Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Sara and Dara (I know, but apparently they were the equivalent of Dick and Jane in prerevolutionary Iran) are our ostensible lovers. She’s a middle-class university student studying Iranian literature, even though teaching contemporary Iranian literature is forbidden. He’s a former political prisoner who ekes out a living painting houses. Before his arrest, he was a film student, whose dreams of being the next Abbas Kiarostami were destroyed by prison.

Later, he spent seven months in solitary confinement for selling banned Western movies, including “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Dara doesn’t help his cause when he tries to explain that he’s only selling the classics of modern cinema, and his interrogator misunderstands and thinks that Dara is admitting that there are coded messages hidden inside.

The hunchback dwarf I can’t explain, but he pops up periodically, befuddling everyone. There are also poets’ ghosts, a seller of magic charms, a phantom assassin, and Mandanipour himself, who occasionally steps in to help out the would-be lovers – or key a character’s BMW. And of course, there’s Petrovich, tsking away at Mandanipour’s moral turpitude, but possibly fascinated in spite of himself. The conversations between Mandanipour and Petrovich are far more fraught than anything the star-crossed lovers could come up with. (Mandanipour, who currently teaches at Harvard, was unable to publish in his native country for much of the 1990s.)

Dara also isn’t that impressed by his creator: At one point Sara and Dara are talking about one of Mandanipour’s short stories, and Dara sniffs that it’s “cowardly.” “The writer has played tricks to pass censorship. I don’t like a writer who plays tricks. A writer who can trick the censorship apparatus can trick his readers, too.” For readers who also prefer a more upfront literary style, be warned: Mandanipour pulls everything but a rabbit out of his hat.
But then, Byron and Shakespeare never had to operate under these conditions.

Mandanipour can’t describe his female character’s beauty without using produce metaphors (there are so many pomegranate references that he says he feels like a still-life painter) and his main characters can be beaten and arrested for walking down the street together. So creativity is the order of the day. One of Sara’s and Dara’s dates takes place in an emergency room of a hospital; another time they arrange to meet walking into a mosque.

But their efforts to see each other are nowhere near as convoluted as Mandanipour’s efforts to write about them. By the end of this witty, hyper-intelligent riff on life under a repressive regime, the exhausted writer has demonstrated the mental and emotional contortions necessary to survive and fully convinced a reader of this vast understatement: “publishing a love story in Iran is not a simple undertaking.”

Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

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