Archive - Nov 20, 2008 - Article

Can we forgive and forget?

In a few days, 10 years will have passed since the brutal death of Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar. Later Mohammad Mokthari, Ja’far Pouyandeh and Majid Sharif were abducted and strangled by rogue agents of the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic. To this day, the case of all the murdered victims remains unsolved. No one has really been charged and no one has been imprisoned. Yet, the best and the brightest of our young journalists, women activists and even some of their lawyers have been incarcerated, and the saga continues. The lucky ones get to leave but they, too, have to struggle. The other day, Mr. Abbas Amir Entezam in an e-mail message said that he may have to go back to prison after a furlough. The date is set for the 30th of Aban>>>

Reading Kafka At Harvard

In March 2006, the Harvard Gazette featured a story about a symposium on Iran and the future of non-proliferation regime at Harvard Law School, adorned by a color photo of three of the four speakers. They were, Matthew Bunn, the director of Kennedy School of Government’s program on “Managing the Atom,” an M.I.T. political science professor, Barry Posen, and Flynt Leverett, a former White House national security advisor. Somehow missing from the photo was the speaker identified by the event’s oversized poster as Director of NGO, Global Interfaith Peace, and former advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, Kaveh Afrasiabi, me. Any one else may have taken issue with the Harvard paper, perhaps wondering if this were a mere case of pure neglect, or photographer’s or editor’s unfriendly choice to exclude me, but by then I was rather used to such discrepant treatments at Harvard>>>

Berkeley Rep Does Arabs

Shahrazad entered and she had the whitest porcelain skin and the lightest blond hair. Dark-haired and dark-skinned actresses surrounded her, playing her sister and slaves but this future queen, the rescuer of Moslem virgins looked eastern European not Middle Eastern! And gone was her self-assertion, the will to decide her own destiny. In Mary Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights, King Shahryar explicitly asks the Wazir for her. When the father brings news of this fate, Shahrazad weeps and finally acquiesces, reminding herself and the audience that she might be able to save other lives. Her wedding night encounter with the king is screechy, almost whiny. The sexual act is barely implied; yet the gleaming dagger at Shahrazad’s throat is real. It dominates the first act as the unhinged king, ferocious in his desperate pain, keeps it there and presses it into her flesh in every bit of conversation between them >>>

آخرین روزها

روز یازدهم فروردین ماه سال 1361 (31 مارس 1982) با سبیل تراشیده و ریش نتراشیده، با چهره ای خسته و درهم "پای آبله و خسته، غریبه و دلمرده، با ترس كبود، راه گم كرده، متحیر و عاجز، خسته و ناتوان، آشنا به هویت خویش، ولی درمانده، اشكی به یك چشم و خونی به چشم دیگر، در حالی كه نمیداند به كجا خواهد رسید؟ به زمهریر هاویه؟ یا به كنار حوض كوثر؟" با كیف دستی كوچكی از فرودگاه "شارل دوگل" بیرون آمد. در اتوبوسی كه از فرودگاه به شهر میرفت، نگران و پریشان، در ردیف آخر نشسته بود. برای دوستانش از ایران تعریف میكند و از تیرباران بیرحمانه، دوست نزدیكش سعید سلطانپور حرف میزند و از اینكه پس از آن مجبور شده به زندگی مخفی پناه ببرد و بالاخره از آپارتمان كوچك و دخمه مانندی كه در تهران داشته است حرف میزند اما لبهایش میلرزند. >>>