<underfire> Image as Event

[negar mottahedeh]

I would like to begin my presentation this week where Melani McAlister left 
off: on the spectacle of Abu Ghraib. Here, with a series of images that I 
captured with my camera  as we were driving along the Sadr freeway in 
Tehran two summers ago.  The following is an excerpt from a piece I wrote 
on the presence and role of the photographs from Abu Ghraib in Tehran :
-------------

Air-conditioned transportation in Tehran is notoriously difficult to find. 
For pampered visitors such as the cultural anthropologists and documentary 
filmmakers from New York and Los Angeles who seem to converge on the 
Iranian capital every summer, a cool taxi ride to the northern parts of 
town recalls something of the charmed life they left behind in the United 
States, a life some refer to offhandedly as "the grid."

Being on the grid, it seems, is something akin to having a non-Iranian 
passport or a green card, multiple credit cards loaded with debt, a laptop 
with a 24-hour DSL connection, satellite television in an air-filtered 
apartment, impeccably pedicured feet in open-toe sandals, a single Gauloise 
cigarette ashing in a saucer next to that daily injection of coffee and 
money earned from a steady job. This is not to say that some of these 
components of the grid are not available in Tehran. They are. Apartment 
complexes in the northern parts of town, like Shahrak-e Qarb, also provide 
residents with hilly, green outdoor spaces where a woman can walk her dog 
without the government-prescribed full body covering and headscarf. Such 
private complexes come with in-house supermarkets, boxed meals delivered to 
your door and a doorman who will call a taxi and announce visitors just as 
he might at a one-bedroom pad in New York. In Tehran, all this comes to 
about $500 a month.

In our time of total war, however, Tehran visitors' moniker for the good 
life also evokes the frightening world of intelligence gathering networks 
and terrorists recently fictionalized in the TNT miniseries THE GRID. In 
this terrifying world, some of those visitors, wittingly or no, have acted 
to embed the particulars of Iranian cultural and social life -- 
particularly those related to Iranian women -- into visions for Iran's 
future that are generated in a grid entirely different from their matrix of 
material comforts. It cannot be coincidental that the memoirs by Iranian 
female authors now living in the West, such as those of Firoozeh Dumas, 
Marjaneh Satrapi and Azar Nafisi, have found such phenomenal commercial 
success at a time when Washington hawks would like these authors' country 
of birth to be the next battleground in the total war of the twenty-first 
century.

.....(I'll say more on this in subsequent postings).....

Driving north on the Sadr freeway in Tehran in the summer of 2004, I came 
across a series of images covering the soundproofed walls of the opposite 
lane. The first panel from the left was a painted reproduction of the 
infamous photograph of the uniformed Pfc. Lynndie England holding a leash 
tied to the neck of an Iraqi prisoner who curls naked in a fetal position 
on the Abu Ghraib prison floor. This image sent shock waves around the 
world, as did the one reproduced in the second panel, a hooded Iraqi 
prisoner balancing on a platform with electrical wires attached to his 
limbs and genitals.

Such haunting images of humiliating torture reinforced for many the 
admonitions of Col. Mathieu in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, the famous film on 
guerrilla warfare now reportedly in vogue at the Pentagon. The colonel's 
words impressed on the audiences of the early 1960s, as they do to the 
global multitude today, that the continued presence of an imperial military 
where it is not wanted requires it to identify sources of populist 
agitation by any means necessary. An ordinary citizen's support of the 
occupation, whether in the name of liberation or in the name of progress, 
implies his or her tacit acceptance of all the repercussions of military 
force, including torture.

Passing these reproductions of domination on the freeway, I was struck by 
the imprints of the hand that had transformed their texture from 
photographs into painted images. I was also struck by the words that were 
written in Farsi to one side of the second panel: "Emrooz Iraq." "Today 
Iraq." It is an auspicious caption that almost reads like an alert on a 
mobile phone: "This is Iraq today." The third and fourth panels in the 
series represented the site of pilgrimage in Mecca and the shrine of Imam 
Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. A quotation attributed to Imam 
Ali appeared across the fourth image. It calls upon the believer to be the 
enemy of tyranny and a supporter of the victim of injustice. Following a 
gap on the wall, a final panel captured three soldiers on bended knee 
surrounded by smoke and fire in combat.

The last heavy combat Iranian soldiers saw was the vicious eight-year war 
between Iran and Iraq, for which Iran sacrificed the majority of its male 
labor force, men who would now be in their thirties, forties or early 
fifties. Seen from the perspective of that war, the messages communicated 
in the fusion of these five panels seemed ambiguous at best. The images 
arrived as both the bearers of the latest news -- "Today Iraq" -- and a 
prescription for pious living. "Be a force against evil and a defender of 
the good." They carried both a reminder of a crucial duty for the devout 
and a powerful picture of military retaliation. They were a broken phrase, 
an unfinished visual exhortation to an end open to question.

....

After my return from Tehran in the summer, I received a photograph of the 
panels I had seen on the Sadr freeway. The fifth of the six panels had gone 
up to fill the gap on the wall. There are two men in it. One is laying face 
down on a red carpet, and the other, sitting next to him, looks out of the 
frame toward the sixth panel depicting the three men engaged in military 
combat. The caption on the left side of the fifth panel reads: "Dirooz 
Filistin." Yesterday Palestine.

While the messages and meanings of the images of torture in US jails in 
Iraq are being muted in the global media with visual rhetoric that 
justifies the occupation, and does so by promoting images of women's bodies 
that have been liberated in hair salons [in Afghanistan for example], the 
Iranian government is promoting images of prison tortures toward different 
ends. These images of humiliating violence in US-occupied Iraq are hung in 
close proximity to images that remind the viewer of the inequities of 
Israeli occupation in Palestine. Close to images that  remind the viewer of 
what has long kept the region so distraught, and that has contributed to a 
colre du lait (milk anger) that, like milk, boils into sudden rage when 
heated. In Tehran too, the question is the question of occupation.

Negar Mottahedeh
Program in Literature
Duke University
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