Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour Page A

repetitive symbols, especially symbols that since the early days of Eve have all too often been manhandled. But my own opposition to the white apple blossoms dancing is more pragmatic than this. I remember years ago, in a story written by one of my friends, Mr. Petrovich censored the sentence “The leaves fall dancing from the trees” because the word “dancing” is deemed vulgar and is forbidden.
    It is now one o’clock in the morning. Sara says good-bye to Dara and quickly goes to sleep to have beautiful dreams …
    Earlier than her, many people in Tehran, this city that once had one of the most beautiful and light-filled aerial views in the world, hoping for beautiful dreams, have turned out their lights and gone to sleep. The new government has decreed that all restaurants and food sellers must close at eleven o’clock at night so that citizens do not stay up late unnecessarily and harm their health. I remind you that for people in Iran the only after-dark entertainment is to roam around the streets and to eat. Those who are wealthy go to restaurants, and the middle class and below go to hamburger joints. For a family or a few friends going out for a hamburger, by the time they make their way through the traffic from downtown to uptown and to a hamburger joint that looks like McDonald’s, it takes three or four hours and kills the tedious evening. (Have you noticed the contrast between the philosophy underlying the concept of the hamburger in the West and the course of action required for eating a hamburger in Iran?) Now ask the question that is on your mind. Don’t be timid. Ask.
    And I will answer:
    Fortunately, McDonald’s does not exist in Iran. The daring ingenuity of the person who installed an M on the neon sign of his hamburger joint lasted all of one day. On the second day, a group of people raided his eatery, burned it down, and proclaimed that McDonald’s was a symbol of the globe-devouring, McDonald’s-eating America. The incident took place years before Mr. Morgan Spurlock’s experience in Super Size Me. You are therefore free to think that these people were concerned about Iranians gaining weight. Given this reasoning, we can be grateful for restaurants and food sellers having to close at eleven o’clock.
    What do you suppose the imposed closing hour of restaurants has to do with literature?
    Actually, there is a very subtle connection. What else is there to do for people who have nothing in particular to occupy their time with from seven to eleven in the evening? People who, incidentally, are too tired and stressed to engage in the task of increasing the Muslim population of the world, as has been implicitly suggested by the government. Yes, reading and taking refuge in Iranian literature await them.
    By enforcing the directive to close restaurants, the government is in fact supporting literature … Mr. Petrovich right away disagrees with our conclusion.
    “It is impossible for the government of Iran to support a corrupt and immoral literature that merely has its eyes on the West and its decadent sexual freedoms. Don’t kid yourself …”
    Mr. Petrovich is right. To occupy the Iranian population’s leisure time, the government has invested, and continues to invest, in television programs and film series that, more often than not, portray writers, poets, and intellectuals as wimpy, bungling, unprincipled crooks and addicts, much in the same manner that Western spies are always portrayed as well-dressed men wearing neckties. Perhaps the banning of neckties in Iran—which I will elaborate on later—was because they can be perceived as an arrow pointing to a man’s lower organ.
    The clock hands in Tehran have just killed the hour of two in the morning. Sara is deep in sweet sleep. She is dreaming of the romantic poem Khosrow and Shirin. She sees herself standing beside a beautiful pond. The pond is like a mirror. Sara sees her reflection on the water. She is wearing a magnificent white