Conclusions: On Acting and the Arts, A Transnational Story

Summary

My paradise is the forest of hemlocks

And my martyrdom comes without an end.

Ahmad Shamlu (1968)

The prisons of Iran are packed with young people who are arrested, tortured and imprisoned simply for thinking, for their thoughts, and for having read books … When they are released from the prison, they’ll leave the books aside. They’ll pick up machineguns.

Khosrow Golesorkhi, “Defence Statements in Military Court” (1973)

The story is now told: dissident arts and guerrilla action in 1970s Iran converged to create a culture of resistance against an autocracy. The Iranian case, as mentioned at the beginning of this book, was part of a transnational phenomenon: many artists of different talents and shades had artistically participated in depicting and supporting the movements for justice and freedom which they praised and in which they participated. In our case, the relationship between the arts and the militant movement was an ‘elective affinity’ growing organic, for a while, in a certain sense. On the one hand, the artists were worn out and exhausted by censorship and repression. They wished, as in poetry and fiction, for a tangible liberator and thus uncannily ‘anticipated’ it. Still, they needed a concrete source of inspiration in political action that would prove they were not alone in their yearning for freedom. On the other hand, the guerrillas’ originators, who could not stand the repression of the 1960s, took up arms, hoping that their sacrifices would mobilise the people. They mobilised not the masses but the artists, whose artistic defiance, ironically, the militants did not take seriously, although, paradoxically, the militants owed their metonymic presence and increased popularity in large part to the artists, who took the essence of their message of rebellion, in artistic expressions, to the populace. A new and defiant weltanschauung thus emerged and expanded.

Art-experience

The connection of dissident arts and militant action in Iran has been only sporadically acknowledged and documented. This book offers a systematic study, in relative detail, of how the cultural and social-psychological aspects of armed struggle, spearheaded by the PFG, propagated the image of the immortal self-sacrificing (the literal meaning of ‘fadai’) fighter who embodied the everlasting struggle for justice in the face of an oppressive machine countless times stronger.