Abandon Hope, All Abandon…!
Although the best known of Don Quixote's exploits is his tilting at windmills, we might also count among them his smashing of an evil puppet theatre. Imagine those puppets coming alive, with their no-longer-wooden armament, Confine the audience, tie strings to their limbs, and manipulate them to play. This is how the Iranian people have been subjugated for nearly half a century.
Regime corruption even corrupts the Persian language. In this absurd dialect, the words “freedom,” “elections,” and “vote” come to bear contradictory meanings and are rendered grotesque.
Nearly half a century ago, an historic moment arose in Iran, called different names by different factions: riot, revolt, revolution. Since this period, the Islamic state has inflicted severe suffering on the Iranian people, from degradation to torture, to execution.
Recently they took aim at the only remaining wealth of the people: their hope. They aim to turn hope into disappointment and surrender. The recent engineered presidential election in Iran was not just an effort to help a specific person win a landslide victory; it was designed to implement the project of "Desperate Despair." It was obvious that the country’s leadership would rig the election in favor of their preferred contender, but this puppet show had another clear message: "You people! Before you had the freedom to choose between bad and worse, but now you will vote only for the worst."
Stalin once said: "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do." In this election, the Iranian state brazenly abandoned the façade of competition and openly embraced the Stalinist counting of votes. The implicit message was: “the slaughterer of your bravest has been chosen by your vote.” And the day after the election, the message was “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here,” the phrase inscribed on the gates of Dante's Inferno.
The rebellious generation of the seventies, those ideologists, or sentimental idealists, those who nurtured the dream of abolishing the monarchy, are now in exile (active or passive), or aging in isolation, or dead. In Iran, however, the new generation is more realistic than their fathers were. An increasing number of young people hold grudges against the regime and anticipate a change, or a miracle. At the same time, they want to have an ordinary and content life.
This new generation is not lost on the highway to “utopia”; they just want to get rid of Islamic Dystopia and live in the “global village” like everyone else. It can be said that living under a theocratic totalitarian state arouses religious disbelief among young Iranians. It seems that they do not believe in heaven, and want to pursue happiness in this mundane short life.
Young Iranians are aware that even though their motherland is one of the top five most resource-rich countries in the world, the poverty and unemployment rate increases annually. Human rights violations have blatantly intensified. The young people who channel their creativity into art are faced with censorship and prohibitions. They rehearse democracy and civic life skills vivaciously by forming NGOs which are quickly shut down amidst accusations of espionage... And now they face the threat of losing their only asset: Hope.
Over the past several years, this generation has formed two major nonviolent uprisings, both of which have been brutally suppressed, and the trial and harsh sentences of those arrested are still ongoing. Young Iranians find themselves alone in the world. Few Western states have condemned government crackdowns on protests. All we get are their politically correct clichés, while it is unclear exactly how they support the Islamic regime behind the peoples’ back.
The young generation of Iran has gradually turned away from revolutionary sentiment, toward a more pragmatic way of life. They know how to circumvent all the technological barriers. To the theocratic totalitarian, the internet or any other development that questions or subverts its foundational principles is the devil. This devil embraces the classic features of Sheitan as he is depicted in religious texts, while displaying the playfulness and sense of humor of the Voland the Satan in The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, who ridicules the authority of an ideological regime.
Despite the crackdown on bloggers and the murder of at least one of them by torture, every new download opens the door for young Iranians who seek freedom, they have the potential to become thousands of freelance reporters documenting the state’s corruption. Satellite Internet is the impending nightmare of the Iranian state.
For Iranians, the hope of living free and equal, with dignity and rights, is the last thing to die. If this hope is taken away from them, young Iranians will have nothing to lose but their lives.
Shahriar Mandanipour (Mondanipour), one of the most accomplished writers of contemporary Iranian literature, has held fellowships at Brown University, Harvard University, Boston College, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He has been a visiting professorship at Brown University, where he taught courses in Persian literature and cinema. He also has taught creative writing at Tufts University. Mandanipour’s creative approach to the use of symbols and metaphors, his inventive experimentation with language, time and space, and his unique awareness of sequence and identity have made his work fascinating to critics and readers. His honors include the Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel of 2004, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the previous two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran. Mandanipour is the author of nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than 100 essays in literary theory, literature and art criticism, creative writing, censorship, and social commentary. From 1999 until 2007, he was Editor-in-Chief of Asr-e Panjshanbeh (Thursday Evening), a monthly literary journal published in Shiraz that after 9 years of publishing was banned. Some of his short stories and essays have been published in anthologies such as Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Fiction and Sohrab’s Wars: Counter Discourses of Contemporary Persian Fiction: A Collection of Short Stories and a Film Script; and in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Short works have been published in France, Germany, Denmark, and in languages such Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish. Mandanipour’s first novel to appear in English, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (translated by Sara Khalili and published by Knopf in 2009) was very well received (Los Angeles Times, Guardian, New York Times, etc.). Censoring an Iranian Love Story was named by the New Yorker one of the reviewers’ favorites of 2009, by the Cornell Daily Sun as Best Book of the Year for 2009, and by NPR as one of the best debut novels of the year; it was awarded (Greek ed.) the Athens Prize for Literature for 2011. The novel has been translated and published in 11 other languages and in 13 countries throughout the world.