|  The
rise and fall of Simon Ordoubadi
Our heart breaks for him because
he is us
By Jacki Lyden
February 23, 2004
iranian.com
On Houman Mortazavi's "Project Misplaced:
The Rise and Fall of Simon Ordoubadi".
Exhibition in Los Angeles February 21 to 28 (2004).
Articultural Gallery,
10469 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles, CA.
Phone: 310.481.9052. Mortazavi will also show his work at iranian.com's
night of comedy and satire in San Jose this Friday February 27 >>> See
These are
the things that I did my first time in Iran to commit acts of
journalism and
write
about
the sixteenth anniversary of the revolution: pose for a woman
who needed pictures of the female anatomy, so that she could paint
them in secret; fall in love; struggle to hear the far-away world
through a black headscarf worn under earphones; listen to a man
explain to me in my hotel room that he had rushed home from San
Francisco to join the revolution, which now had been betrayed,
and that he considered the Zoroastrians to be the only true Persians;
hold a Kleenex to my streaming nose as hundreds of men and women
chanted "MARG BAR AMRIEKA" -- Death to America -- at
Friday prayers at Tehran University; get my butt pinched while
trying to cover the ceremonies for the revolution in Azadi Square;
watch young women weep at the tomb of the Ayatollah Khomeini; watch
young women flirt, cigarettes in hand, at sophisticated literary
soirees; and watch a literature professor, Azar Nafisi, question
her class from under her black chador worn with a black tassel
that bobbed when she walked. "What is kitsch?" she
asked. "Is this kitsch?" -- holding out a bouquet
of daffodils. "Or is this kitsch?" She held out a pot
of fake red flowers.
On the walls of the mullahs' bonyad, graffiti proclaimed: "Liars
and Thieves." War veterans missing one or both legs sat
below. I was dazed. Where had I misplaced myself -- in a cosmopolitan
culture superimposed on an Islamic republic; in an Islamic republic
superimposed on a cosmopolitan culture?
Iran, I have decided, is all things to all people
who love it: ancient and theocratically imposing, endlessly inventive,
stern
and passionate. "We are contradictions, joonam," said
the man who had fallen in love with me. "I cannot even touch
you on the street." A basiji followed us, waiting to make
a vigilante's arrest. Visually, we all know that what we
see in Iran is transparently not all that meets the eye; the
second we look, we want to know more. The second we realize that
we will
never penetrate it as Westerners, we despair of ever knowing
anything at all. We are never, for one moment, as comfortable
and complacent
as we are, say, covering a presidential campaign or high school
football playoff or ordering new kitchen tile. And yet as journalists
and writers and artists, we go home thinking we know something
of this "Muslim corner of the world." And when we are
ready to admit that it is a carnival of chaos, ready to seduce
or convert, mislead or misrepresent, along comes its artists
to poke fun at our surrender.
Simon Ordoubadi may be misplaced
in time and culture, but no more so than those of us ready
to go to Iran, paper or microphone
in
hand, thinking we are going to get The Story >>> See images When I first met Houman Mortazavi he was running
an ad agency in Tehran, drawing funny little cartoon characters,
in part because
he enjoyed it and in part because, under Islamic law, he couldn't
use the human form to sell products. No chance to depict people
who enjoy using BARF, the laundry powder as snowy white as the
top of Damavand Mountain. He was also busy making a wardrobe
of
painted clothes, called Life Accessories, and I remember wanting
to wear his picture of his folded newspaper hat.
Then, he made the rash decision to come to America
for more "artistic
freedom." (He was not the man I'd fallen love with,
by the way.) I remember his first business card, offered at a
publishing party at the Rainbow Room in New York City. HOOMAN
MORTAZAVI. No
phone, no profession, just a man with a funny name in white letters
on a black card. "And how long have you been in the U.S.?" the
ad executive asked him.
"Twenty-four hours," came the reply.
But as Project Misplaced suggests, the United States
remained just a little inaccessible, a little ridiculous and threatening,
faintly
sinister, inviting and at the same time forever resisting his
advances. You can have it all if you can just make the grade.
But who's
grading whom? Now that the world has been neatly divided by the
most sinister acts of humankind, reducing East and West to supercharged,
cartoonish fear, who doesn't empathize with the Simon Ordoubadis
of the world? Isn't he a man trying to please, trying to
fit in, trying to behave as if he has made sense of it all? This
is not de Tocqueville or Tom Paine or the founding fathers, but
their indirect descendant, trying to find a place at the Big
Table, and showing us in the process how slick and yet how kitsch
we have
become. I fear we would all choose the fake red flowers over
the real daffodils now.
Iran is an "irreal" place, with its black robed authority
over every aspect of life, from who takes a drink to the tolerable
shine on a woman's hair. It is a place with deep values and
ancient traditions, with poetry for the heart and the mind and
for the ages, with colors that make you ache and that are threaded
into the carpets and through the deserts and mountains, which
are sometimes mocked by the notion that there is only one way
to behave,
think, love, pray...
Meanwhile, the vigilantes once burned
a faux McDonald's down in North Tehran. A cinema was firebombed,
and indeed, women have been stoned to death. And yet the society
embraces a constant struggle between the desire for "personal
space" and the laws of the theocracy: more and more, scarves
get pushed back on women's heads and couples hold hands,
at least in some parts of the country. In late 2003 Iran decided,
under pressure from Europe, to submit to nuclear inspection.
Sound
like a civil society emerging? Yes and no. Hundreds of newspapers
have been closed down. And the hardliners tried to throw all
reformist candidates out of Parliament.
In Iran, there are internal struggles over who is
the true face of Iran. Yet we in the United States have our kitsch
notion of
who we are: invincible do-gooders, people never in the wrong
but making the world safe for Kmart and Halliburton and Starbucks.
We paint the world in the same colors as the Iranian theocracy:
black and white, and neon. We shine so brightly that we can't
really see who the "other" is because, mainly, from
our kitsch perspective, they are faint imitations of American
culture,
for who could be more dominant? So Simon Ordoubadi comes to America,
but not quite on his own terms. He campaigns, but he stands in
for you and you and you. His campaign is to make the world more
pliable, elastic and understandable, but it resists a simple,
drive-in Burger King solution. You have to make the experience,
you can't
just order it with fries to go. Our heart breaks for him because
he is us.
And yet the story doesn't end there. In assuming his inferiority,
we don't really know him at all. Examine his campaign a bit
more closely. Perhaps you cannot be sure about his motivations
and whether such an alien should really be trusted. There are
hints of his ambitions and regressive trends, like his slogan, "Today
unity, tomorrow revenge" (perhaps this is borrowed from politics
American-style, post-election), or the whole idea of erecting
a wall that will segregate Iranians from "those who are different
to us." Aren't we living, as a new millennium begins,
with an administration that predicates policies on what its sacred
base wants to hear?
Simon Ordoubadi notices that, and tells his
audience what it wants to hear too. So we can't tell what
he might do with power: invade Poland or become a human rights
activist, depending on which camp embraces him first. He is a human
preemptive strike, whose first and last ambition is to make it;
everything else is secondary and insignificant to his own survival.
Simon
Ordoubadi projects our own overweening, preening insecure pretensions
right back at us, as though he were a human
funhouse.
And that is why I like him so much >>> See images Author
Jacki Lyden has been a host and correspondent
for National Public Radio for over 20 years. During that time
she has extensively covered the Middle East and made many trips
to Iran. She has covered the occupation of Iraq, and Afghanistan,
and is writing a book about cultural interpreters in Iraq, Iran
and Afghanistan called "The World of Which You Speak," due
out from Houghton Mifflin in 2005. Her previous book, Daughter
of the Queen of Sheba, is slated to be made into a film by Paramount
Studios. She lives in New York and Washington, DC. >>> Homepage
Comedy & Satire in
San Jose on February 27 >>> Details
* Send
this page to your friends
|
