Young and Defiant in Tehran

Chapter 6: Culture of Defiance

Chapter 6 Culture of Defiance The next revolution in Iran will be a sex-revolution —A journalist in Iran In each room of this house there is a storm. When they are raging, we all will be gone —Federico García Lorca The second quotation above is from The House of Bernarda Alba, the famous play by Federico García Lorca. In February 2002, during the Fajr Festival, Khaney-e Bernarda Alba was played in Tehran. This short play is set in rural Spain at the turn of the twentieth century. The characters, all women, live in a cloistered household managed by a newly widowed mother with five daughters. Under the shadow of the Church and the tyranny bred from a need to protect the chastity of the family, the matron (Bernarda Alba) represses her daughters by enforcing an eightyear mourning period. She allows no sign of joy or self-assertion, such as wearing make-up and bright-colored dresses, or contact with the opposite sex. Tension in the family increases and a tragedy is inevitable. Eventually, the youngest daughter revolts against the mother, but the result is violence and her suicide. As it was performed, the play reflected the current situation in Iran rather than that of early twentiethcentury Spain. Many young women I talked to about the play recognized themselves in Lorca’s tragedy. The hopelessness and anxiety , but also the potential forces of rebellion in the play created a connection between Lorca’s imagination and the reality lived by the Iranians. The above citation from the play recalls what Dara in a bitter and prophetical tone once said: A short time after the Revolution, suddenly there was a severe scarcity of gruel, baby food, and diapers. Ayatollah Khomeini disliked contraceptives and commanded the nation to bear children. The Revolution needed young people. In Ayatollah Khomeini’s words “an army of 20 millions.” There was a baby boom. When these babies grew up and started school there was a “school crisis.” There were not enough schools. The state changed the school system to get them all in. After school the boys were called to do military service. Again, there were not enough places. After the war, the state changed the system and started to sell exemptions from military service [moafi]. The youth then wanted to go to university. Islamic Free Universities mushroomed everywhere. Today the first wave of the “army of 20 million” is out in the labor market. There are no jobs, no future for them. The younger generation see themselves as a “burned generation” [nasl-e sokhte], a generation with little to lose. The crisis is here. This generation is like an inundation [seil] coming toward us. It is approaching, too late to stop it coming and it destroys everything on its way. Scary but true. Dara’s words echo the voice of a social change in the making. The Third Generation have created their own space, ways of communication , and “tactics” in de Certeau’s sense (1984) to subvert the meanings of the adult culture. They have developed several rituals of performative “defiance.” In the following pages I present some ethnographic illustrations . Football as Politics Jafar Panahi’s satirical comedy Offside (2005) is a film about female fans who are refused entrance to watch the national team play a World Cup qualifier against Bahrain. They disguise themselves as men in order to go through police control. The movie shows the anguish of several young girls who are captured and wait to be punished for their “cultural crime.” Women are not allowed to enter the stadium because male players wear shorts and the audience shout “indecent” slogans. The film shows how “pastoral power” excludes women from the public space with a “caring” and “saving” argument. Nevertheless, on November 29, 1997, many women forced their way inside the stadium to join the celebration and welcome the national team returning from Australia. A few days earlier, the Iranian team had won beaten Australia and qualified for the 1998 World Cup in France. That night the post-Revolutionary generation took over Tehran’s streets, squares, and parks. They rejoiced and danced until long after midnight. The representatives of the state were shocked and paralyzed by the immensity of the spontaneous happenings. They avoided confrontation with the people. The joyous tumult was reviewed by the media and the intellectuals as a “social happening” (hadese-ye ejtema‘i). This “social happening” has later been repeated several times, for instance, at the...