Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora. By Mehraneh Ebrahimi. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 183. ISBN: 9780815636557 (paperback).
Mehraneh Ebrahimi was born to a traditional Muslim-Persian family but grew up and studied in different countries around the world. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, and is a recipient of numerous teaching awards.
Ebrahimi opened the preface of her book with a famous poem by Saadi; he wrote it eight centuries ago but currently it is the motto on the entrance of the United Nations building.
In her book, the author analyzes the role of visual arts using three lenses: aesthetics, politics, and ethics. She compares the relation of these three lenses to Borromean knots: cutting one of the knots will liberate the other two knots.
By using some interesting writing techniques and bringing in some works by other philosophers and researchers, the author argues that the effect of literature and visual arts on raising the democratic process in different ways is enormous. Democracy can be torn apart in a society when extreme regimes are attacking activists, artists, or civic liberties among their people, she says. Creative works of visual arts and literature, such as cartoons in Bashi’s work, or the photographic work of Shirin Neshat, or her feature film Women Without Men (adapted from Parsipur’s novel) are eye-opening to the society which is under pressure. It helps to create a political and ethical landscape for truth-telling and to engage people of that society and to challenge the policing regime. Despite the danger of political disagreement in a community under fascism, art and literature could initiate a democracy-to-come. They could bring not only awareness of peoples of different cultures and roots but also a visible sensitivity toward the lives that have been hidden inappropriately behind walls from the rest of the world.
The book consists of two parts. The first part examines diasporic Iranian visual literature in graphic novels, such as Marjaneh Satrapi and her works including Persepolis or The Story of a Return, and how comical/satiric language can bring about proximity within the audience. Regarding Bashi’s Nylon Road, she discusses how an ethical self-criticism and self-questioning could loosen the connection of ethics to aesthetics and politics.
In the second part of the book, the author surveys visual literature within the scope of photo-poetry and poetic films. She touches on examples in Neshat’s collection titled Women of Allah and how images of women veiled could show a sharp contrast between their traditional roles versus neotraditional ones, which have been usually the norm as male domains. The author claims that Neshat’s and Parsipur’s works and their representations are very much affected by the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, one of the most prominent twentieth-century Iranian women poets. In their works of poetry or filmography, they display the suffering and the dream of Iranian women in a different context. In this part, Ebrahimi focuses also on the new wave of Iranian graphic memoirs to critically analyze each element of the aesthetics, politics, and ethics of those works.
In general, through discussing the graphic novels, photo-poetry, and feature film collections created by Iranians in diaspora, the author enlightens the readers regarding the verbal and visual expressions of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. Looking through the eyes of refugees, immigrants, or people who lived through the misery and drama of war, one can truly imagine the massive cloud of terror and fear those people must have experienced.
The works considered in this book and similar ones play an important role in re-shaping and re-imagining the pain of others in the global community who endured trauma, violence, humiliation, and racism, just as Saadi had expressed it centuries ago.
This book is an excellent scholarly work that could fit primarily in academic libraries with collections on cultural studies, Middle East studies, and film and documentary work. It is also an appropriate source as criticism and interpretation of modern literature for any academic or literary reading with a focus on women, visual and literature art, and graphic literature in the diaspora.
Shahrzad Khosrowpour
Chapman University