Remember the scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five when, from behind his bandages, Billy Pilgrim whispers “I was there” to fellow patient Eliot Rosewater? There meant at the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War.
Billy’s “I was there” is the debut of a short career explaining that Time is of a piece, a Truth he learned when kidnapped and living among the ETs of the planet Tralfamadore.
I fell into Billy Pilgrim consciousness during a performance of Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Forteresses, a sit-down theatrical narrative around the experiences of the playwright’s mother and two of his aunts before during and after the 1979 revolution in Iran.
Though Shaheman’s play notes emphasize the immigrant family experience – if I had only notes and pictures and hadn’t seen the actual play, I would have thought it was about Shaheman himself – his mother and aunts do all the talking. They talk about themselves and the mechanics of their lives right up to now, when they’ve become pretty much somebody’s unremarkable mom or granma or neighbor with a foreign accent. They are women of my own age, of my companion Karine’s age, of the age of most folks I know.
The mechanics of Shaheman’s mother’s and aunts’ lives come down to trying to deal with disabilities imposed on being a woman. Indeed, each woman’s story boils down to an unassuming tale of institutional, economic and sentimental dependence.
Shaheman’s mother is utterly dependent on an abusive husband and also has children to protect. One aunt has her aspirations systematically blown off by new woman-hating legislation which comes along to back up failing custom, the third is thwarted by sentimental entanglement with a blameless man.
I expect that Shaheman meant the title Les Forteresses – “Fortresses” – to allude to the rock-solid “strength” and “resiliency” of the women in the face of personal hardship and exile.
But what Billy Pilgrim heard was the women’s painful chorus of “What The Fuck?”
Because, frankly, why should one expect to be blocked and punished at every turn for what one is?
Condign punishment for existing was just not the expectation in the post-war world of 1979. Not in Iran and not in the USA. Not anywhere.
I was among the last of the John Gardner-Robert Creeley literati cohort at State University at Buffalo, which was, in 1979, already then, as today, a global engineering-education hub. Many of Shaheman’s mother and aunts’ national and spiritual brothers (and just a few sisters!) were there with me, aspiring to a modern education for a modern life.
Forteresses made me understand that “I was there”, an actor in the play, when Shaheman’s mother and aunts were coming of age. I believed then, as they believed, that women’s equality, like racial equality, like human equality, was a given of modernity.
All of us were carried along by the warm wind of revolution and naïve positivism.
Virtually no Iranian could imagine then that the lightning flashes of woman-hating were not just throwbacks to an atavistic “medieval Islam”, soon to dissipate in the sunshine of modernity. In the USA, I was not alone to think that egregious fanatic Phyllis Schlafly was a throwback, the fears of unisex toilets and the failure of the ERA, a joke, all a tribute to a sad, but dying, Christian atavism.
I explained away the Iran regime's obvious woman-hating then as “decolonization”, “national-religious” assimilation of the “fact of modernity”.
I was as wrong and as naïve about Schlafly and her Eagle Forum movement as Shaheman’s female relatives and those mostly young men chattering to beat the band in our student union were about the revolution that Khomeini’s Islamists seized.
In the USA and in Iran, the year 1979 marked the end of passive and customary resistance to women’s equality and a turn toward the active woman hating promoted across the world today. As much as Khomeini’s revolution, the success of Schlafly’s Eagle Forum gave the impetus for active opposition to women’s equality – i.e. woman hating – as a sine qua non of “the fact of modernity”.
So, when I actually watch the action and listen to the stories, Forteresses is about how explicitly woman hating ideology has organized and strengthened to block and turn back women’s rights since 1979.
Ruhollah Khomeini’s ideological legacy is no medieval throwback, unless, of course, I suppose that the regime’s nuclear, ballistic and cyber weapons capabilities, without speaking of its logistics and command and control capabilities, have been plucked out of a miraculous cave just outside Qom.
Iran’s government today is ready to club and poison every woman in the country to preserve itself – it should come as no surprise that de facto allies Russia (whose imperial venture in Ukraine is blessed by the Patriarch of Moscow) and Hamas unapologetically use rape as a weapon of war.
And what is Schlafly descendant Tucker Carlson’s flushed-face “Christian national values” if not “the fact of modernity” without woman’s equality? In 21 states of the USA a woman may not freely dispose of her body; there is still no ERA...
In 2024, woman hating is the name of their game wherever we live. No mistake.
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The performers Shady Nafar, Guilda Chaverdi, Mina Kavani interpreted, accompanied and gave voice to Gurshad Shaheman’s mother and aunts at the 6 February 2024 performance of Shaheman’s Forteresses at Théâtre de la Bastille. Theirs was a profoundly Tralfamadorian performance. Nafar, Chaverdi and Kavani manage to crystallize, universalize and make timeless the vulnerability, discrimination and personal stagnation inflicted by inequality based on gender. A special shout out to Shady Nafar, whose empathic interpretation and rhetorical skill moved me especially deeply.
Cogent and true. Did the play take place in a rug store?
Posted by: David Schloss | February 17, 2024 at 11:36 AM
Everything new is old again. In 1979, I was already grown up and active in international feminist groups. Kate Millett, who started out as an academic struggling to be taken seriously and who had become a radical advocate for abused women, was in prison in Iran. Toxic men, killing to mask their chronic (hydraulic) insecurity. Dictatorship, coming soon to a democracy near you.
Posted by: Jacquelineditor | February 17, 2024 at 11:56 AM