Our University of Virginia friend, Professor Farzeneh Milani, has just published a brilliant review essay in the current issue of Middle East Report, “On Women’s Captivity in the Islamic World.”
Drawing from her own forthcoming book, long in the works, Milani analyzes how the Muslim woman is commonly reduced in American “non-fiction” bestselling pulp to being a “virtual prisoner…. the victim of an immobilizing faith, locked up inside her mandatory veil—a mobile prison shrunk to the size of her body.”
Here’s a splendid thematic excerpt:
“The recent spate of memoirs and autobiographies involving Muslim captors and their native or non-Muslim victims, a mutant category I call “hostage narratives,” puts a new and fascinating twist on the familiar theme of women’s captivity in the Islamic world. It is no longer mainly Western men who recount the tales of confinement, but women who recount them firsthand…. It is women’s own longing to escape, their own urgent plea to be liberated. The hostage narrative relies on the authority of personal experience, shares an insider’s perspective and commands more trust and legitimacy. Written in English, addressing Americans directly and concerned with national and international security for good measure, this category of literature fetishizes the veil.”
In formulaic works, from Mahmoody’s Not without My Daughter to Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran to Ali’s The Caged Virgin, women languish within a gulag, crying out for “liberation” from without. For this review essay, Milani avoids questions about the motives, agendas, or even veracity of the writers or publishers. Instead, Milani wants to know what makes us in the west so readily receptive to such stark presentations.
The analysis is laced with political implications, and Milani locates the genesis of the modern “hostage narratives” to a political event: the US-Iran hostage crisis.
An indelible sense of anguish etched itself into the collective memory of a justifiably outraged nation. “America in Captivity” was the headline that summed up the mood of a country in psychic pain. Like harrowing flashbacks of a trauma, hostage taking became a recurrent theme in books and films and news clips about Iran and, by extension, the Islamic world.
Wittingly or otherwise, American publishers have kept Americans largely hostage to sterile memories, now nearly 3 decades old.
Milani is not entertaining “illusions” and concedes that “repression, autocracy, political and religious purges, censorship, and gender inequity” within Islamic realms are realities that should be, and are, widely studied. Yet as I too have written, Iran in particular is “a land of paradoxes, a society in transition.”
“[N]o one can accuse the Islamic Republic of intolerance toward its own contradictions, particularly when it comes to the treatment of women. Indeed, two competing narratives of womanhood exist side by side in Iran today. Iranian women can vote and run for some of the highest offices in the country, but must observe an obligatory dress code. They can drive personal vehicles, even taxis and trucks and fire engines, but cannot ride bicycles. (an irony I explored here at jwn last July – scott) They are seated away from men in the back of buses, but can be squashed in between perfect male strangers in overcrowded jitney taxis. They have entered the world stage as Nobel Peace Laureates, human rights activists, best-selling authors, prize-winning film directors and Oscar nominees, but cannot enter government offices through the same door as men. “
More accurately then, life for Iranian women reflects a “complex mixture of protest and accommodation, of resistance and acquiescence.” The Monitor’s Scott Peterson recently captured this “ebb and flow” experienced by Iranian women; the problems grab the headlines, the push-back less so.
Milani’s review essay deserves close consideration, particularly her plea to fellow Americans to stop “suspending our critical judgment” and to seek out the competing narrative of the undiscovered Muslim woman. In her, Milani suggests we shall find
“a moderating, modernizing force, a seasoned negotiator of confined spaces, a veteran trespasser of boundaries, walls, fences, cages, blind windows, closed doors and iron gates.”
Scott, Farzaneh’s essay is indeed brilliant, and breath-taking in its scope. I am so glad that MER published it, making the full text freely available online there; and that you brought it to all of our attention here.
I think her treatment of Phyllis’s Chesler’s whole body of work on Afghanistan, spanning four decades, is rich and thought-provoking. In particular, it raises important questions about the broader uses to which “memory”– or more precisely, the way we actually choose to frame and present our memories– is put.
Hostage narratives in general have always been an important part of mobilizing opinion in western countries in support of imperial/colonial military adventures. The rash of western hostage narratives these days, that deal with abduction/captivity of vulnerable individuals in Muslim countries, is just a subset of that. And then, hostage narratives themselves are a subset of atrocity narratives– the ones in which the survivors of this particular form of atrocity survive and can tell their own tales…
Such narratives may be (and probably usually are) “true” at one level. Excluding, of course, fabricated atrocities like the “Kuwaiti babies” one that was used to rally support for Bush I’s military expedition in the Gulf in 1991. No doubt, a small number of Belgian nuns were murdered and possibly also raped, by the Germans in 1914 or so… But it is the way these stories are framed, presented, and disseminated that is important. For example, liberal Europe could be outraged by the story of the Belgian nuns but not hear a peep (or give a damn) about the ten million Africans in Congo wiped out by Leopold’s horrendous colonial-plantation project in central Africa.
So I think it’s great that Farzaneh has turned her broad range of analytical and interpretive skills onto this topic. This work can really help us interrogate atrocity discourses more broadly.
If I may be transgressive, I wonder whether it is possible to discount the validity of ‘hostage literature’ altogether. After all, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was hostage literature in the sense that Dr. Milani describes, it was written for political reasons, and it may well have helped to set off a war. And, no doubt, apologists for slavery at the time would have scoffed at slave narratives, claiming that many slaves were well-treated and happy with their lot, and that their lack of freedom was balanced by security.
Yes, I am being deliberately provocative, and no, I don’t equate the situation of Iranian women with slavery. I am a longtime admirer of Shirin Ebadi and I am quite aware of the complexities facing women in Iran. Nevertheless, cannot ‘hostage literature’ sometimes fulfill a useful function by making the public aware of an injustice they would not otherwise know of, and are not those who believe their situation is unjust entitled to speak out? Would you classify a cri de coeur by a Palestinian in Gaza as hostage literature, even if it oversimplifies the conflict or if the author’s experience is not universally applicable?
Azazel, I don’t think you’re being transgressive. I agree with you that we shouldn’t discount the value of all hostage narratives or all atrocity narratives. (Heck, if that were the case there’d be no point for me in doing anything with an international rights group like HRW!) I do think, though, that we should feel quite free to interrogate these narratives quite vigorously. I don’t think we should simply hear “Belgian nuns! An atrocity!” and rush off to war…
Thus, while being completely sympathetic to the survivors of any atrocities and working hard to try to heal and restore them, we should also try to ask questions like, “Why are these particular stories being told in the way they are, by whom, and for what end? And what other stories, or parts of this same story, are NOT being told, that we should also hear?”
I think that was the main argument of Farzaneh’s essay, and it’s one that I strongly sympathize with.
We can all, certainly, think of many examples of these kinds of narratives being used for political (and not only humanitarian purposes… I believe the present strong focus in the US on “saving” Darfur, while those same congregations, prominent media personalities, and organizations keep quite mum about the human suffering in the DRC, Gaza, or elsewhere should certainly be interrogated with the kinds of questions I list above.
Men and women differ physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and in every other significant aspect of species experience. They are as unlike as bees and flowers–but equally dependent on each other for propagation. As a member of the culture that has made the biggest hash of trying to accomodate these differences– that of the United States of America where the wildly wrong-headed feminist movement has convinced hundreds of thousands of women that they should want things they do not want and pursue activities that make them miserable–I find it ludicrous that we presume to be outraged at the solutions attempted by other cultures, notably the Islamic nations. I don’t think those solutions are necessarily very good, but they sure surpass the Western attempts.
HRW issues protest alert about travel bans on Iranian female protesters…
http://action.humanrightsfirst.org/campaign/Ardalan
Part of the “ebb and flow” — of course, HRW doesn’t do “comparative” HR’s assessments…. one wonders in which of Iran’s neighbors such movements could even form and receive such wide support (and face such pressure)….
Yet another dimension to the paradoxes for Iranian women — (one you won’t find in the “hostage narratives”)