My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices [Paperback]

This book was published in 2006 and contained 15 contributions by as many Iranian writers or artists, most of whom were living in the West. There were 9 essays, 3 interviews, 2 excerpts from more or less autobiographical novels, and 1 speech. With these works, the editor sought to capture different aspects of Iranian identity, and narrow the gap between the realities of Iranian lives and the simplified images transmitted through the media.

As far as could be determined, the oldest writer was Dariush Shayegan (1935-), described as Iran's foremost philosopher and a theorist behind former president Mohammad Khatami's call in 1999 for a dialogue among civilizations, the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (1940-), and the lawyer and activist Mehrangiz Kar (1944-), who was imprisoned in 2000 after returning to Tehran from a conference abroad on political reform. Others included Shohreh Aghdashloo (1952-), an actress and the first Iranian nominated for an Oscar; Azar Nafisi (1955-), author of the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran; Shirin Neshat (1957-), described as one of the best-known Iranian artists in the Western world; Marjane Satrapi (1969-) creator of the graphic novel Persepolis; Reza Aslan (1972-), who's written on Islam and democracy, particularly in the book No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam; and Azadeh Moaveni (1976-), a writer for Time magazine. Elsewhere, the editor has said that she included roughly three generations of contributors: her own, those of her parents, and those of her grandparents. Of all the writers, 11 were women.

At least 12 of the writers had been born in Iran before the 1979 revolution, but at the time of publication only three contributors were living there: Shayegan, Kiarostami, and poet/translator Naghmeh Zarbafian; the rest were based mainly in the United States or Western Europe. Just over half of the writers in the collection had left Iran decades earlier, within a few years of 1979. Most of the writers wrote in English, a few were translated from Persian (Kiarostami, Kar) or French (Shayegan, Satrapi).

For this reader, the most informative pieces tended to be the ones tied most closely to Iran. Four of the essays were set there close to the year the book was published: Aslan described a brief trip to the city of Qom and claimed the majority of Shiite Moslems viewed the present republic as a corruption of a Shiite state, and that the government was neither a theocracy nor a democracy. Moaveni's briefly covered present-day sexual mores in Tehran, in which kissing in public was illegal but Viagra, birth control pills and opiates were easily available, and growth of premarital sex among working-class youth marked a major shift in customs. Salar Abdoh described a brief visit to Tehran and attendance at a sleazy underground party among the wealthier and bored. Zarbafian imagined laboriously how a story by Milan Kundera on sexual and other identities would be censored by the government and understood by the young.

Two of the interviews were particularly good: Kiarostami discussed his development as a filmmaker, the structure of his films and the conditions under which he worked ("Poetry in Iran pours down on us, like falling rain, and everyone takes part in it . . . . Above all, poetry is the language of Persian culture." "I am well aware that in the country in which I am living, the complaints of a filmmaker are too trivial to be heard. They seem almost indecent."). And the émigré artist Shirin Neshat discussed the shock of her first return visit to Iran after the revolution, her view of women there as oppressed but not submissive, and the development of her art ("I feel that as an Iranian, I'm entitled to address subjects that are about my country . . . . For all of us who work in art, as much as we want to stay true and responsible to our cultures and explain our work at times through the cultural lens, ultimately, the staying power of the works will be determined and perpetuated above and beyond our national boundaries.").

Shayegan was represented by an excerpt from his 2004 novel Land of Mirages, which showed a Westerner and an Iranian trying among other things to reach an understanding of one another through their respective cultures. It appears that the rest of this novel hasn't yet been translated from French into English, unfortunately.

Other pieces concerned not the writer's own experience in Iran, but some aspect or another of life/art inside the country. Negar Azimi discussed briefly the visual arts there over the previous decade, describing them as thriving, as well as the growth of visual art on the Internet and earlier important work by photographers during the revolution and the war with Iraq. Babak Ebrahimian advised looking at the artistry of Iranian poetry and film to get the pulse of life of Iran, focusing on the interweaving of poetry, sound and visuals in two films by Kiarostami. Other than the essays on this director and visual arts, there was no coverage of filmmakers working inside Iran, and no coverage of the many writers there.

A handful of the other contributors focused less on Iran and more on their personal concerns in the countries where they were living, or wrote with fewer personal details and a broader, more polemical tone. The best of these for me was Nafisi's speech given in Washington, D.C. that described a "republic of the imagination," which she located in the best of what the West's literary heritage and democratic culture had to offer. Opposed to this was the "totalitarian mindset," which couldn't tolerate irony, ambiguity or irreverence and sought to impose its narrow-minded outlook on life and imagination, politicizing all dimensions.

She identified women and the younger generations of Iranians as the most powerful forces for change there, but condemned zealotry everywhere: "A culture that has lost its poetry and its soul is a culture that faces death. And death does not always come in the image of totalitarian rulers who belong to distant countries; it lives among us, in different guises . . . To mistake sound bites for deep thought, politics for ethics, reality shows for creative entertainment; to forget the value of dreams; to lose the ability to imagine a violent death in Darfur, Afghanistan or Iraq; to contemplate murder as passing news: are these not indications that now--more than ever--we need the courage and integrity, the faith, vision, and dreams that [the best books] instilled in us?" An essay by Gelareh Asayesh described prejudices she'd encountered in the United States as well as her own preconceptions, but seemed to this reader to paint the society around her with too broad a brush.

Many of the pieces succeeded in conveying the range of accomplishment of progressive, tolerant Iranians, or giving a glimpse into life in Iran or abroad. Criticisms of the collection might be that some of the pieces were too brief, general or loosely tied to Iran. And that a larger number of uncensored voices originating from inside Iran or other points on the political spectrum, if such voices had been available, might've made it possible to judge how widely shared within Iran were perspectives contained in the book. Such voices might've included people like Seyed Mohammad Marandi in Iran and Fatemeh Keshavarz in the United States.

Easily available collections of fiction that capture different aspects of Iranian identity include Stories by Iranian Women since the Revolution (1991), Stories from Iran: A Chicago Anthology 1921-1991 (1992), A Walnut Sapling on Masih's Grave and Other Stories by Iranian Women (1993), In a Voice of Their Own: A Collection of Stories Written by Iranian Women since the Revolution in 1979 (1996), A Feast in the Mirror: Stories by Contemporary Iranian Women (2000), and Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (2005).

My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes understands that the articulation of Iran must be incomplete--that the contributors to this volume, women and men, give us their conversations, their essays, their reminiscences, is a gracious endeavor to color and shade a contemporary depiction of Iran which is very black and white. The voices in this book are varied and intelligent, and their stories offer a complicated look at a country, a history, nationalism, and the very notion of `home.' I loved it.

I was surprised by what I found inside, and a bit shocked. Iran
has two cultures living within each other. There is a desperate air
of frustration of a people forced to live within the confines of
policies dictated by fundamentalism that is an uncomfortable fit
given the history of the country. Definitely recommend it.