light, night to day, and death to life that is traceable in all the black screen sequences. Henry Corbin once called the twilight, a common motif in Iranian poetry, a moment of “in-between, where one side looks towards the brightness of day, and the other side towards the darkness of night.”[23] Importantly, Kiarostami does not set darkness and light in opposition but rather explores their interrelation as a creative interplay of folding and unfolding matter that gives birth to images. Deleuze suggests thinking of the fold in connection to Heidegger’s concept of “Zweifalt, not a fold in two … but a ‘fold-of-two,’ an entre-deux, something ‘between’ in the sense that a difference is being differentiated.”[24] We can only think of darkness through light, death through life, non-representation through representation (and vice versa) in the moments when the two intersect, intermingle, bend, and re-fold: “Non-representational theory needs ‘a hinge-logic, a hinge-style.’”[25] Darkness and light, black and white act as the genetic forces of cinema, providing material out of which the visible appears and into which it recedes. Deleuze holds that the genetic power of the black or white screen in time-image cinema “restor[es] our belief in the world,”[26] invoking the Nietzschean concept of an eternal return to origins for renewed value. The energy of the sun acts as a source and force of not only images but also life in general: “sun makes the world visible,” but it also “makes it possible.”[27] In Kiarostami’s films, all moments of darkness end with an affirmative gesture of the “birth of light,” suggesting that life regenerates itself and goes on: “[a]s long as there is sun, the earth’s fossil fuels could in fact be renewed.”[28]

Darkness also acts as a fuel: it becomes a driving force for the viewer’s imagination. Kiarostami’s unfinished cinema retains its secrets because it “requires gaps, empty spaces like in a crossword puzzle, voids that it is up to the audience to fill in.”[29] Because this is an experience at the limits of perception, the rarefied sensory-motor aspect is driven to connect with the affective and cognitive modes. Many of Kiarostami’s films produce new visions for possible becomings, such as a becoming-woman, a becoming-animal, a becoming-minor, and a becoming-molecular, which run counter to traditional structures of the visual world. “Becoming,” a pivotal concept in this discussion, is regarded by Deleuze and Guattari as a constitutive process of existence, the condition of continuity and sustenance of life. Becoming is not about imitation or identification but about transformation and change. Deterritorialization through darkness in particular involves a becoming-imperceptible, the ultimate chain in a flow of becomings. Deleuze and Guattari describe it as a type of perception that no longer pertains to the subjective-objective view of the world (which could serve as a capsule definition of representation), but approaches life in the context of non-personal affect and intensity, which is inherently non-representational. Imperceptible does not necessarily mean invisible: rather it is a stage (but not a state) in which perception becomes molecular, when we “arrive at holes, microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection.”[30] As Simon O’Sullivan observes, art can reveal “other ‘planes’ of reality” that may become discernible through changing temporal and spatial registers.[31] Abbas Kiarostami is often described as a filmmaker who does not engage in manipulating the medium. But in what follows I show that Kiarostami points to the imperceptible by relying specifically on the prosthetic technology of cinema, sometimes under the guise of darkness. By mobilizing our perceptual fields in an attempt to address and renew the very limit of what is perceivable, the black screen sequences in Kiarostami’s films bring into the open the degree to which we are caught in the flow of habitual and deep-seated perceptions.

The Meeting of the Wind and the Leaves: Poetry, Secrets, and the Darkness of the Screen-Cave

 

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) takes place in the Kurdish village of Siah Darreh, or “Black Valley,” where a crew of filmmakers has arrived to record the mourning rituals for the local centenarian, a woman who has stubbornly refused to die on cue. The man in charge of the crew, Behzad (Behzad Dorani), observes a young woman from the village bringing fresh milk to a well digger, Yossef, a man burrowing deeper into the valley. Behzad is determined to follow this fresh milk to its source. First directed to “Kakrahman’s house,” Behzad is then shown into a dark cellar, stooping beneath the low ceiling and carrying his milk pail. He is a disbeliever, uninitiated in local rituals: “Why is it so dark here?,” he asks, hesitating on the threshold. As he moves forward, he advances on the camera position until his own body blocks the remaining light from the low door—most likely, an invisible cut[32] occurs here, and the screen goes completely black for several seconds.

Behzad has entered a pitch-dark cellar, with only the sounds of his tentative footsteps, the bleating of a goat, and the lowing of the cow to orient the viewer. Miss Zeynab appears out of the darkness carrying a hurricane lantern, which does not illuminate the girl’s face throughout the scene of the milking which follows. Behzad is reminded of the opening lines of Forough Farrokhzad’s poem, “Gift” (Hediyeh): “I speak out of the deep of night / Out of the deep of darkness / And out of the deep of night I speak,” as he is suddenly inspired to recite the second stanza of the poem.[33] Taking Zeynab by surprise, he declares, “If you come to my house … Oh, kind one, bring me the lamp and a window   through which I can watch the crowd in the happy street.”[34] After asking Zeynab’s permission, Behzad then recites to her another of Farrokhzad’s poems, “The Wind Will Take Us,”[35] which lends the film its title. In his reading of this scene, Hamid Dabashi regards the recital of Farrokhzad’s poems in the darkness of the cellar as that of “a vulgar man intruding into the private passions of a young woman.” He also calls the milk “a substance with mischievously sexual connotations” and notes that “the protagonist leaves with a bucketful of milk and a satisfied grin on his face,” condemning the whole scene as “ocular masturbation.”[36] He concludes, hyperbolically, that the “stable sequence is one of the most violent rape scenes in all cinema.”[37] Dabashi’s emphatic interpretation of the scene has been met with some apprehension, and a few film critics, such as Joan Copjec and Chris Lippard, offered alternative readings of this poignant moment in the film. In contrast to Dabashi, whose attention was focused on the male figure (it is notable that he never identifies Zeynab by her name, referring to her only as a “milkmaid”),[38] Copjec shifts the emphasis from Behzad’s shameless behavior to “the awakening of shame in Zeynab,”[39] who “requires an intervention, the presence of others as such, in order to emerge from the milking, from the gerundive form of her impoverished existence, as a subject.”[40] This approach itself is an important feminist intervention of reading from a woman’s point of view, illustrating the impact of a female character who is placed in a more active subject position. Copjec continues, “In Dabashi’s reading of the encounter between Behzad and Zeynab, it is Behzad who brings shame to Zeynab. This misreading depends on the reduction of shame to the product of a simple intersubjective relation in which the belittling or degrading look of another person is sufficient to ignite shame. I would argue, however, that it is not Behzad who occasions shame in Zeynab, but the erotic poem by Forough Farrokhzad, ‘The Wind Will Carry Us.’”[41] Two important observations by Copjec invite another reading, one that transcends the subject-object relationship. My Deleuzian approach to this scene draws inspiration from an affective encounter that takes place in the darkness of the cave and poetry as a deterritorializing creative force.

 

Dabashi’s representational analysis is deeply locked within the subject-object position (a brutal man “raping” a helpless milkmaid) and is, most likely, informed either consciously or unconsciously by his knowledge of the peculiar system of codes in Iranian cinema. As Copjec and others explain, the system of sartorial modesty, or hejab, is quite pervasive in Iranian culture. Its influences can be traced in cinematic representations after the Iranian revolution, which dictated that female characters had to remain veiled in the presence of their onscreen husbands (and also, by extension, the off screen male spectators).[42] As bodies and feelings had to be cloaked, “[p]oetry became the only option for expressing intimacy, at first primarily for the men.”[43] For example, in his analysis of Rakhshan Banietemad’s The May Lady (1998), Hamid Naficy describes an exchange between Foruq, whose name is a nod to Forough Farrokhzad, and Mr. Rahbar, who “exchange letters and, using one of the favorite Iranian devices of intimacy, sexuality, and love, quote poetry to each other.”[44] In trying to find the key to the cryptography of the scene, Dabashi interprets the recital of the poem solely as a means of indecent and immoral seduction. But rather than portraying the scene as unbecoming, I propose instead that it invites multiple becomings.

 

“You’ll get used to it if you stay here,” says Zeynab to Behzad, for whose benefit she has lit the hurricane lantern. He replies, “I’ll be gone before I get used to it.” For both Behzad and Zeynab, this encounter offers a new connection, another relation to the world other than the one they are used to. Behzad descends into the cellar from the sunlit world outside, while Zeynab spends her days in the dark. They both momentarily undergo a reaching out to something that is outside of their habituated experience, an “experimental milieu” outside of their normal selves .[45] The habitual modes of their existence are interrupted by an affective moment in the cellar, where a switch in perceptual orders takes place. For Behzad, the darkness of the cellar and Zeynab, the keeper of its secrets, exist on a different perceptual register. For Zeynab, the stranger’s presence interrupts her existence through the light of the lamp cast on her while she is milking. The poem Behzad recites brings her a “window” into the world through which she can “watch the crowd in the happy street” out of her windowless cellar. “The wind is about to meet the leaves,” continues Behzad and, after a pause, he explains this line to Zeynab: “the two are meeting.” He tries to find a more accessible way to explain the affective power of poetry through language that would be understandable to Zeynab and adds, “It’s like when you went to see Yossef” (who likewise spends his days in the dark and whose face we never see). This scene, however, is not just about an ordinary meeting between Zeynab and Yossef, or Zeynab and Behzad; rather, it is an encounter with an asubjective power of affect. As O’Sullivan points out, “affect is a more brutal, apersonal thing. It is that which connects us to the world. It is the matter in us responding and resonating with the matter around us.”[46] The meeting of “the wind and the leaves” in the darkness of the cellar affects both Zeynab and Behzad, inviting becomings. This affective desire is “connected to the feminine, defined as fluidity, empathy, pleasure, non-closure, a yearning for otherness in the non-appropriative mode, and intensity.”[47] For both Behzad and Zeynab, it starts with an opening to a becoming-woman. Behzad steps into the zone of dark quarters occupied by Zeynab, and Zeynab, who went to school approximately the same number of years as Forough, “becomes-woman” through and with her poetry.

 

Kiarostami urges us to look for poetry even (and especially) in complete darkness. In her illuminating study Khatereh Sheibani describes the influence of modern Persian poetry on Kiarostami’s filmmaking. In her discussion of the film The Wind Will Carry Us, Sheibani observes that “the concept of binaries, which suggests a fixed-reality scheme through which many of us perceive the world, is problematized” here.[48] The film invites an overstepping of the “black and white” alternatives,[49] or for that matter the urban and rural, above and below ground, life and death, male and female, and subject and object pairings. The film abjures these “rationalizing” linguistic patterns in favor of the assemblage of disparate expression, “this way or that,” “both good and bad,” that can be found in the poetics of Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri.[50] In their discussion of becoming-music, which can also apply to lyric poetry, Deleuze and Guattari remark that “musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal” because it participates in a form of “creative deterritorialization.”[51] Zeynab is (in)visibly affected by Forough’s lines. Unlike in the classic affection-images (the close-ups of Joan’s face) in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928),[52] we are unable to see the traces of affect on Zeynab’s face, as it is obscured by darkness. We can only sense her affect, as her re-action is suspended and remains non-actualizable, in a state of virtuality and potentiality. Male and female, subject and object, voyeur and observed are swept up in the creative deterritorialization of poetry.

 

Dabashi considers the scene an obscenity, but it is only because he is examining what is perceptible to the voyeur. Instead, this scene invites us to explore the process of becoming-imperceptible, through the pathways of poetry and secrets. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the “secret has a privileged … relation to perception and the imperceptible.”[53] The secret issues an invitation to becoming-imperceptible, though it may do so in part through what it reveals as much as through what it withholds, in its form and in its content. To Behzad and the spectator, Zeynab remains a secret, an enigma: “The protector of the secret is not necessarily in on it, but is also tied to a perception, since he or she must perceive and detect those who wish to discover the secret.”[54] The choice of a dark cellar in this film, as well as the choice of a grave in Taste of Cherry is quite notable. Both, as subterranean grounds, offer a tangibly material contact with the earth’s innards. A meeting point between the Cosmos and the Brain, caves have taken center stage in many religions and philosophies. Yulia Ustinova connects the importance of caves in ancient Greece to the recent findings in neuroscience, building on the concept of altered consciousness. According to her, the descent into a dark cave (catabasis), immersing oneself in a state of sensory and significatory deprivation, provided a path to the ascent (anabasis) of the mind.[55] As Ustinova also observes, “[c]aves hid awe-inspiring secrets and treasures.”[56] The prehistoric caves of Lascaux, the underground spring of the ancient oracle at Delphi, and even a rough-hewn cellar in a remote Kurdish village—such underground precincts hold hidden secrets and mysteries precisely because they are sealed off from the perceptible world. The secret remains hidden in the dark, the unseen, the becoming-imperceptible, for those who seek it. It is not too much, perhaps, to suggest that at the same moment in which Behzad and the viewer enter the realm of darkness, he/we experience an altered state of consciousness, as the mind lets go of its dependence on habitual vision and the appearance of things. But if for Behzad the reaching out to an “experimental milieu”[57] outside of himself is triggered by his passage into a dark space, for the spectator this happens through recourse to the “experimental night”[58] that cinema spreads over us, thereby affecting “the visible with a fundamental disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which contradicts all natural perception.”[59] This scene prompts us to put normative perceptions and expectations into flux, distorting the habitual cinematic codes that usually rely on visibility and audibility. For the spectator, becoming-imperceptible is not about disappearance but about reconstituting the nature of one’s perceptual field and changing the threshold of the perceivable world. The secret of the scene in the dark cellar lies in “a perception that seeks to be imperceptible itself”[60]: “Listen / Do you hear the darkness blowing?”[61]

 

Modification of Speeds I: Drugs and the Darkness of the Screen-Grave

 

The critical response to Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) has emphasized its minimalist techniques, often at the expense of its vision, including its long, uninterrupted takes, lack of apparent action, long shots that encompass a barren landscape, and extended durations without dialogue.^[62] For most of the film Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives through Tehran and the surrounding countryside in zigzagging patterns seeking an accomplice for his planned suicide. This departure from the Hollywood action film model led critics such as Roger Ebert to declare the film “excruciatingly boring,” because from the perspective of western feature cinema, there was almost nothing to see.[63] What Ebert fails to see are the imperceptible changes: each time Badii travels to the same spot with a pre-dug grave and a tree next to it, he undergoes a series of transformations, not unlike Behzad in The Wind Will Carry Us. Behzad also repeatedly drives up the winding road to the top of the hill (where the cemetery is located) in search of a signal whenever he receives a call from his Tehran boss. Even though the route is repeated, it is never the same journey for either Behzad or Badii. Every time they come to “the same” location, they arrive there in a renewed state, transformed by a series of affective encounters with the villagers (Behzad) or the car passengers (Badii).

 

The final sequence of the film, after Mr. Badii has recruited an Azeri taxidermist to throw earth on his body if the latter finds him dead in the morning, demands a changed perspective. First, we watch Mr. Badii from a distance moving from one room to another in his apartment. He appears to take into his mouth what we can only infer is an overdose of sedatives or some other drug. Then, under the guise of night, the taxi with Mr. Badii in it heads on a zigzagging path up the hillside to the spot of the open grave. If we look at the scene in a planar dimension, instead of inferring three-dimensional space, then what might be a pair of headlights presents a folded line of flight in the dark with relation to what might be a scattering of streetlights or lit domiciles. Without the changed perspective of holes in space or lines of transparency, without drawing our attention away from the world of perceivable objects and toward the molecular realm of becoming-imperceptible, we cannot appreciate what is about to transpire at the gravesite. We next see the seated Mr. Badii with his back to the fixed camera, framed against the darkened landscape just described. He smokes his “last” cigarette after fighting with his lighter, which stubbornly refuses to work. He then takes his position inside the grave waiting for the drugs to take effect. Drugs of various sorts can be inducements to altered consciousness, “All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed. What allows us to describe an overall Drug assemblage in spite of the differences between drugs is a line of perceptive causality that makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived; (2) perception is molecular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and the perceived.”[64] The face of Mr. Badii, recumbent in his shallow grave, is momentarily illuminated by the moon and then obscured by the clouds passing above him, lit by a flash of lightning and then cast into a blackout that, in screen time lasts for over a minute but, as Mr. Badii passes into the imperceptible, unfolds for an eternity. As Rosi Braidotti poignantly intones, “What we most truly desire is to surrender the self, preferably in the agony of ecstasy, thus choosing our own way of disappearing, our way of dying to and as our self. This can be described also as the moment of ascetic dissolution of the subject; the moment of its merging with the web of nonhuman forces that frame him/her—the cosmos as a whole.”[65] The prolonged blackout will be irritating to those who wish for only the conventionally perceptible in cinema, to know “what happened.” But for those more conducive to a changed perspective, it invites us to an experience of becoming-imperceptible in the disappearance of the subject, the collapse of the subject-object dichotomy.

The effect of the blackout, the obscuring and eclipsing of light, recalls the famous play on cuts in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), when thin clouds are passing in front of a full moon and a straight razor is drawn across a woman’s wide-opened eye.[66]

In Taste of Cherry we hear the sound of distant thunder and in the split second of the lightning flash, we can see that Mr. Badii’s eyes have closed. The extended black screen, or cut, is simultaneously the occluded moon, Mr. Badii’s shut eyes, his presupposed diegetic passing, and our experience of the darkened theater in which we view Taste of Cherry.[67] But the imperceptible cut that takes place here suggests that the black screen is not simply a “symbol” of death or an “emblem” of a funereal cloak. As darkness comes to its end, we first hear and then see—but in the differing vision and framing of video—a troop of soldiers marching along the winding road in full daylight. It is not the morning after, or the arrival of the taxidermist, but a completely different season and a grainier camcorder footage of Kiarostami, Homayoun Ershadi,[68] and the film’s crew and cast, shooting scenes or relaxing between takes, as the soundtrack introduces Louis Armstrong’s jazz dirge, “St. James Infirmary Blues.” If the latter seems culturally disparate, it is a funeral march that celebrates life rather than mourns death. As Deleuze claims, “Becoming imperceptible is Life, ‘without cessation or condition’ … attaining to a cosmic and spiritual lapping.”[69] The videotape coda is an assertion that for the past ninety minutes we have been watching not an act of self-annihilation but of creative deterritorialization, one that affirms life on the plane of immanence. Nagisa Oshima once said of his method of banishing green, “No matter how severe a human confrontation you are portraying, it immediately becomes mild the instant that even a little green enters it. Green always softens the heart.”[70] The switch from a barren landscape to a scene with bright greenery promises regeneration and rebirth. The extended black screen, then, serves as a “fold-of-two,”[71] as the processes of life and death are materially enmeshed together rather than separated in the either/or of the “dualism machine.” An invitation to becoming-imperceptible is achieved through the treatment of the medium itself, in which the cut from 35 mm film to videotape not only transfers and enfolds the two media within one another but the two ontological registers as well. The black screen is neither erasure nor negation but the locus of an encounter. There is no cessation in the flow of matter, but rather a fold of two world lines, the intersection of which situates itself in the realm of the imperceptible and explored through the very materiality of the medium. As spectators, we reach this creative deterritorialization of seemingly opposed states of life and death, disparate media, and levels of ontology through the imperceptible blackout that they share.

 

Modification of Speeds II: Time-Lapse Effects and Any-Space-Whatever

 

The short film The Birth of Light (1997) and the documentary Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) eschew conventional narrative development and typical character representation. Instead, the attention in both films is shifted to alternative planes: animal, inanimate, molecular (a becoming-dog, a becoming-duck, a becoming-wood, a becoming-wave). They also invite us to explore the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible. The Birth of Light and the final section of Five emerge from a primordial darkness into the first emanations of light. The initial darkness in The Birth of Light, first through a thin ray of light that becomes stronger, transforms into dawn as the sun rises over the distant mountains. The short film was commissioned by the Locarno International Film Festival, with photography by Bahman Kiarostami and music by Peyman Yazdanian. Rumor has it that it might have been intended for inclusion in Lumière and Company (1996), an anthology of films by international directors who were encouraged to use the vintage Cinématographe of the Lumière brothers to commemorate the centennial of motion pictures.[72] One might be tempted to explore the link between the birth of cinema and the birth of light (lumière); however, the film is not in black-and-white, but in color, and much longer than the anthology’s required fifty-two seconds. Curiously though, two aspects of this short film link it to Kiarostami’s final film-compilation, 24 Frames (2017), alternatively known as 24 Frames Before and After Lumière. The Birth of Light runs just under five minutes, which is approximately the time (about four-and-a-half minutes) of each segment included in the compilation. In addition, both projects examine the boundary between still and moving images, real and artificial, manipulation and non-manipulation. If the still images in 24 Frames, mostly personal photos by Kiarostami, come to life through imperceptible digital techniques, The Birth of Light relies on a time-lapse effect, animating a seemingly static image of the mountain landscape.[73]

 

Five, also known as Five Dedicated to Ozu, is an ensemble of non-narrative shorts. In Five (as well as in The Birth of Light and 24 Frames) Ozu’s “pillow-shots”[74] become extended meditations on backgrounds, which come to the fore in a non-representational style. According to Vannini, backgrounds are the “sites that fall outside of common awareness, the atmospheres we take for granted, the places in which habitual dispositions regularly unfold.”[75] In these films Kiarostami abandons representational dramas of the foreground in favor of the backdrops that often pass unnoticed. The segments in Five are separated by black or white screens overlaid with music, which are ontologically different (as straightforward structural cuts) from the final black screen sequence. This section is the longest and runs to nearly thirty minutes. It begins in total darkness, and then light is gradually reflected on shallow, dappled water, appearing and disappearing into darkness again. The wind susurrates, a thunderstorm brews and raindrops splash on the water’s surface, frogs croak and waterfowl squawk. Or so it seems, with a sort of Zen consciousness and placidity that we could ascribe to Ozu. But like the planar screen that we observed in Taste of Cherry, the image is so rarefied and difficult to discern that we become aware that we are watching the projection of light and not (only) observing a contemplative nature-scape. The liminality between the imperceptible and the perceptible is at issue here, defined in Deleuze and Guattari as “zones of indiscernibility”: “The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and each world as an assemblage effectuating it…. To be present at the dawn of the world. Such is the link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator.”[76]

The impressionist appreciation of what appears to be a single long take—perhaps so long as to try the patience of the distractible filmgoer, and indeed Five also doubled as a gallery installation piece—was “achieved only after filming several ponds over an extended period.”[77] This segment is an artfully composed montage, painstakingly achieved through the manipulation of the shot(s), concealing the edits in what appears to be the diegetic blackness of the screen. We are led to believe that the light of the moon reflected on the surface of the pond is eclipsed by the passing clouds as we are plunged into complete darkness. But as we saw in Taste of Cherry and Un Chien Andalou, it might be just a subtle nod to the cinematic cut. Like the dawning in The Birth of Light, the muted grays, low contrast, and barely discernible surfaces are eventually tinged by Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” and the crowing of a cock. The appearance of such “naturalness,” however, is only arrived at through the technical manipulation of film, the use of time-lapse montage.[78] As discussed earlier, one entrée into the virtue of imperceptibility is speed. Just as drugs affect humans in various ways, speeding up or slowing down bodily functions (Mr. Badii who takes his sleeping pills), the effects of modifying of speeds, such as time-lapse, high-speed, or slow-motion effects, change the metabolism of cinema. It only takes about “five minutes” for the darkness to be transformed into light in The Birth of Light. In time-lapse cinematography, the frame rate is lower than the speed used to watch the sequence, so that the processes that would appear imperceptible to the human eye can become perceptible. Deleuze and Guattari tell us, “Movements, becomings, in other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perception are relative…. What we must do is reach the photographic or cinematic threshold … according to variable speeds and slownesses.”[79] The becoming-imperceptible is all around us; it is, among other things, happening at speeds that are either above or below the threshold of human perception: the geologic time of continental drift or the beating of a hummingbird’s wings; or, the rotation of the planet that brings dawn and dusk each day. The kino-eye, as demonstrated throughout the manipulation of frame rate, grants the spectator an entrance into the imperceptible.

 

The black screens in The Birth of Light and Five are instances of what Deleuze describes as the rarefaction of the image (“less information”), in which little or no light penetrates and observable objects are minimal or few.[80] Blackness and whiteness can be conceived—cosmically and cinematically—as either the fundamentals out of which all the stuff of the world begets or the elementals into which it disintegrates. In Kiarostami darkness is not negative, but enabling, and the vitalist forces always prevail. In both films, a new day arises out of the darkness of night, a characteristic of Kiarostami’s themes of birth, death, and regeneration. Deleuze references the concept of any-space-whatever in his descriptions of the affection-image of classical cinema as well as in the depiction of the movement-image crisis and time-image films. Extending as far as the void, these any-spaces-whatever manifest their genetic power: “Nothingness itself is diverted towards that which comes out of it or falls back on it, the genetic element, the fresh or vanishing perception.”[81] No coordinates can be assigned to these spaces, instead, they exhibit independent qualities and forces outside of belonging to any actual locations.[82] Famously, Deleuze describes Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929) as no longer a direct representation of any concrete rain, but a qualisign, a pure quality of rain as an affective state achieved through an accumulation of images in rapid montage.[83] In the last segment of Five the rain abruptly begins and ends, and there are irregular flashes of lightning, illuminating the black screen, not unlike irrational cuts in experimental flicker films, which render the space in a fragmented and disconnected manner. Kiarostami’s waterscape, as any-space-whatever, is not any localizable basin of water, but a space of virtual dimension, deterritorialized and indeterminate. As affect overflows the frame, it becomes a “pond of matter in which there exist different flows and waves.”[84]

 

“The Electricity is Off”: Power Cuts and Any-Space-Whatever in Minor Cinema

Kiarostami’s documentary film, ABC Africa (2001), was made at the invitation of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development. The director and his assistant, Seifolah Samadian, travel to Uganda, where they spend ten days recording digital video of the many children orphaned by AIDS and warfare, being cared for by the Uganda Women’s Effort to Save Orphans. One night, as Kiarostami and his assistant discuss the day’s shooting, they observe a swarm of mosquitoes around the hotel’s floodlights. As soon as they are told that the electrical power will be cut off by the local authorities at midnight, they (and we) are immediately plunged into darkness.[85] We are reminded of the moment in The Wind Will Carry Us when Behzad finds himself in complete darkness in the cellar, and in response to his bewilderment, Zeynab explains, “We have a flashlight. The electricity is off.” In a rural Kurdish village, episodic power outages might be a fact of life. For the cosmopolitan Tehrani Behzad, however, darkness disrupts habitual systems of sensory perception as he struggles to acclimate himself to an utterly different mode of existence. When Kiarostami and his assistant find themselves in a similar situation in Uganda, they are equally unable to cope, nor have they brought a flashlight as recommended by the authorities: “How can they live in this darkness?,”[86] they ask each other. The videorecording rolls for another seven minutes in the dark as the filmmaker and cinematographer attempt to find their way by a single matchlight and, eventually, flashes of lightning through the window. For a filmmaker reliant upon the electrical grid for production, and with light being the constituent medium of cinema, the unexpected power loss is profound. They observe of the locals, “The sun is gone, life is gone,” but they could equally be speaking of their own work. “With no candles, no lights, no television and no internet [and we could add, no cinema]. I can’t think of anywhere in this world where the sun could be more precious and welcome,” they say, referring to Ugandans. In Bozak’s words, during this moment we get a glimpse into the “privileged world without its natural mechanisms of power and structure … deprived of its electrical supply.”[87]

Kiarostami makes us aware of how much we rely on the habituation of our motor-sensory faculties to carry ourselves through our daily (and nightly) activities. When any one of those faculties is disturbed, we are paralyzed, fixed in place like a bat suddenly unable to echolocate its position in a cave. Groping in the dark, Kiarostami and his assistant continue conversing, “They live half their lives within these dark walls, like blind people. We can’t even handle five minutes of it.” But, of course, it is not only the director and the cinematographer who are deprived, we, the spectators in the theater, or perhaps streaming this sequence on our laptops, likewise feel unable to handle five minutes of the black screen—a veritable eternity in our habituation to an ever-flickering image—so that we experience something like anxiety, claustrophobia, or simply displeasure. The black screen presents itself against naturalized systems of representation, defamiliarizing “the privileged viewing conditions that ‘institutional’ (from [Noël] Burch) or ‘state’ (Deleuze) viewership takes for granted.”[88]

 

Kiarostami’s cinema has been previously placed under the rubric of Deleuzian “minor cinema” in connection with new political forms of consciousness.[89] In this sense, Kiarostami, an Iranian filmmaker, undermines the dominant Hollywood “language” through his “accented cinema,”[90] much like Kafka, writing in German as a Jew living in Prague, and creates “lines of flight” by way of experimentation.[91] The black screen in ABC Africa, similar to that at the end of Five, can also be approached as an any-space-whatever. For one, there is the shared motif of lightning strikes that make the screen appear and disappear out of the throbbing darkness, thus fragmenting the space. But, poignantly, in minor cinema these spaces of virtuality, invisibility, and affect also become the locus in which “the missing people are a becoming,” they create their collectivity and “invent themselves”[92] in the absence of recognition in the black tunnels and the underground into which they were pushed by power structures. For these “missing people,” either the Kurdish milkmaid Zeynab or the Ugandan grandmother who cares for thirty-five children in a single room, the power failure might be caused either by poor infrastructure or by political struggles. The “voided” nature of the spaces where the missing people find themselves has a strong genetic element, which in minor cinema acquires the special meaning of an anticipatory function, the seeds of the people to come. These “disconnected spaces”[93] (from electricity and privilege) become emancipatory channels, a call “for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.”[94] And if there is hope for humanity, then it will be because the privileged, sunstruck cosmopolite Behzad, a cognate of the film director, will acclimate himself to the motor-sensory deprivation of the dark cellar, thus “becoming-woman,” “becoming-molecular,” “becoming-imperceptible,” just as Kiarostami and his assistant will also see in the lightning-illuminated trees of Uganda their own “becoming-other,” “becoming-minor.” There is also hope for the spectator who will reach out to the imperceptible and co-emerge with the world through the affective power of darkness and for whom the non-signifying black screen will become a virtual space where new possibilities can be thought. But above all, there is hope for all people who will engage with the Earth differently.

 

Coda

In this essay I address the deep affinities between Deleuzian philosophy and Kiarostami’s films, placing the latter’s cinema within the recent turn to non-representation, affect theory, and the reframing of regimes of visuality in film-philosophy and media theory. I argue that Kiarostami’s cinema, especially his black screen sequences, aspire to the logic of non-representation in the audiovisual medium of cinema, which so willingly succumbs to the tenets of mimesis. The sequences of darkness in Kiarostami’s films invite an imagination of baroque interiors characterized by folds within the intersection of light and shadow, allowing entry into the realm of the imperceptible. Many of Kiarostami’s seemingly uninterrupted and non-manipulated shots mask elaborate labor, capturing movements invisible to the human threshold of perception, which in the black screen sequences is aided by darkness. As Ahmad Kiarostami noted during the post-screening conversation about 24 Frames at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, in many of his father’s films, what you see and take for granted has been in fact painstakingly constructed. It should not come as a surprise, then, that in Kiarostami’s last film, 24 Frames, “everything is very carefully designed” by means of digital manipulation.[95]

24 Frames, a reference to the twenty-four frames per second at which film is projected, was shown posthumously at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The film was inspired by Kiarostami’s desire to know what comes “before” and “after” each given image. Recalling Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic concept of “thirdness,” which splits the binary of the signifier/signified,[96] there has always been an indiscernible twenty-fifth frame in Kiarostami’s cinema, an element outside of the system of signification, which compels the viewer to reach beyond the dimensions of narrative content. The final black-and-white frame in 24 Frames depicts a young woman sleeping in front of the big window, with her head on her desk. On the computer screen beside the woman is a scene from the classical Hollywood film, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which portrays a kissing couple. Famously, Kiarostami did not object to spectators sleeping during his films and even encouraged them to do so: “dreams are windows in our lives, and the significance of cinema is in its similarity to this window.” He emphasized that it was more important how the spectators felt after the film, and he wanted them to experience a “relaxing feeling” following the film’s end.[97] We then hear Andrew Lloyd Weber’s song, with lyrics by Glenn Slater, “Love Never Dies”: “Love never dies once it is in you / Life may be fleeting, Love lives on.” Finally, “The End” flashes on the computer screen, depicted against the background with streaks of light and shadow. The credits start rolling to the side of the frame, announcing Abbas Kiarostami as the director of the film. The twenty-fourth frame is a folded farewell that finds itself betwixt and between the happy ending of the classical movement-image cinema and the time-image cinema’s unresolved closure. “Nothing is ever finished in [Kiarostami], nothing ever dies,”[98] and thus there is no END in his open-image cinema. We walk away tranquil and unhurried, but now it is up to us to open that window into our individual lives and unravel what comes “after” the final frame, to track the course of Life in its reverberating process of growth and change. Kiarostami’s cinema demonstrates an affirmative ethics that helps us to survive and sustain ourselves against all odds: there is the birth of light and continuance of life on earth, even in the face of death. It’s Life, And Nothing More…

[1]Tanya Shilina-Conte <tshilina@buffalo.edu> is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English, University at Buffalo. She teaches a wide variety of courses in Film and Media Theory, Cinema in the Post-media Age, Global Culture and Media, and Theories of Montage and Representation. She has published articles and book chapters in Studia Phaenomenologica, Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film, and Studia Linguistica. She is currently involved in a research project entitled Black Screens, White Frames: Recalculating Film History, based on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and theory of cinema.

 

[2]I am alluding here to Werner Herzog’s documentary, Lessons of Darkness (1992) of burning oil fields in post-Gulf War Kuwait, but not in any overtly political sense, nor in an apocalyptic manner. Lessons of Darkness, directed by Werner Herzog (France, Canal+, 1992), Film.

[3]See Babak Tabarraee, “Abbas Kiarostami: A Cinema of Silence,” Soundtrack 5, no. 1 (June 2012), 5-13, and also his MA thesis, “Silence Studies in the Cinema and the Case of Abbas Kiarostami” (Master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, 2013). Kiarostami’s cinema has also been described as “cinema of questions,” “delay and uncertainty,” “ellipsis and omission,” cinema of an “open image,” and “unfinished” or “half-created cinema.” See Godfrey Cheshire, “Abbas Kiarostami: A Cinema of Questions,” Film Comment 8, no. 6 (July/August 1996): 34-36, 41-43; Laura Mulvey, “Kiarostami’s Uncertainty Principle,” Sight and Sound 6 June 1998, 24-27; Saeed-Vafa Mehrnaz and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn, “The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema,” Screen 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 38-57; Abbas Kiarostami, “An Unfinished Cinema,” Text Written for the Centenary of Cinema, distributed at Odon Theatre, Paris, 1995; and Mohammad Jafar Yousefian Kenari and Mostafa Mokhtabad, “Kiarostami’s Unfinished Cinema and its Postmodern Reflections,” International Journal of the Humanities 17, no. 2 (2010): 23-37.

[4]See Saige Walton, “Enfolding Surfaces, Spaces and Materials: Claire Denis’ Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation,” Screening the Past 42 (2013), Web, www.screeningthepast.com/2013/10/enfolding-surfaces-spaces-and-materials-claire-denis’-neo-baroque-textures-of-sensation/, 24 November 2017;

“Affective Forces and Folds of Night: Les Salauds/Bastards (2013) as Baroque Dark Matter,” The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016): 1-25; and Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

[5]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 276.

[6]Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 221.

[7]See Nancy N. Chen, “‘Speaking Nearby’: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology Review 8, no.1 (Spring 1992): 83-91.

[8]Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

[9]Phillip Vannini, “Non-Representational Research Methodologies: An Introduction,” in Non-Representational Research Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research, ed. Phillip Vannini (New York: Routledge, 2015), 5.

[10]See, for example, François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and William Brown, “Non-Cinema: Digital, Ethics, Multitude,” Film-Philosophy 20, no. 1 (Feb. 2016): 104-30. As Brown notes, one of the characteristics of non-cinema is an imposition of darkness.

[11]Gregory J. Seigworth, “Capaciousness,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2017), ii, iii, Web, doi:10.22387/CAP2017.7.

[12]Simon O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6, no. 3 (December 2001), 125.

[13]1 Corinthians 13:12.

[14]See, for example, such images as “Kiarostami at Work,” Photos 12/Alamy, in David Denby, “End Games: The Films of the Iranian Director Abbas Kiarostami,” The New Yorker 87, no. 4 (14 March 2011), 65; and “The Director Abbas Kiarostami,” by Laurent Thurin Nalset, in Nicolas Rapold, “Master of Illusions Faces His Own Mirage,” New York Times 8 February 2013: AR12.

[15]Abbas Kiarostami, Fanfare 6 April 1998, Web, 24 May 2017. Other directors who have also regularly worn dark glasses in public appearances, if not for medical reasons, then possibly as an affectation or a prop, are Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, Tim Burton, and Claire Denis. In Agnès Varda’s recent film, Faces Places (France: Ciné Tamaris, 2017), dark glasses become one of the cross-cutting themes. Varda’s partner in this film, a young visual artist named JR, is constantly wearing dark glasses, which reminds her of Jean-Luc Godard. Varda remarks in the film that JR’s dark glasses are like “the black screen” between them.

[16]Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 31.

[17]See Chris Lippard, “Disappearing into the Distance and Getting Closer All the Time: Vision, Position, and Thought in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us,” Journal of Film and Video 61, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 31-40; Michael Price, “Imagining Life: The Ending of Taste of Cherry,” Senses of Cinema 17 (November 2001), Web; Hamish Ford, “Driving into the Void: Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry,” Journal of Humanistics and Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-27; Mathew Abbott, “The Appearance of Appearance: Absolute Truth in Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa,” Senses of Cinema 67 (July 2013), Web; Justin Remes, “The Sleeping Spectator: Nonhuman Aesthetics in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu,” in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 231-42; and Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami (London: SAQI Books/Iran Heritage Foundation, 2005), among others.

[18]A reference to Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil (Sunless) (France, Argos Films, 1983).

[19]Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 42; 40.

[20]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 18.

[21]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 32.

[22]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 40.

[23]Henry Corbin, The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy, trans. Joseph Rowe (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1998), 156.

[24]Deleuze, The Fold, 10.

[25]Marcus A. Doel, “Representation and Difference,” in Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, ed. Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison (London: Ashgate, 2010), 128.

[26]Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 201.

[27]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 19-20.

[28]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 18. Also a reference to Kiarostami’s film Life, and Nothing More… (Iran, Kanoon, 1992), sometimes also translated as And Life Goes On.

[29]Kiarostami, “An Unfinished Cinema.”

[30]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 282.

[31]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 127.

[32]This type of “blackout cut” was often practiced in classical cinema, when objects or characters momentarily blocked the camera. In film literature, blackout cuts have variously been described as hidden cuts, masked cuts, or invisible edits, as they are presumed to pass unnoticed.

[33]Forough Farrokhzad, “Gift” (Hediyeh), Web, www.forughfarrokhzad.org/selectedworks/selectedworks1.php#Gift, 31 May 2017.

[34]The Wind Will Carry Us, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (France, MK2 Productions, 1999), Film.

[35]Forough Farrokhzad, “The Wind Will Take Us,” Web, www.forughfarrokhzad.org/selectedworks/selectedworks1.php#The%20Wind, 31 May 2017.

[36]Hamid Dabashi, Close-Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future (New York: Verso, 2001), 253.

[37]Dabashi, Close-Up, 253, 254.

[38]Dabashi, Close-Up, 253. She does remain silent when asked her name by Behzad, but we know that her mother has called her Zeynab.

[39]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze: Shame, Hejab, Cinema,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 14 (2007), 176.

[40]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze,” 177.

[41]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze,” 179.

[42]Copjec, “The Object-Gaze,” 164.

[43]Hamid Naficy, “Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietemad’s Films,” Social Research 67, no. 2, Iran: Since the Revolution (Summer 2000), 565.

[44]Naficy, “Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema,” 572.

[45]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 127. He references Chapter 6 of A Thousand Plateaus, on “The Body Without Organs.”

[46]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 128.

[47]Rosi Braidotti, “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 157.

[48]Khatereh Sheibani, “Kiarostami and the Aesthetics of Modern Persian Poetry,” Iranian Studies 39, no. 4 (December 2006): 524.

[49]For example, Behzad is perplexed as to why the whitewashed village is called Black Valley, not White Valley, a (for him) confusing reorganization of binaries.

[50]Sheibani, “Kiarostami,” 524.

[51]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 299.

[52]The Passion of Joan of Arc, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer (France, Société Générale des Films, 1928), Film.

[53]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 286.

[54]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 287.

[55]See Yulia Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for the Ultimate Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2.

[56]Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind, 1.

[57]O’Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” 127.

[58]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 201. Deleuze is quoting from Jean-Louis Schefer, L’homme ordinaire du cinema (Paris: Cahiers du cinema, Gallimard, 1980).

[59]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 201.

[60]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 287.

[61]Forough Farrokhzad, “The Wind Will Take Us.”

[62]Taste of Cherry, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, France, Zeitgeist Film, 1997), Film.

[63]Roger Ebert, review of Taste of Cherry, Chicago Sun-Times 27 February 1998, Web, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/taste-of-cherry-1998, 21 May 2017.

[64]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 282.

[65]Braidotti, “Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” 153.

[66]Un Chien Andalou, directed by Luis Buñuel (France, Les Grands Films Classiques, 1929), Film.

[67]It is of interest that Mr. Badii, just like Luis Buñuel in the razor scene of Un Chien Andalou, is smoking a cigarette.

[68]Homayoun Ershadi lights up a cigarette and hands it over to Kiarostami, an extension of the gesture from the previous scene.

[69]Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 26.

[70]Nagisa Oshima, “Banishing Green,” in Color: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 119.

[71]Deleuze, The Fold, 10.

[72]Keith Uhlich, “Kiarostami at MoMA, Day 1: Birth of Light and Taste of Cherry.” Slant 6 May 2007, Web, www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/kiarostami-at-moma-day-1a-birth-of-light-taste-of-cherry, 24 November 2017. Lumière and Company includes a different short by Kiarostami, Dinner for One (Iran, France: Cinétévé, 1996).

[73]The most typical use of time-lapse is usually sunset to sunrise.

[74]Noël Burch coined this term in comparison to a “pillow-word” (makurakotoba) in Japanese poetry, “a conventional epithet or attribute for a word,” that serves a brief auxiliary function in a poem. Based on this analogy, “pillow-shots” are scenes of everyday life seemingly disconnected from the main plot, and without humans present in them. In To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 160.

[75]Vannini, “Non-Representational Research Methodologies, 9.

[76]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 280.

[77]Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Spoiler Alert,” Chicago Reader 8 June 2006, Web, www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/spoiler-alert/Content?oid=922348, 22 May 2017.

[78]See Tom Paulus, “Truth in Cinema: The Riddle of Kiarostami—Part Two,” Cinea 3 January 2017, Web, https://cinea.be/truth-cinema-the-riddle-kiarostami-part-two/, 22 May 2017.

[79]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 281.

[80]See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 12.

[81]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 122.

[82]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 120.

[83]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 110-11. Regen (Rain), directed by Joris Ivens (Netherlands: Capi-Holland, 1929), Film.

[84]Deleuze, The Fold, 5. Deleuze is quoting from Letter to Des Billettes, December 1696 (GPh, VII, 452).

[85]“It’s a good thing we took our pills,” they say right before the power is cut off, wondering if any of the mosquitoes carry malaria.

[86]ABC Africa, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran: IFAD, 2001), Film.

[87]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 42.Think also of blackouts during the Special Period in Cuba or extended periods of time without electrical supply on some Caribbean islands after the recent hurricanes Jose and Maria. 

[88]Bozak, Cinematic Footprint, 43.

[89]See, for example, Vered Maimon, “Beyond Representation: Abbas Kiarostami’s and Pedro Costa’s Minor Cinema,” Third Text 26, no. 3 (May 2012), 331-44.

[90]See Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[91]See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?”, Mississippi Review 11, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1983), 13-33.

[92]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 217.

[93]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 273.

[94]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 108.

[95]Conversation with Ahmad Kiarostami at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, about 24 Frames, 13 September, 2017. For instance, Ahmad Kiarostami talks about the zigzagging path in Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), trampled down by a class of children who were directed to walk back and forth across the hill. Another example includes a piece of wood “spontaneously” split apart by the waves in Five, which occurred because Kiarostami hid an explosive in it (see Mahmoud Reza Sani, Men at Work: Cinematic Lessons from Abbas Kiarostami [Los Angeles, CA: Mhughes Press, 2013], 16).

[96]Peirce’s three trichotomies of the sign (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler [New York: Dover, 1955]) influence Deleuze’s analyses of the image in the Cinema books.

[97]Xueili Wang, “Sleeping Through Kiarostami,” Los Angeles Review of Books 7 October 2016, Web, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/sleeping-through-kiarostami/, 24 November 2017. A few reviews of the screening of 24 Frames at the Cannes Film Festival described sleeping spectators in the audience: “During the screening at the Lumière, where I sat in the balcony, probably half the audience in my area got up and left in the first hour. Over half of those who remained spent portions of the film asleep,” Nolan Kelly, “24 Frames: The Last Word of Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami,” The Pavlovich Today 12 August 2017, Web, http://thepavlovictoday.com/mixed-media/24-frames-last-word-filmmaker-abbas-kiarostami/, 24 November 2017. For a scholarly treatment of “the sleeping spectator,” see Remes, “The Sleeping Spectator: Nonhuman Aesthetics in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five.”

[98]Deleuze, in “The Greatest Irish Film (Beckett’s “Film”), gave this assessment of Beckett, in Essays Critical and Clinical, 26.

 

Homa Katouzian is the Iran Heritage Foundation Research Fellow, St Antony’s College, and Member, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. He is editor, International Journal of Persian Literature and co-editor, the AIS-Routledge book series in Iranian studies.

In the eleven hundred years of literature in Persian, humour has been quite visible and has played important roles in various contexts. It has also been widely varied in style, form and scope. There has been both verbal and fictional satire, lampoon and buffoonery , some of them soft and subtle, others coarse and even obscene, but all of them more or less amusing, though behind many of them are such motives as anger, revenge, blackmail, sarcasm, mockery, social criticism and so on, while some others resemble maxims and aphorisms dressed up as satire. The title of this talk is too ambitious for the time available, so I shall offer an overview of classical humour and modern satire in the early twentieth century.

Generally, there is not much difference between Persian and Western satire beyond the inevitable differences of from, but we find more indelicate jibes and abuses in Persian satire, especially when matters of sex and honour are brought into them. Still, even these are quite distinct from simple invective because it is precisely their literary form that shapes them into humour. For example, Mahsati or (Mahasti) Ganjavi, a twelfth century female poet, wrote in a quatrain:

When the judge’s wife came with child, he cried

Struck by pain he found it extremely odd

Saying I am old and cannot have an erection

This whore is not Mary, so whence the benediction.[2]

This quite compares with the style of reporting in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron. But theirs are relatively rare in the body of Western satire, whereas they are more common in Persian literature.  Some of Rumi’s tales in his Masnavi almost border on pornography, even though, oddly enough, they too are lessons in mysticism. However, there are also many subtle and delicate satires, verbal as well as fictional, not only in the works of such great classicists as Sa’di and Hafiz but also in modern satirists such as Dehkhoda.

Abolfazl Beyhaqi (995-1077) wrote in his great history a thousand years ago about a man who procured concubines for a prince and received ample rewards for them. A judge told him to remember that pimping is better than judging.[3] Naser Khosrow (1004-1088), who also flourished in the eleventh century, was a very serious and highly religious man who, in his polemics against his religious enemies called them, ass, cow and so on. He wrote in a humorous aphorism:

نشنیده ای که زیر چناری کدو بنی

بر رست و بردوید بر او بر به روز بیست

پرسید از چنار که تو چند ساله ای

گفتا چنار سال مرا بیشتر ز سی ست

خندید پس بر او که من از تو به بیست روز

بر تر شدم بگوی که این کاهلی ز چیست

او را چنار گفت که امروزه ای کدو

با تو مرا هنوز نه هنگام داوری ست

فردا که بر من و تو وزد بعد مهرگان

آنگه  شود پدید که نامرد و مرد کیست

Have you heard that once a marrow grew

Under a maple tree and bore fruit in a day or two?

It asked the tree’s age which it said

Was more than thirty years

The marrow laughed and said how come

That by me in a few days you have been overcome

The tree said today o marrow

It is too early to compare me and you

For when the October wind begins to blow

It’ll be seen which one of us is to bellow[4]

Not long afterwards, the nobleman Keykavus ibn Eskandar (1021-1087) wrote in his Qabusnameh, the book intended for the education of his son, that a dress-maker whose shop was near the cemetery used to throw a pebble into a vase each time they buried a dead person, and counted the pebbles every month. After his death a man showed up looking for him and was told that the tailor too had fallen into the vase.[5]

In another anecdote, he says that a sheep owner used to dilute milk with water and sell it. One night his shepherd was sleeping on high ground when a flood came and swept the sheep away. Next day the shepherd told the sheep owner: last night the waters that you used to put in the milk gathered together and took the sheep away.[6] He also tells the tale of a hundred-year-old man who was bent and leaning on a walking-stick. A young man asked him in mockery how much he would sell his little bow. He told him, if you wait long enough, life would give it to you free of charge, although you are not worthy of it[7]. Keykavus emphatically advises his son not to resort to obscene words when he jokes, but, as mentioned, that advice is not observed by a number of Persian poets and satirists.

Anvari Abivardi (d. 1189), that twelfth century great but not very ethical poet, wrote in a long qasideh that emptying cesspits is better than writing poetry because that is a useful occupation whereas there is no use in writing poetry.[8] He wrote once, addressing himself, that he would not be immune from danger as long as he is in danger of writing poems.  Although he did write panegyrics, he was not successful in earning a good living, so he resorted to lampoon and blackmail to milk the rich. Once he addressed a short stanza to one such:

انوری نام هجو می نبرد

چون ترا چشم بر عطا ست هنوز

کیر خر نام می برد لیکن

می نگوید که در کجاست هنوز

Anvari will not talk of lampoon

Since he still hopes for a donation

He does mention donkey’s prick

But does not yet mention its location[9]

 

In another piece he complained of the meanness of the prince:

 

گر اندک صلتی بخشد امیرت

از او بستان کز او بسیار باشد

عطای او بود چون ختنه کردن

که اندر عمر خود یک بار باشد

If the prince gives you a little reward

Take it from him for it is too much.

His gift is like circumcision

In a lifetime it happens only once.[10] Reflecting on his own lack of fortune, he wrote once:

 

هر بلایی کز آسمان آید

گر چه بر دیگری روا باشد

نرسیده به خاک می پرسد

خانه انوری کجا باشد

Whatever ill descends from the heavens

Even if intended for someone else,

Before reaching the earth it asks

Where’s Anvari’s residence?[11]

It is perhaps not surprising because, apart from lampooning for money, he scandalised anyone he disliked. Addressing a man, for example, he wondered why every woman he married slept around with others, ending by the question: Do you want whorish wives to praise / Or it just happens to be the case?[12] He overreached himself in ribaldry when he wrote in a stanza:

 

اگر سهلان رستم نذ ر کرده ست

که هر کس را که من گایم بگاید

بگادن چون تواند خواهرش را

و یا مادر , که قتلش واجب آید

وگر گآید مر ایشان را و گوید

که در سوگند تا ویلی  نباید

بگادن چون تواند خویشتن را

مگر بر علم ما چیزی فزاید

If Sahlan son of Rostam has vowed

To fuck anyone that I fuck

How can he fuck his mother and sister?

Since he would surely be executed.

But if he does it nevertheless

Saying that an oath should not be broken.

How can he possibly fuck himself?

Perhaps he’ll teach us a lesson. [13]

He was very unhappy with his wife and wrote such obscene verses about her which are almost unprintable. He wrote about marriage that: To get married in this era / Is naught but pure pimping (کاندر این روزگار زن کردن / بجز از محض قلتبانی نیست ).[14] However, sometimes he also wrote humorous poems without targeting himself or others, but still using foul language. For example, he tells the tale of a group of ladies who had gone out to the countryside.  A he- donkey happened to be mating with a she-donkey ‘with a two-feet long ebony’ (یک گز و نیم آبنوس), ‘while farting and braying with much excitement’ (گوز می افکند و میزد عر عر ان). The leader of the ladies said to the others: ‘If copulation is what this donkey is doing / Our husbands surely shit on our pussies’(گر جماع این است که این خر می کند

بر کس ما می ریند این شوهران  ).[15]

It is not just Anvari, but many a twelfth-century poet has tried his hands at ribaldry.  Sana’i Ghazanavi (b. 1150) – to become a mystic later in life – tells the tale of a woman in labour that sends someone to ask for a remedy from a holy man which would relieve her pain. The messenger comes across a eunuch on the way who tells her to tell the woman that pain cannot be avoided: ‘You have enjoyed the sweetness of fucking / So put up with the pain of squatting (چون چشیدی حلاوت گادن / بکش اکنون مشقت زادن).[16]

Yet, in a more subtle anecdote, he says that an old woman had a pretty daughter called Mahsati as well as three cows.  One day the girl became seriously ill, making the mother extremely unhappy. Meanwhile, one of her cows put her head into a pan but could not take it out. She emerged from the kitchen with her head in the pan. The mother thought it was the Angle of Death and shouted: I aren’t Mahsati, Angle of Death / I am only a poor old woman; If it’s Mahsati you have come to claim / There she is for you to take’; It is she who is ill, not me / Don’t with her confuse me.

ملک الموت من نه مهستی ام

من یکی پیرزال محنتی ام

گر تو را مهستی همی باید

اینک او را ببر که می شاید   [17]

Khaqani (1126-1198), the great twelfth century poet was so proud that he did not regard any other living poet worthy of the name. This got him into highly scathing exchanges, among others, with his teacher and father-in-law Abol’ala Ganjavi and his own pupil Mojir al-Din Bilaqani, both of them poets of different standing, though much less talented than him.  He wrote other lampoons and abuse about all and sundry, even including the lesbians of Baghdad: This is drumming, not fucking / resulting in a world-full of noise.[18] He wrote about a Lord As’ad:

خواجه اسعد چو می خورد پیوست

طرفه شکلی شود چو گردد مست

پارسا روی هست , اما نیست

قلتبان شکل نیست , اما هست

When Lord As’ad goes on drinking

His appearance looks ironical – drunk

He is pious looking but he is not one

He is not looking like a pimp, but he is one.[19]

Khaqani’s contemporary, Suzani Samarqandi (1072-1166) is perhaps the most notorious classic in harsh lampooning and ribaldry. His Divan is packed with harsh lampoons many of which are low in artistic touch. He too was at odds with his contemporary poets and used to attack them in poems which he wrote in the same metres and rhymes as theirs.  One of his targets was the great poet Nezami Ganjavi for whom he wrote an elegy before his death:

نظامی ار چه نمرده ست , مرده انگارم

به نظم مرثیتش حق طبع   بگزارم

چه گر بمیرد و آنگاه مرثیت  گویم

چو نشنود که چه گویم چه سود گفتارم

لطیف مرثیتی پیش او فرو گویم

چنانکه در دل او آرزوی مرگ آرم…

بمیرد آن سگ زن روسپی به مرگ سگان

اگر چه گوید با شیر نر به پیکارم…

Nezami is not dead but I assume he is

And write his elegy in verse

For if I do so after he dies

What’s the use when he hears it not?

I’ll write him such a delicate elegy

That would induce him to have death-wish…

Let that dog of a wife-whore die like dogs,

Even though he says he will fight me like a lion…[20]

Both Rumi and Sa’di, two of the all-time great classics flourished in the thirteenth century. They were both humorous in different ways, though, as mentioned, Rumi has a number of virtually pornographic tales. One of the better known is the story of the lady without a male partner who discovered that her slave girl lets the donkey in the stable have sex with her, not suspecting that she uses a pumpkin as a buffer. She tried to imitate the girl without the use of the pumpkin and died as a result: ‘It was a most disreputable death, my friend / Have you ever seen someone martyred by a donkey’s prick? (مرد مرگی با فضیحت ای پدر / تو شهیدی دیده ای از کیر خر ؟’)[21] Rumi also tells the story of two men, one of them good looking with a small beard, the other, ugly, whose beard had not yet grown. They once stay the night in a khaneqah, and in the middle of the night the beardless youth erects a barrier around himself with bricks. A resident man comes along with ill intentions. The pretty male had a small beard and so was out of bounds.  He asks the beard-less youth why he had done that. He said, to protect myself from geezers like you, since: A few hairs on the chin are more protective / than thirty bricks around one’s ass (بر زنخ سه چار مو بهر نمون /  بهتر از سی خشت گرداگرد کون).[22]

However, much that Rumi wrote in his Masnavi, let alone Divan-e Shams, was far from harsh and indelicate. He tells the tale of a man whom a group of dervishes invite to eat with them. At the dinner spread he joyfully repeats with them the zekr (evocation) ‘the donkey’s gone, the donkey’s gone, the donkey’s gone’ (خر برفت و خر برفت و خر برف), unaware that they had secretly sold his donkey to throw the feast. The camel’s knees are rough and dirty since she sits on them. Rumi says in a piece:

آن یکی پرسید اشتر را که هی

از کجا می ایی ای اقبال پی

گفت از حمام گرم کی تو

گفت خود پیداست از زانوی تو

Someone asked the camel, hey

Whence come you, you lucky one?

From your neighbourhood’s bath, he answered

Ah, it’s obvious from your knees, he said.[23]

Almost everything that Rumi wrote contained a mystical message, though this did not stop them from being humorous as well. The tale is famous of the merchant who had a parrot and, going to India, he asked it what it wanted as a souvenir. The parrot asked him to ask wild parrots how it could return to them. On return, the merchant said that when he put the question to the Indian parrots one of them dropped dead. Whereupon his own parrot dropped dead and he threw it out of its cage. The parrot flew up and was free.

Sa’di (c1210-1292) was the greatest Persian satirist of the thirteenth century. His satire is usually subtle and amusing, and contains a maxim or is instructive in other ways. In some of his works he resembles Rabelais who flourished more than two centuries after him, and sometimes Voltaire, who came centuries later, although no work of Sa’di’s is blasphemous. No wonder that Voltaire said if Sa’di is from Persia then Persians must be a highly civilised people. He wrote in a short stanza:

مردکی بود غرقه در جیحون

به سمرقند بود پندارم

بانگ می کرد و زار می نالید

که دریغا کلاه و دستارم

A little man was drowning in the River Oxus

– It was in Samarqand, I think –

Clamouring and complaining desperately

Woe for my hat and headdress![24]

 

Sa’di’s Golestan, a gem of a prose book that also includes the occasional verse, is packed with verbal and fictional satires of various kinds. A minister told a great Sufi that he served the sultan day and night, hoping for his reward while fearing his wrath. The Sufi told him that if he worshipped God as much as he worshipped the sultan, he would be one of the most pious.[25]

He tells the story of an imposter who dressed up his hair in the style of the descendants of the Prophet Mohammad and arrived in a town saying he was returning from Hajj and presented a qasideh to the king who gave him ample reward and treated him with great respect. However, one of the courtiers said that at the time of Hajj he had seen the man in Basra, so he was not a Hajji. Another one said that his father was Christian, how could he be a descendent of the Prophet. And they found his qasideh in Anvari’s Divan. The king ordered him to be flogged and driven out of town. He told the king ‘I’ll tell you one more thing and if it is not right I would deserve any punishment that you would mete out on me’. The king agreed, and he said in verse:

غریبی گرت ماست پیش آورد

دو پیمانه آب است و یک چمچه دوغ

اگر راست می خواهی از من شنو

جهاندیده بسیار گوید دروغ

If a stranger brings you yoghurt / It’ll be diluted and full of water; Ask me if you want to

know the truth / An experienced traveller tells all sorts of untruths.

The king laughed and let him go[26].

A religiously devout man was guest of a king and at dinner he ate less than usual. And when they stood to prayers he prayed longer than he was used to. Returning home, he asked for food. His son asked him why and he said he had not eaten much at the court to impress the king. The son told him to repeat his prayers as well because his prayers at the court would not be answered.[27]

A king asked an ascetic ‘Do you ever remember me?’ He said yes, when I forget God[28].

They said an ascetic ate a lot of food every night and then prayed until dawn. A wise man   said it would be much better if he ate lightly and slept through[29].

A king faced a difficulty. He vowed that if it was resolved he would give so much alms to the ascetics. When his prayers were answered he asked a trusted servant to distribute the alms among the ascetics. Next day the servant returned and said he could not find one. Surprised, the king said to his knowledge there were four-hundred ascetics in his land. The servant said Sire those who are ascetic refuse the alm, and those who accept it are not ascetic.[30] Someone told his guru that he was tired of having so many visitors. He said give a loan to those of them who are poor and ask for a loan from those who are rich. You would then not be bothered by any of them.[31]

Someone got an eye-ache and went to a vet. The vet put in his eye what he would for beasts and he got blind. The case went before the judge. The judge said there is no compensation, since if he was not an ass he wouldn’t seek treatment from a vet.[32]

Someone’s young good-looking wife died and his mother-in-law stayed at home on account of the dowry. The man found her presence unpleasant, but he could see no way out of it. One day a group of friends came to see him. One of them asked how he was in the absence of his beloved. He said seeing my mother-in-law is worse than missing my wife.[33]

The relatively long tale of the Hamedan judge and the pretty farrier boy could have made a scandal in the twenty-first century. The judge fell madly in love with the youth and tried every trick to seduce him and eventually succeeded. One night they got together and on the same night the police chief was informed. The judge was at the height of ecstasy when one of his retainers brought him the news that the prince was on the way. The judge did not heed the warning. The prince showed up and this was the scene he saw:

شمع را دید ایستاده , شاهد نشسته,  می ریخته , قدح شکسته , قاضی در خواب مستی بی خبر از ملک هستی.

The candle standing, the youth sitting, the wine spilled on the floor and the judge

drunken and sleep, unaware of all that there was.

The prince gently told him to wake up since the sun was rising. The judge got the message and said: Where did it rise from? He said from the east. The judge said thank God it is still possible to repent [since according to a hadith, as long as the sun rises from the east it is possible to repent]. His canny response was ineffective since the prince thought a man of his standing must be punished for others to take a lesson from it, and so ordered that he be thrown down the castle. The judge said I have been a servant of your dynasty, why don’t you throw someone else so I would take a lesson. The prince laughed and forgave him.[34]

Sa’di also tells the tale of a fox who was running away. They asked it why, it said they were catching camels. They said but you are not a camel. It said if an enemy said I was, it would be all over before he was proven wrong.  In several anecdotes, Sa’di is critical of the marriage of old men with young women. In the shortest one of them he says that they asked an old man why he did not marry. He said “I don’t enjoy the company of old women.” They said but you are wealthy and can marry a young one. He said, “Being old, I don’t have any joy with old women. How can a young woman have affection for me?”[35] In a lengthier anecdote he says that an old man married a young woman, trying to amuse her every night to make her happy. One night he told her that luck was with her in marrying him, not an arrogant and ill-tempered young man.  The woman sighed and said what you have told me so far is not as good as what I heard from my midwife who said it would be better for an arrow to sit at the side of a young woman than an old man. So there was no hope of agreement and they separated. The woman then got married to a poor and aggressive young man and constantly thanked God that she had escaped from that hideous torture and reached this state of bliss.[36]

The great fourteenth-century poet, Hafiz (1325-1389), lived for five years under the religious tyranny of a ruler who had defeated in battle his favourite prince and imposed the strictest possible Islamic rule. In his ghazals, we find jibes and subtle humour reflecting his acute unhappiness in those circumstances. He used to call the ruler, Amir Mobarez, “the chief religious police” or mohtaseb, each time he wanted to say something critical about him.  For example, he says in a ghazal: Do not ever drink with the city’s mohtaseb / because he will drink your wine and throw stones at its cup.[37] And in another: “We drink, we are licentious, we love pretty youths / who is there in town unlike us; Do not mention to mohtaseb my vices / Because he is drinking constantly like us.”[38]

میخواره و سرگشته و رندیم و نظر باز

وان کس که در این شهر چو ما نیست کدام است

با محتسبم عیب نگو یید  که او نیز

پیوسته چو ما در طلب عیش مدام است

 

In yet another ghazal, he writes: Try to learn libertinism from mohteseb / Since he is drunk and no-one suspects it (ای دل  طریق رندی از محتسب بیاموز / مست است و در حق او, کس این گمان ندارد ) .[39]

Neither does Hafiz leave the divine and the preachers unscathed. For example: The preachers who appear thus at the altar and pulpit / Do the other thing when no-one is looking. ( واعظان کاین جلوه در محراب و منبر می کنند / چون به خلوت می روند آن کار دیگر می کنند  )[40] Or: The Lord Imam whose prayers was so long / washed up his gown in the blood of wine (امام خواجه که بودش سر نماز دراز  / به خون دختر رز خرقه را قصارت کرد.[41] Somewhere else he wrote: Although I am drunk, libertine and sinful / Thank God my fellow citizens are all sinless (من ار چه عاشقم و رند و مست و نامه سیاه / هزار شکر که یاران شهر بی گنهند).[42]

Again: Forty years we suffered and in the end / Our remedy was in the hands of two-year-old wine (چل سال رنج و غصه کشیدیم و عاقبت / تدبیر ما به دست شراب دو ساله بود).[43] In general, the humour of Hafiz is so subtle that it is difficult to appreciate fully out of the context.

The greatest classical satirist, however, is Obeyd Zakani (c.1300-1370). He compares with Voltaire and Jonathan Swift, to the extent that his satire involves sharp criticism of social injustice, prejudice and irrational beliefs. Contemporary but senior to Hafiz, he was an accomplished poet in his own right, but most of his satire is found in a series of small books such as Cat and Mouse, Ethics of the Gentry, Joyous Treatment, The Hundred Maxims, etc. His long poem, Cat and Mouse, is a political allegory about the war between the noted religious tyrant of Shiraz who had previously been the prince of Kerman and had defeated and killed the ruler of Shiraz, who was both a favourite of Hafiz and Obeyd. It tells how a cat in Kerman repented in a mosque of catching mice, unaware that a little mouse was hearing him. The mouse rushes to its friends and gives them the good news, and being elated, they bring the cat presents for its life-saving decision. But no sooner do they get close to him that he jumps at them and begins to catch as many as possible: “Five mice he captured-two in each front paw / And one was snapped up in his lion-like jaw’ (دو بدین چنگ و دو بدان چنگال

یک به دندان چو شیر  غرانا .[44] The mice declare war and capture the cat, but it manages to break free of its fetters and attacks and wins the war. This is a mockery of Amir Mobarez al-Din – Hafiz’s mohtaseb – portrayed by the cat whose piety is implied to be pure hypocrisy.

It would take a volume to describe and discuss Obey’d satirical booklets. Here let me quote a couple from his Resaleh-ye Delgosha or Joyous Treatment, some of which are written in Arabic:

For example:

They asked a man why does your son not look like you. He said, ‘If our neighbours leave us alone, my children would look like me’.[45]

A man saw a baby cry and would not stop despite her mother’s gentle touches. The man told her if you don’t stop I’ll give your mother a treatment. The mother said this baby will not believe what you say unless she actually sees it. [46]

And in Persian:

A man asked a preacher what is the name of Satan’s wife. He said ‘Come here and I’ll tell you’. The man went to him and the preacher said into his ear ‘You bloody pimp, how would I know?’ When he returned to his place, others asked him what the answer was. He said: Whoever wants to know should go and ask his reverent himself.[47]

In another anecdote, Talhak (Cf. dalqak) the court jester was asked the meaning of cuckoldry. He said this question should be asked of judges.[48]

In another anecdote we read:

A man went to a doctor of religious law and told him that when he stood to prayers he got an erection; what is the remedy? He told him to think of his dead parents. He said it would not work. He said think of when you die. He said that would not work either. No matter how many advices of this kind the doctor gave, it was useless. He lost his cool and said ‘little man come and push it up my ass’. He said ‘I have come to you to do whatever you advise’.[49]

In yet another coarse anecdote:

They were mating two donkeys in a village, a pretty woman being the owner of the he-donkey. The she-donkey’s owner told the woman how come you want 5 drachmas for the services of your donkey whereas if I want to copulate with a woman she would demand ten drachmas from me? The woman said ‘bring me a prick like this and I would give you fifty drachmas.’[50]

Mowlana Qotb al-Din, a renowned physician, went to visit an important man who was ill.  He asked the patient how he was. He replied that he had had fever but it had now broken, although his neck was still hurting. The physician said let’s hope that that too would break soon.[51]

A judge fell ill and the physician ordered him to be fed wine through his ass. This they did and he got drunk and began to shout and bellow. They asked his son what he was doing. He said he is shouting through his ass.[52]

As it can be imagined there are a number of anecdotes in Obeyd’s Treatise on marriage and the relationship between husbands and wives, not to mention men and youths. He says in one of them:

A young wife went to the judge and complained, ‘I am a young woman and my husband does not serve me right’. The husband said, ‘I serve her as much as I can’. She said ‘I am not content with less than five times a night’. He said, ‘More than three times is not in my power’. The judge said ‘What a strange plight I am in. They don’t bring a case to me unless I have to contribute something myself. But let it be. I will undertake the other two times myself.’[53]

Some of the anecdotes regarding men and youths cannot be repeated in polite society. Let us, nevertheless, quote one which more or less can be.

A Christian boy converted to Islam. The police chief ordered him to be circumcised.  At night fall he sodomised the boy. Next day his father asked him how he had found the Muslims. The boy said they are a strange lot, when someone converts to their religion, in the morning they cut off his prick and at night they tear up his ass.[54]

As mentioned, there is much more to Obeyd than has been presented here. But his was the peak of both coarse and subtle classical humour.

Passing over the neo-classical period in which much of the satire in poetry, such as in Yaghma Jandaqi and Qa’ani Shirazi, was coarse though still humorous, we arrive in the twentieth century which among so many other literary and cultural developments saw the popularity of humour both at the literary and journalistic level. The century opened with the movement against arbitrary rule (estebdad) and for the establishment of a constitution, subsequently known as the Constitutional Revolution. Within a short period, young poets and satirists took to the field and published their works in the extensive revolutionary press which had mushroomed up both in the capital and the provinces. The focus was on the aims of the revolution and especially the central objective of ending the shah’s arbitrary powers.  The old shah (Mozaffareddin) gave up resistance relatively easily, but he died soon, and when his son and successor (Mohammad Ali) mounted the throne it took two years of struggle between 1908 and 1909 before he would be overthrown.

Ali Akbar Dehkhoda (1879-1955) is everybody’s darling for his famous ‘charand parand’ or charivari column in the newspaper Sur-e Esrafil. He displayed unrivalled talent both for his clear, simple and somewhat colloquial prose and for his highly effective political satire. But what he wrote was often scathing and sometimes libelous. He addressed one piece to Adam Smith whom he described as “the father of political economy.” He said that Smith had been wrong in identifying nature, labour and capital as the three factors of production, because in that case the shah would have no way of increasing his wealth. The shah does not work, he went on to explain, his nature does not function well ever since he has been taking an opium tablet every night, and he has no capital. Would he then not be able to increase his wealth? He would, Dehkhoda went on to say, by holding a circumcision ceremony for the boy heir-designate, Ahmad Mirza, and collect the pishkeshes that courtiers and notables would be obliged to present to him on such an auspicious occasion.^[55]

 

In another piece he wrote a letter, as if addressed by the shah to the Swiss parliament. In it the shah is made to address the Swiss parliament as “his exalted excellency the parliament of Switzerland”, ask the parliament to arrest all the Iranian dissidents in “his” realm and have them bastinadoed, and end by saying that the letter is accompanied by a ceremonial robe (khal’at) to show the shah’s appreciation of his, i.e., the parliament’s, services.^[56]

Dehakhodâ wrote a few satirical poems as well, but, though sometimes sounding colloquial, they tended to contain archaic words, and in any case were no match for his prose in charand parand.

Seyyed Ashraf (1871-c1934) published the newspaper Nasim-e Shomal (Northern Breeze), all the columns of which he virtually filled single-handedly. He was to a considerable extent Dehkhoda’s counterpart in writing simple and colloquial poetry in support of constitutionalism as well as constitutionalists.  He too was vehement in dealing with the shah, the anti-constitutionalists and critics of constitutionalism, but stopped short of Dehkhoda in his personal attacks. Still, he was scathing enough. He accused Sheikh Fazlollh Nuri, a conservative cleric, of putting his faith on sale and destroying the dignity of Muslim people:

دشمن فرقه ابرار منم

قاتل زمره احرار منم

شیخ فضل الله سمسار منم

دین فروشنده به بازار منم

مال مردار حراج است حراج

كو خریدار حراج است حراج…

I am the enemy of the freedom party [the sheikh is made to say]

I am the murderer of all freedom-lovers

I am Sheikh Fazlollah the pawn-broker

I am selling religion in the bazaar…

-Dead stuff I must put on sale

Come buyers, sale, sale!^[57]

Iraj Mirza (1873-1925) who was not a typically political poet was nevertheless moved by the action of Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri in taking sanctuary against the parliament (Majlis) to write:

حجت الاسلام کتک می زند

بر سر و مغزت دگنک می زند …

چک زن سختی بود این پهلوان

ملتفتش باش که چک می زند

دستش اگر بر فکلی ها رسد

گوز یکایک به الک می زند …

حالا در حضرت عبدالعظیم

شیخ در دوز و کلک می زند

ان شاءالله دو روز دگر

خیمه از آنجا به درک می زند

 

His reverend smacks you

He clubs your head and brain

A big slapper is this champion

Look out or he’ll slap you.

If he gets his hands on men with a bowtie

He would beat the fart of each of them by a stick…

Now in the shrine of Abdol’azim

The sheikh is busy scheming

God willing in a couple of days

He would leave there and camp in Hell…^[58]

Of the poets who continued – indeed advanced – the writing of harsh political poetry in the period of post-revolutionary conflict and chaos, the highest prize should go to Aref-e Qazvini (c.1281-1933) and Mirzade-ye Eshqi (1893-1924). Much of the humorous effects of their political lampoons are due to the coarseness of the language, although Eshqi’s poetry is considerably more mature, and he might even have made a notable poet had he not fallen victim to political assassination at an early age.

The end of World War I and the conclusion of the 1919 Agreement led to an explosion of nationalist passions both in response to the influenza epidemic, famine and chaos, and to what was firmly (but erroneously) believed to be the design to turn Iran into a British protectorate.^[59] It was of course not just poetry. The newspapers opposed to the 1919 agreement – that is, most of the papers published in Tehran were full of innuendos and sometimes downright libels against the government and its leading figures. Eshqi addressed an obscene poem to Vosuq, the prime minister, saying that Iran was not his daddy’s property, was not the rent of his boyhood adventures, and was not the wages of his loose-laced daughter.

ای وثوق الدوله ایران ملک بابا یت نبود

اجرت المثل زمان بچگی هایت نبود

مزد کار دختر هر روز یکجایت نبود…^[60]

Aref went overboard and described the entire Iranian people as asses:

…People of this lawless land are asses

By God both common and grand are asses…

He who heads the ministers,

– I swear by the God of both worlds –

Is a bigger ass than them all

In fact he is a stable-full of asses …[61]

And he ended this long poem with verses which could well be the subject of a separate study:

بلشویک است خضر راه نجات

– بر محمد و آله صلوات –

ای لنین ای فرشته رحمت کن

کن قدم رنجه زود و بی زحمت

هین بفرما که خانه خانه توست

تخم چشم من آشیانه توست…

 

The Bolshevik is the divine guide to salvation

– Blessed be Mohammad and his people –

O’ Lenin, O’ angel of bliss

Take the trouble if you please

You may nest in the apple of my eye

Please step in, the home is yours…^[62]

The period between the 1921 coup and the fall of the Qajars in 1925 was one of intense power struggle between popular democrats and constitutionalists, on the one hand, and nationalists and modernists, on the other. Towards the end of the period, the body politic was divided between those for and those against a dictatorship led by Reza Khan, but in the first couple of years the situation was a good deal less clear-cut. For example, when Vahid Dastgerdi wrote a poem in praise of Reza Khan and incidentally attacked Eshqi and Aref, Eshqi wrote a long and devastating reply in a qasideh, leaving little to imagination:

ای وحید دستگردی شیخ گندیده دهن

ای که نامیدی همی گند دهانت را سخن

ای شپش خور شیخ یاوه گوی شندر پندری

ای نداده امتیاز شعر با گند دهن

پوستین بر پیکرت چون جلد خرسی کول سگ

هیکلت اندر عبا چون دوش نسناسی کفن

بر سرت عمامه چون آلوده با گچ سنده ای

رو در آیینه نگر باور نداری گر ز من

ای سخن هایت همه مانند گوز اندر هوا

ای زبانت در دهان مانند گه  اندر لگن…

O Vahid-e Dastgerdi, filthy-mouthed sheikh

Who call the filth of your mouth poetry!

O louse-eating sheikh in torn-off rags

Who mistake poetry for the filth in your mouth!

Your skin coat is like a bear’s skin on a dog’s shoulder

Your garment looks like a shroud around a baboon

Your turban is like a turd wrapped in plaster

Look in the mirror if you doubt my word

Every word of yours is like a fart in the air

Your tongue in your mouth is like shit in a basin…and so on.^[63]

At about the same time, Eshqi wrote a general condemnation of politics and politicians:

بعد از این بر وتن و بوم و برش باید رید

به چنین مجلس و بر کر و فرش باید رید

به حقیقت در عدل ار در این بام و در است

به چنین عدل و به دیوار و درش باید رید

آنکه بگرفته از او تا کمر  ایران گه

به مکافات الا تا کمرش باید رید…

From now on the motherland and its environs must be shat on

Such a parliament and both its high and low members must be shat on.

Truly if the gate of justice is this roof and gate [i.e. the parliament]

Then such justice and its wall and gate must be shat on.

He who has been shitting on Iran up to her waist,

In retribution, up to his waist he must be shat on…^[64]

At the close of the fourth parliament in 1923, both Aref and Eshqi were still pro-Reza Khan. Aref was to continue his support but Eshqi was to renounce it. When the fourth parliament ended, Eshqi wrote his infamous poem in which he haled insult and invective on virtually every politician:

این مجلس چارم به خدا ننگ بشر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود

هر کار که کردند ضرر روی ضرر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود

این مجلس چارم خودمانیم  ثمر داشت

ولله ضرر داشت

صد شکر که عمرش چو زمانه به گذر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود…

دیگر نکند هو نزند جفت مدرس

در سالن مجلس

 بگذشت دگر مدتی ار محشر خر بود

دیدی چه خبر بود…

This fourth parliament was a blot on humanity,

Didn’t you see it all?

Whatever they did was loss upon loss,

Didn’t you see it all?

Honestly was this fourth parliament of any use?

By God it was all loss

Thank heaven that its life was not to last,

Didn’t you see it all?…

No more will Modarres jump and somersault

In the parliament’s hall

The jamboree of donkeys is now up,

Didn’t you see it all?. . .^[65]

Parvin E’tesami was a prominent woman poet with a pessimistic view of life and society, and was extremely sympathetic towards the meek, weak and downtrodden. And she often employed irony, not satire, in defending the weak and castigating the strong. She does however have a piece in the form of a dialogue or debate, in which she satirizes the symbols and agents of religious authority in a very effective way. The morality police (mohtaseb) stops a drunk and grabs his neck. The drunk tells him that what he has grabbed “is a shirt, not a [donkey’s] rein(این پیراهن است افسار نیست  ).”

In the course of the conversation the policeman tells the drunkard he can be held at the mosque before they call the civil police, but he rebuffs that by saying that the mosque is no place for evil-doers. The policeman then says that the house of the judge is nearby so they can go there, but the drunk retorts that the judge himself may be in the tavern. In the end the policeman says that the sober should punish the drunk by whipping them, and the drunk says but no-one here is sober.[66]

Iraj was an outstanding poet and satirist and in no way can justice be done to his work in this brief. He is, among other things, famous for his opposition to face veil.  And we may here quote two specimens of his long poems on this subject.[67]

Very briefly, the narrator says that as a young man he had once invited a woman into his home on a bogus pretext. He had then asked the woman to show him her face and the woman had severely rebuked him. As a result, he had changed tactics and, instead, made physical passes at the woman. The woman had responded positively, and they had ended up copulating while she was holding fast onto her hejab, refusing to show her face, because, the narrator jibes, chastity was in her face. The poet then concludes that, compared with liberated women, ignorant women wearing the face veil are far less capable of defending their honour.^[68]

And once more criticizing hejab, he says in another poem that they once drew the picture of a woman above the gate of a caravanserai. The clerics, whom he calls ‘the turban masters,’ hear of it and arrive at the scene without delay. They mix dust with water, make a neqab for the picture, and thus save the faith—he comments—with a fistful of mud.[69]

Another outstanding poet was Poet-Laureate Bahar who did not often write humorous poems but he has a long piece satirising the efforts to turn Iran into a republican dictatorship, in 1923-24, with a couple of stanzas of which we may end this talk[70]:

چو جمهوری شود آقای دشتی

علمدارش بود شیطان رشتی

تدین آن سفیه کهنه مشدی

نشیند عصرها در توی هشتی

کند کور و کچل ها را خبر دار

ز حلاج و ز رواس و ز سمسار

-دریغ  از راه دور و رنج بسیار…

ز عدل الملک بشنو یک حکایت

که آن بالا  بلند بی کفایت

میانجی گشته بین بول و غایط

کند گاهی تدین را حمایت

شود گاهی سلیمان را مدد کار

که سازد این دو را با یکدگر یار

– دریغ  از راه دور و رنج بسیار…

When there appears a republican in Mr. [Ali] Dashti

His standard bearer being that devil of a Rashti [Mirza Karim Khan]

[Seyyed Mohammad]Tadayyon, that insane old Mashti

Sits every night in the entrance hall of his home

Summons the riffraff up to the hashti

From cotton-whippers to pawn-brokers

– Alas the long way and great suffering

Listen to a tale about Adl-al-Molk

That that tall and useless bloke

Between shit and piss he tries to mediate

He sometimes to Tadayyon lends support

And at other times becomes Soleyman’s assistant

To bring these two together

– Alas the long way and great suffering. . .[71]

To conclude this necessarily incomplete talk, ever since the rise of classical literature circa eleven centuries ago, satire was a genre that was used especially in poetry though sometimes in prose as well. In classical era it peaked in the fourteenth century, though it did continue less frequently and less prominently until the twentieth century when it flourished in the constitutional era. In the regime of one-man-rule that followed – and putting aside the occasional “harmless” satirical journals – it necessarily was either unpublished or muted, until the 1940s and early 50s when a number of good satirical magazines emerged in a free atmosphere. But that did not last long, until the revolution of February 1979 changed the nature of many things, including satire.

 

[1]The revised and extended version of Keynote address delivered at the conference of the International Society for Humour Studies, Montreal, 10-14 July 2017.

[2]Divan-e Mahhasti Ganjavi, ed. Taheri Shahab (Tehran: Tahuri, 1957), 28.

[3]Abolfazl Beyhaqi, ed. Ali Akbar Fayyaz (Tehran: N.P, 1995), 458.

[4]Divan-e Naser Khosrow, ed. Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, re.ed., Mehdi Soheili (Isfahan: Enteshar-e Ketabforushi-ye Ta’id, 1956), 616.

[5]Keykavus ibn Eskandar, Qabusnameh, ed. Amin Abdolmajid Badavi (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1956), 134.

[6]Keykavus ibn Eskandar, Qabusnameh, 136.

[7]Keykavus ibn Eskandar, Qabusnameh, 134.

[8]Divan-e Anvari, ed. Modarres Razavi (Tehran: Bongah-e Tarjomeh va Nashr-e Ketab, 1968), 471-473.

[9]Homa Katouzian, “Satire in Persian Literature, 1900-1940” in Literature of the Early Twentieth Century, From the Constitutional Period to Reza Shah, ed. Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 163.

[10]Mehdi Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan (Tehran: Pazhang, 1987), 439.

[11]Divan-e Anvari, Ba Moqaddameh va Tashih va Moqabeleh-ye Hasht Noskheh, ed. Sa’id Nafisi (Tehran: Mo’asseseh-ye Matbu’ati-ye Piruz, 1959), 379.

[12]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 438.

[13]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 439.

[14]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 437.

[15]Ali Asghar Halabi, Tanz o Shukh Tab’i dar Iran va Jahan-e Eslami, Tehran: Entesharat-e Behbahani, 1998, 491.

[16]Sana’i Ghaznavi, Hadiqa al-Haqiqa, ed. Modarres Razavi (Tehran: N.P., 1951), 387.

[17]Hamidi, Behesht-e Sokhan, 329.

[18]Divan-e Khaqani Shirvani, ed. Zia Al-Din Sajjadi (Tehran: Zavvar: 1959), 808-809.

[19]Sajjadi, Divan-e Khaqani Shirvani, 847.

[20]Divan-e Hakim Suzani  Samarqandi, ed. Naser al-Din Shah-Hosseini (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1959), 62.akim Suzani SamarqandiHh

[21]Ketab-e Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, ed. Reynold A. Nicholson, Book Five (Tehran: N.P., N.D.),  86-87.

[22]Nicholson, Ketab-e Masnavi-ye Ma’navi, Book 6, 493-495.

[23]Homa Katouzian, Tanz o Tanzineh-ye Hedayat (Tehran: Pardis-e Danesh, 2016), 90.

[24]Katouzian, Satire, 162.

[25]Homa Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di (Tehran, Nashr-e Markaz, 2009), 25.

[26]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 25-26.

[27]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 30.

[28]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 32.

[29]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 33.

[30]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 35.

[31]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 36.

[32]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 62.

[33]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 50.

[34]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 55-56.

[35]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 58.

[36]Katouzian, Golchin-e Sa’di, 57.

[37]Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, ed. Adib Borumand, aided by Purandokht Borumand (Tehran: Pazhang, 1988), 329.

[38]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 47.

[39]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 279.

[40]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 422.

[41]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 290.

[42]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 426.

[43]Borumand, Ghazaliyat-e Hafiz, 452.

[44]“Cat and Mouse,” trans. Dick Davis, in Hasan Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani (Washington: Mage Publishers, 2008), 129.

[45]Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, ed. Abbas Eqbal, re-ed., Parviz Atabaki (Tehran: Zavvar, N.D.; date of preface, 1963), 251.

[46]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani,118.

[47]Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani, 112.

[48]Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani; Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, ed. Abbas Eqbal, re-ed., Parviz Atabaki, 289.

[49]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 278.

[50]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 286.

[51]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 281.

[52]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 287.

[53]Javadi, Obeyd-e Zakani, 93.

[54]Eqbal, Kolliyat-e Obeyd-e Zakani, 279.

[55]See Maqâlât-e Dehkhodâ, ed., Mohammad Dabir-Siyâqi, vol. 1 (Tehran, 1983), 194-195.

[56]Dabir-Siyâqi, Maqâlât-e Dehkhodâ, 199-200. For a study of Dehkhoda’s life and works see the entry in Encyclopedia Iranica, www.iranica.com/articles/dehkoda.

[57]See Edward G. Browne, Press and Poetry (Hyderabad, India: Osmania University, 1914), 213-214.  For Browne’s English translation of this poem’s first five stanzas see 215-216.

[58]See Divan-e Kâmel-e Iraj Mirzâ, ed. Mohammad Ja’far Mahjub, fifth impression (America: 1986), 12-13.

[59]Almost everyone was convinced that this was the case until 1981 when, for the first time, this author argued against it. See Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran (London and New York: Macmillan), 77-78.  For a detailed and documented study of the Anglo-Iranian 1919 Agreement, see idem, State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of the Pahlavis (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), chapters 4-7.

[60]See Kolliyat-e Mosavvar-e Eshqi, ed. Ali Akbar Mir-Salimi (Tehran: Mir-Salimi, 1943), 292. For a study of Ehsqi’s life and works see the entry in Encyclopaedia Iranica, www.iranica.com/articles/esqi-mohammad-reza-mirzada.  For further and more recent studies of Eshqi and his works see Mohammad Qa’ed, Eshqi, Sima-ye Najib-e yek Anarshist, Virast-e Dovvom (Tehran: Tarh-e Naw, 2001); Solmaz Naraqi, Mirzadeh-ye Eshqi (Tehran: Nashr-e Thaleth, 2009).

[61]Divan-e Aref-e Qazvini, ed. Abdorrahman Seyf-e Azad (Tehran: Seyf-e Azad, 1948), 298.

[62]Seyf-e Azad, Divan-e Aref-e Qazvini, 300.

[63]See Mir-Salimi, Kolliyat-e Mosavvar, 407-409.

[64]Mir-Salimi, Kolliyat-e Mosavvar, 403.

[65]Mir-Salimi, Kolliyat-e Mosavvar, 396-402.

[66]Divan-e Parvin E’tesami, ed. Heshmat Moayyad (Costa Mesa, Calif: Mazda Publishers, 1987).

[67]For a longish study of Iraj’s work, see Homa Katouzian, “Iraj, the Poet of Love and Humour” in HK, IRAN, Politics, History and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

[68]Divan-e Kamele- Iraj Mirza, ed. Mohammad Ja’far Mahjub (Washington: Shrkat-e Ketab, 1989), 79-84.

[69]Mahjub, Divan-e Kamele- Iraj Mirza, 177-178.

[70]For a longish treatment of Bahar’s humour, see, Katouzian, “Satire in Persian Literature, 1900-1940″; and “Literature and Politics in Iran: 1919-1925.”

[71]Divan-e Ash’ar-e Mohammad Taqi Bahar, Malek al-Sho’ara, ed. Mehrdad Bahar (Tehran: Tus, 1989), I.

 

Daryoush Ashouri  ­­­­­has studied at the Faculty of Law, Political Science, and Economics of the University of Tehran. He has worked extensively as author, essayist, translator, encyclopedist, and lexicologist. His main concern is with cultural and linguistic matters of his motherland as a Third World country encountering modernity. He is author, compiler, and translator of more than 25 books. He has been a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Tehran, Oxford, and Tokyo.

The “Third World” as a term with a referential object became prevalent in the early 1950s. It designated, primarily, the neutral political situation of the countries not belonging to the two hostile blocs of power, East and West, a division emerging out of the victorious allied powers in the Second World War. The period of the ideological and political strife between the two blocs, in its earlier phases, witnessed the process of achieving political independence by previous European colonies in Asia and Africa. Later, these emerging powers were politically categorized or designated as Third World countries.

These old colonial, or semi-colonial, countries gradually attained their independence through political, and, in some cases military struggles under the leadership of their modern intelligentsia, or the main transmitters of the modern revolutionary political and social ideas into their native lands. The anti-colonial movements of the Third World strove to shape their formally independent states after the modern concept and model of the nation-state, originating from nineteenth century Europe. But this aspiration encountered great obstacles emanating from their economic, political and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, the next related term emerging in this period, or somewhat later, was “underdeveloped” countries which complemented the concept of the Third World, and underscoring, comparatively, the economic situation of those lands. The new term, which replaced the older and ambiguous term of “backward countries”, with its quantitative economic and social measures, assessed the underdeveloped against the developed countries in the atmosphere of the Cold War era which witnessed the restless competition of the two main blocs of power for “development”. However, for decades the concept of the Third World, contained “underdevelopment” as its componential notion, echoing the existence of the poor, non-industrial countries, desperately entangled in seemingly unsolvable political, social, and, worst of all, economic problems on the way to establish the modern nation-state and achieving a developed industrial economy.

However, the twentieth century, in its closing decades, witnessed radical changes in the international scene. The downfall of the Soviet empire, by putting an end to the bipolar system of rival political and military powers of the Cold War era, made the concept of the Third World devoid of its international political connotation as a third party in this relationship. Subsequently, the vast industrialization of a considerable number of the previously underdeveloped countries in East Asia and, later on, other parts of the world to the point of the emergence of the great world economic powers among them, rendered obsolete the term “Third World” connoting “underdeveloped countries”.

In spite of all these processes, from a certain point of view, the “Third World”, as a useful term, still seems applicable in a new context, not by far alien to its old usage. That is, its capability to express the social psychological and cultural situation of those nations still entangled, embarrassingly, between their historical past, usually termed as “traditional”, on one hand, and on the other hand, involvement in the process of modernization. This paradoxical status could be formulated, in my terms, as transition from the Orient to the Third World. In this discussion, my focal point of view, obviously, is my native country, Iran, as my immediate source of knowledge and personal experience of a psychologically and culturally Third World status, as such. Iran, alongside other Middle Eastern countries, in spite of all apparent material developments achieved by the immense influx and dispersal of petrodollars, could be considered as the most expressive representation of this phenomenon.

During the height of Orientalism, an earlier title for “Oriental Studies” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European scholarship categorized old Asiatic empires and cultural domains as “Oriental”, vis-à-vis their own Occidental region. The bipolar concept of Occident-Orient in the nineteenth century obviously put into contrast two geographically and culturally opposing worlds: on one side the prosperous, self-confident Western European modern nation-states, enjoying the tremendous boom of the scientific and industrial revolutions as dominant world powers encroaching upon all oceans and continents; on the other side, the rest of the world still lived  in their enclosed local cultures and premodern or primitive economies and political systems, encountering the shocking presence of those coming from unknown or extremely remote lands with unimaginable material and intellectual means of power for dominance.

Modernity, by its revolutionary philosophical and scientific achievements, created a totally new meaning and prospect for being human, reflected in the term “humanism” in modern thought, promoting free will for modern individuals. However, the Industrial Revolution, alongside the social and political revolutions that had changed fundamentally the economic and social life of the Western world, by its contagious nature gradually changed all pre-modern human societies that came into permanent contact with Western Europe through European colonial encroachments and political expansionism. The great transforming power of Modernity manifests itself in the actions of modernization: there is now nowhere in the world that has not been “discovered” by European explorers, and no human society left without, somehow, being touched by material, technical modernization.

This historical story is normally formulated under the sociological terms as transition from traditional to modern society. But a sociological approach doesn’t take into account a fundamental aspect of this phenomenon which might be called the ontological transition. The colonial and military encroachments of the modern commercialist, rationalist world equipped, in the first instance, with achievements of natural sciences and, then, cultural and historical sciences, alongside amazing inventions and productions of the Industrial Revolution, has had a fateful role in displacing peoples from their imaginary focal geographical and historical locations. That is, places which were once defined by mythological ontologies and which, through oral or literary traditions, described their place on Earth and in the Universe. It is well known that all pre-modern cultures and civilizations, geographically, felt themselves being at the center of the World. But, the modern European geographical knowledge, following the naval adventures to explore the entire globe, based on empirical science and exact calculations, inevitably deposed mythological imaginations about the Earth and  the place of everything on it. That signaled the first great step toward modern civilization, the demythologization and disenchantment of Nature, and its gradual submission to human domination. These achievements, noticeably, had shocking effects on the minds of the peoples who had no part in these discoveries and still lived in their legendary place at the center of the World.  The demythologization of geography was the first step for putting all traditional human cultures out of their imaginary centrality and relocating them in the periphery of a Eurocentric world totally defined by modern European scientific mentality.

The demystification of nature by development of the natural sciences and demythologization of history through human sciences were integrated processes reinforcing modern rationalism and humanism in their European homeland. The European modern mind not only re-read its native history through scientific approach, but, at the same time, through universal notions of modern science, undertook the project of compiling world history as a general encyclopedia of the human race on Earth. This all-inclusive approach following natural history as general history of all natural beings, integrated all dispersed local histories into a universal scheme of general human history. As mentioned before, until the development of the universal human history by European scholarship, all premodern human cultures and civilizations had their own oral or written local histories rooted in mythological times and traditional legends. But by being enforced to transit from premodern countries or empires into modern nation-states, as a prerequisite for becoming a nation, following the model of the secular modern national historiography, all newly borne states, or those transformed from pre-modern into modern states, were engaged to compose their own specific national histories to define their own national identification. To this purpose, traditional local historical narratives were re-read and re-written to articulate a “national” history which, explicitly or implicitly, evaluated their place in the modern universal human history.

The forced openness of the Orient to the modern Occidental world through the actions of European colonialism, created, as a sub-product, the intelligentsia of the Oriental type. A basic characteristic of the early generations of the fledgling Oriental intelligentsia who were often reared at the service of their colonial masters, was losing confidence in their own native world views and style of life, and showing great fascination for European way of life and thought. They tried to learn languages of their masters, received modern European education, and adopted European-styled attire, in an effort to imitate every detail of the sophisticated modern European social conduct. These behaviors obviously demonstrated the alienation of this newly- arrived privileged social and political layer from their own native historical past and their aspirations for quickly changing their “uncivilized” peoples and countries according to the civilized European model. Thus, the early generations of the Oriental intelligentsia in China, Japan, India, Iran, Egypt, or elsewhere, by absorbing certain ideological elements from the mentality and knowledge of the modern European intellectualism and following the enlightening role of the intellectuals in Europe, recognized the historical mission of transforming their native worlds in accord with modern values and way of life produced by the European Enlightenment. This task demanded the awakening of their slumbering societies and offered to people a modern historical consciousness by encouraging them, or forcing them by revolutionary actions, to abandon their backward way of life drowned in ignorance and superstition, mental and material poverty, and thereby embracing Europeanization as the path to economic, intellectual, and, moreover, higher moralistic prosperity.

In this way, the resentment of the newly borne intelligentsia against their traditional culture and way of life gradually transmitted to other layers of the “Oriental” societies. In later historical developments, the transmutation of the Oriental man, originally submissive toward his own eternal destiny, to a human being in search of another meaning and means of life, is one of the essential causes for the disintegration of the Oriental world and its ultimate dissolution into Third World conditions. All contributions to the “underdeveloped” world, in the form of reorganization of the governmental system through the introduction of bureaucratic, educational, military, and other kinds of modern national institutions, in general, was not effective for the realization of the intellectual ideal of Europeanization of the Oriental worlds. In contrast, the presence of the clumsy and imbalanced elements of modernization aggravated the situation. Heterogeneity between the mentality of the native peoples and their traditional morals and manners made the achievement of those expectations almost impossible. Exposure to the modern world and its humanistic attitudes and aspirations played an essential role to push these societies further toward their doomed, chaotic Third World destiny.

The post-Second World War era, with the rise of anti-colonial enthusiasm for political freedom from Western dominance, turned the previous fascination for everything “European” into a sense of anger and resentment. Presence of the extreme leftist movements, leaning toward Soviet bloc and communist ideology, intensified these feelings. By so-called “scientific” theorizations, proponents of extreme leftist ideologies by absolute demonization of the Western world, depicted it as a monstrous, voracious, capitalist entity with an unbridled thirst for plundering the natural resources of other parts of the world and exploiting their societies. Communist propaganda presented the Western world as ultimately responsible for all the misery and poverty of the people in other parts of the world by keeping them forcefully deprived of all technological means necessary for modern life.

By keeping in mind this general depiction of the historical situation in the Third World, in this short presentation, as a concrete example, I turn to review briefly the multiple stages of reactions in the Iranian world versus the West and modernity. Iran, in spite of its long history of foreign invasion, permanent destruction and reconstruction, had kept until recent times the Oriental spirit of its culture, based on strong religious and mystical inclinations in its way of life and thought. This mystical spirit of Iranian culture reflected itself best of all in the immense output of its vast inventory of poets. Some of them, like Rumi and Hafiz, stand at the top of the illustrious names in the Persian literary world. The prevalence of the irrationalist, illuminist way of thought in this cultural world, from the remote historical ages to modern times, manifestly demonstrates the original “Oriental” nature of Iranian culture. Now, disregarding all interfering political, military, and economic factors, we may say that the encounter with the Occidental world and its rationalist spirit, imposed by direct or indirect influence of European ways of thought, had been destructive to a culture which had self-confidently and proudly preserved its unique spirituality throughout its pre-modern times.  This culture, by means of the Persian language and, properly, its poetic genius reflected in the works of its great mystical poets, had created an immense sphere of influence in the central, south, and western parts of the Asiatic continent, extending to the Ottoman Empire’s occupied territories in south-east Europe.

The damaging effects of the influence of modern ideas and ways of life on this Middle Eastern empire is a painful story which, might be said, had been experienced in the same way, and almost at the same time, by all spheres of Asiatic cultures and civilizations. As a formally independent state, Iran was never officially colonized by European powers but, in the nineteenth century had been left to exist as a buffer zone between two great European colonial powers, Russia and Great Britain, under their strong political influence. Under this semi-colonial situation which gradually witnessed the transition of Iran from Orient to the Third World, the early generations of its emerging intelligentsia, like their analogues in other Oriental lands, aspired for Europeanization of their people and country in every aspect of their life. Their attempts to remodel the old political structure of Asiatic despotism into the modern nation-state led to the Constitutional Revolution which, without palpable results for democratization of the country and rule of law, resulted in total chaos. The essential needs for building modern governmental, educational, social and cultural institutions, and basic industrialization of the country demanded an iron hand demonstrated by the dictatorial reign of Reza Shah. But the Second World War and subsequent occupation of Iran by Allied powers shortened this period. By the polarization of the main world powers into Eastern and Western blocs almost immediately after the war, Iran found itself under the newly defined category of the “Third World” and its associative concept, the underdeveloped country. Nevertheless, by initiating a political movement for the nationalization of the British Oil Company in the early 1950s, Iran stood amongst the first nations to push back against European colonialism and dominance.

The period of the revolt against the West amongst the Third World nations bore in Iran a semi-modern intellectual movement, with strong appeal among younger generations of educated people in search for a national identity based on original Oriental spiritualism radically in contrast to the so-called Western materialism. This intellectual movement later played a complementary role to a politically active religious movement which brought about the 1957 revolution. Under the pressure of opposing political forces and imbalanced projects of modernization, at last the country fulfilled its Third World destiny by way of a revolution under religious leadership, an event that astonished and later stunned the world. The final question, however remains: What is the meaning of an “Islamic revolution” in the context of an apparently demythologized world haunted by humanistic aspirations of the modern times?