It Is my Responsibility to Learn from “the Persian Flaw”
I spent June crocheting, gardening, painting hearts on rocks with acrylic, cooking too much rice, glitter-gluing broken seashells to canvases, coloring—using my hands as much as possible to ground myself as I checked in with people in my community one by one. I also spent June writing—often after I received a flurry of “thinking of you” texts from non-Iranian friends and allies, texts that I grew to dread because they meant it was time to Google in what ways Israel and/or the U.S. had enacted more violence against my kin. Often, too, I wrote after checking in with my mother on whether my aunt and uncle, both unable to evacuate Tehran, were alive.
Since the first day Israel, and then the U.S., attacked Iran, many Iranian writers I admire have used their online presence to process this ongoing trauma through personal narrative. Am I alone in feeling a cultural pressure—a responsibility?—to declare my very personal “stakes” in the war and bare my pain for public consumption and to do so now? In a recent article for The Nation, Kaveh Akbar writes, “To say it probably too baldly, I feel some excruciating sense of, ‘OK, now they are attacking Iran, it is my turn to perform my agony, to audition for your empathy.”
This is not at all a dig at or critique of Iranians who have been vocal in this way. This is a question about the ways that I feel capitalism is encouraging me to perform my pain for doom-scrolling profit. Maybe also a critique of the ways I have felt guilty for not “doing enough” before realizing that what I thought of as “doing enough” was actually just virtue signaling, not tangible action. (Which is not to suggest that I do not see sharing oneself authentically through writing as meaningful as we know that reading is transformative—it’s why the state would rather shut us up.)
June excerpts from my journal on writing—
If I have a platform, no matter how small, I have a responsibility as an artist to make my politics clear.
If I do not have a platform, as an artist, I still have a responsibility to make my politics clear.
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To be clear, there is no other way to say this: the U.S. makes me cringe.
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“What has a colonial empire ever destroyed and built back better? Who has an Israel bomb ever made more free?”
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It is my responsibility as an artist to condemn the state.
When my people are suffering from a collective trauma, it is not my responsibility to condemn the state on a manufactured timeline, especially if that timeline disallows me to tend to my nervous system.
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It is my responsibility to speak for my people.
How could it ever be possible to speak for an entire people?
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It is my responsibility to learn from the tradition of “the Persian flaw,” the tradition of incorporating an intentional flaw into one’s art—a practice in imperfection, an honoring of one’s own humanity. From this I learn that imperfect speech is > no speech, that imperfect action > no action. It is my responsibility to falter and err.
When I falter and err, it is my responsibility to commit to repairing harm.
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It is my responsibility to deconstruct internalized savorism implicit in my impulse to speak for entire peoples.
It is my responsibility to create avenues that allow my peoples to speak for themselves—plural.
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“I was born in an Iranian prison.
“My parents were held in their jails.
“My uncles lie in their mass graves.
“Nothing you can tell me about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven’t lived in blood and bone.
“That doesn’t mean I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins.
“If your vision of liberation comes only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it’s not freedom you’re after.
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It is the responsibility of literary organizations to condemn the genocide, the war, the complicity of our tax dollars. It is a responsibility they shirk. When, months from now, journals with white editors call for a special Iran issue, I will resent them.
It may feel like my responsibility to submit. It is not.
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“This must be our constant betrayal, to know now that the lyric is not as valuable as the polemic. That the sonnet must give way to the photocopied and wheatpasted list of companies and individuals with financial ties to the genocide. That political thought is not only an option for artists but a duty, an obligation and a fundamental necessity. That it supersedes the line break, the marginalia, the invocation of the muse. Better to know what we’re saying and why, and to say it with force, like a stone hurled from the river that reaches the sea.”
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It is my responsibility to show up.
It is also my responsibility to critique my own internalized ableism that manifests as shame when I do not show up in a way with social capital, i.e. at a protest.
And it is also my responsibility to critique our culture that devalues the necessary supportive caretaking work that allows others to show up—at a protest or otherwise.
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The chronic impulse to repost online robs us of sustained reflection and rest, of transformation. It robs us of the time and energy to caretake, to hold space, to act in solidarity, and make incremental change in sustained daily actions.
It will never be my primary responsibility as an artist to “create content.”
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I have a responsibility to myself and to others to allow for nuance and contradiction—but it will never be my responsibility to convince others that, despite our brownness, we are human.