Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili

Author:Shahriar Mandanipour; Sara Khalili
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Persian (Language) Contemporary Fiction, Fiction, Fiction - General, Literary, Historical, General
ISBN: 9780307390424
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

BITTER WATER

On this snowy night, Dara is sitting at the window of his room feeling sad. He feels he was a small pile of snow that Sara with her beautiful hands had delicately and compassionately made into a small snowman, she had caressed it, and then, squish, she had crushed it under her foot. Hearing the sound of the snowman being squashed, Dara angrily punches the wall and curses at himself.

“You fucking dimwit!”

Right here, I come face-to-face with another problem in writing my love story. In stories that go to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to receive publishing permits, there should be no foul language uttered by the characters, especially popular curse words associated with the primary sexual organs and auxiliary sexual organs. Now imagine that in one of your stories you have a foulmouthed thug, and you want to develop this character. Let’s suppose you have reached a scene in Iran in which the thug character has grabbed a polite character by the collar and is picking a fight with him. What would you do?

In an age when every day stressed and troubled people in all corners of the world get into fights over small and petty issues and shout vulgarities at each other, and bystanders become their censors, characters in Iranian stories, in the most critical moments, in climaxes such as fights and brawls, and even on occasions when they are killing each other, can only go so far as: Rude idiot… Snitch… Jackass … Cheeky … I’m going to slap you … This is in direct contrast to American films in which during similarly critical climaxes, or even in the course of revelries and romantic interludes, words such as Shit… Asshole … Son of a bitch … and Fuck you … fly from the lips of characters to the farthest limits of the movie screen. I know polite American television channels have found an effective method of censoring these foul words even when dealing with rap songs. It is that bleep sound that suddenly pops up in the middle of what the character or the rapper is saying. These bleeps may be effective in movies, and they may render rap songs more acceptable, but they are not a solution for us Iranian writers. How in the world can we put the blare of a bleep in the mouths of characters in our stories?

Please do not tell me that those three infamous dots “…” will solve the problem.

No, they will not… Ask me why and I will say:

The use of these three dots is very dangerous to any story. In fact, it is like gaining access to nuclear energy with which one can either produce electricity to light streetlamps so that ghosts from the stories of Gogol and Bram Stoker, and ghosts from the One Thousand and One Nights, cannot go roaming around so easily, or use it to build a nuclear bomb. Readers, however, are generally not interested in lighting lamps on streets inhabited by ghosts.

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