The first time I was beaten up by police I was sixteen years old. It was March 8, 2004, and more than four thousand feminists had gathered in Tehran’s Laleh Park to commemorate International Women’s Day. Hundreds of security forces were dispatched to the park to prevent our rally from going ahead. They were especially focused on driving men out of the rally. If women were celebrating “their day,” this could be cast as an ordinary community fair, just like other groups mark “their days,” but if men joined them, this would look like subversive politics. A police officer articulated precisely this “argument” after hitting me with a baton. “If it’s women’s day, what are you doing here?” he said. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and not just because it was my political duty, or because of the electricity of the crowd. The crush was rife with political luminaries. Right before the police attacked, I was chatting with the feminist firebrand writer Nooshin Ahmadi Khorasani. I was a lanky sixteen-year-old in conversation with a superstar. She was running a mass feminist campaign while publishing pioneering texts in women’s studies. We debated Marxism and feminism; she urged me to read more Simone De Beauvoir. And in that same crowd, before and after the repressive batons whirled, we spoke of literature, of the latest novels we had read, of the upcoming plays at Tehran’s City Theater. All of this went together, all of it was our creed. The political theory, but also the plays. In that rich company, I was raised to see myself as part of the cultural resistance to the Islamic regime. It represented crude ignorance and we represented sophisticated courage. All of us writers and artists had to submit our works to the censorship boards, at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, or the state broadcaster, or other censorious institutions, and their very responses gave us a sense of superiority. The censors would ask us to cut a description of a kiss in a novel or a women’s ears jutting out of her hijab in a film. Ordinary life in Tehran was a form of resistance. Of course we were resisting when we marched in the streets for women’s rights. But we were also resisting when we immersed ourselves in the arts that we loved. There was a symbiotic relationship between these two forms of resistance. We were defending our values when standing up to the police and also when scheduling assignations with our “DVD guy,” who brought all the prohibited movies to our apartments like a drug dealer on the run. “Next week, I can get you some really good stuff,” he would whisper furtively to the salivating cinephiles. “The collected works of Michelangelo Antonioni.” We resisted the rule of the mullahs by hosting underground film clubs in apartments all over the city. There we would stay up past midnight watching and discussing prohibited films. Resisters knew that, at the speciously “kosher” cassette shop near Tehran’s central bus station, if you knew the right passcode, the man behind the counter could supply just about any music you could dream of. But an act or an activity didn’t need to be illegal for it to count as resistance. Resistance was also a photography class or a painting class, all legal and above ground, but still a place of gathering for the cultured men and women, who, with our minds, hearts, and bodies, preserved everything that the regime detested. The most visible annual occasion of resistance was the Tehran International Book Fair, organized by the aforementioned Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. It was a massive affair which assembled thousands of publishers from all over Iran and beyond, and it was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. It was all legal, sure, but the steady resistance which stretched the political noose in the 1990s and 2000s had forced the government to permit a bit more than it had before, and the book fair still benefited from that struggle. During the presidency of the reformist Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 to 2005, a wide variety of books were suddenly allowed to be published. One could buy Marx and Lenin and Jane Austen and Tennessee Williams. Even if she had to be censored in parts, you could certainly buy Simone de Beauvoir. Oppression is difficult to institutionalize over a people that wants freedom, and the resisters recognize one another in the ceaseless fight against the government’s logistical crackdowns. The obscurantist mullahs and their henchmen might hold almost all the political power, but we persevered nonetheless. And there were so many of us! Despite receiving millions of dollars in subsidies, the pro-regime publishers sat alone in their booths, with few people frequenting them or touching their sumptuous bindings. They watched glumly as, a few steps away, an indie publisher with wares printed on a shoestring attended to a long line of customers. We were legion. And this wasn’t only the case in Tehran. I remember spending time in gorgeous southern cities such as Bandar Abbas and Shiraz, and in my paternal city of Arak. Their book fairs weren’t so big, but they existed. A European friend visiting Iran told me about going to a branch of the Book City (Shahre Ketab) chain in a small city and walking in on a well-attended event in which a literary critic was discussing the French novelist Patrick Modiano — and this was before he won the Nobel Prize and the attendant global acclaim. Our golden principle, our iron law, was that we never confused art for politics, and never justified the arts as a political tool. They were sacrosanct on their own terms. That was essential to our existence-as-resistance strategy. My generation rejected what we considered an embarrassing fusion of literature and politics which had been the hallmark of the resistance leaders who directed the revolution in 1979. Influenced by that blighted epoch, the Global 1960s, that generation often measured art simply
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