'Women Without Men': Flowers in the Desert?

Siobhan Hoffmann-Heap 

@SiobhanHoffmann

When I was a teenager, malleable of mind, I watched The House of Sand and Fog. Echoes of that were stirred by this fim, and two themes from it lodged in my mind to be be fired up by Women without Men: the first was a problematic depiction of ‘The American Dream’ - how Americans struggled to make ends meet – coerced into an uncomfortable synergy with foreign interpretations of the same concept. It made me wonder whether all of humanity was perpetually undertaking a universal quest for happiness - or at least the creation of a personal utopia. Many of the characters in the film seemed to be desperately searching for a home, for contentment, for silence and a place to rest. This theme is revisited in Women Without Men; Munis wonders: “What is it about people, that their hunger, their desires seem to eat everything?”

The second piece of brain shrapnel was the story and the associated imagery, of Massoud’s (Ben Kingsley’s character) existence before he left Iran:

It was a wonderful idea to cut down the [cypress] trees at our house on the Caspian, to have the sea spread before us, to reach infinity with our eyes… Our lives went the way of the sea when the Ayatollahs ripped the soul out of our beautiful country.

I never fully understood the cultural allusions that the film made to Iran, since I had no understanding of the area, or the history, and even now my knowledge on it is still sketchy. The history curriculum in this country is limited, mentioning anything remotely related to the Middle East and the lasting impact British and American intervention had on that area, way before my generation were forcefully made aware of it in the 90s.

Women Without Men follows the metamorphoses of four women from various walks of life within that lost generation, in Tehran in 1953, using the CIA and M16 orchestrated coup that removed left-leaning Dr Mohammad Mossadegh from power, as a backdrop. Mossadegh’s Achilles Heel had been his government’s creation of a policy that nationalized the Iranian oil industry - an industry that had been under British control, via the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) now British Petroleum (BP), since 1913. You will have heard of BP, but Mossadegh? No?? It’s ok… Apparently even Tony Blair (as PM) didn’t know who Mossadegh was or why Iran hated the British so much… (he was obliged to rather sheepishly consult the font of all knowledge, Jon Snow). Apparently, bungled interventions and militarism spurred on by interest in oil provision isn’t, and never was, a new idea. Mossadegh claimed that “long years of negotiations with foreign countries... [had] yielded no results”, coming to the conclusion that “With the oil revenues we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.” Can’t argue with that.

The director of Women Without Men, Shirin Neshat’s stock in trade is photography, and it shows. She initially aimed to create a series of separate stories based on the 1989 novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, and present them as art installations across the globe, before her bright idea of editing them into the feature film occurred. This feature film (her first) deals with, amongst other things, arranged marriage, rape, prostitution, unrequited love, religion, and death (not to mention Communist and Fascist politics), but in a typically Persian poeticist way, and stretched over a robust historic framework. The film is studded with quotable lines, sparse but emphatic dialogue, features beautifully choreographed action sequences and camerawork that references classical art and literature: Zarin (the prostitute), is discovered floating, Ophelia-like in a pool in the orchard, surrounded by aquatic greenery, simultaneously wide-eyed and comatose; Munis finds a new life as a revolutionary after faking her own death to avoid an arranged marriage, reborn from the earth into which she is buried, Lazarine and determined, and her internal monologues punctuate much of the film, often alongside slow-motion scenes of watery submersion or falling. She falls to her death, petticoats fluttering in the breeze at the end of the film, with the words “Death isn’t so bad. You only think it is. All that we wanted was to find a new form, a new way.” Being a political radical is just as problematic as being a woman.

An elemental metamorphosis is constantly alluded to in the film whether through rebirth, epiphany, cleansing, or changes in dress. The theme of water is one that is visually referred to, in a callback to Islamic and Middle Eastern historical tradition. Islam, a religion born of the desert, understandably places huge importance on water and nature. The Gardens of Babylon, were, according to Dr Stephanie Dalley (Oxford) located near Ninevah, in northern Iraq. Huge feats of engineering prowess were executed by the Sassanians to bring water to pleasure palaces located in arid mountainous regions. In Islamic art, rock crystal holds huge material significance as representative of solidified water, a precious commodity. Unsurprising, then, that Farrokhlagha’s orchard is a place of sanctuary, or that the changes that take place in the female characters are signified, without exception, by them shedding their black shawls to reveal flowery dresses beneath. Faezeh is proposed to by Munis’ brother with the words, “A woman’s body is like a flower. Once it blossoms it soon withers away”; the fall of the regime that fosters growth in the tradition of art and culture, or the dashing of romantic hope, or gender emancipation linking with the sickness of the orchard, and the death of nature are not coincidental.

After the upheaval, and the catharsis experienced by individual characters (and by proxy, the viewer,) all that is left is society - the everyday. The music ends, the party is over, and we are given the impression that despite the finite nature of human life, these stories hold universal piquancy, and humanity is composed of individuals in a cyclical search for belonging, and the unerringly predictable failure of humanity to achieve it: "In this turbulence and noise, there was almost silence underneath. The sense that everything repeats itself over time. Hope. Betrayal, Fear. 

On Women and Turkish Cinema

EYLEM ATAKAV 

@eylematakav

Earlier in November my book Women and Turkish Cinema was published by Routledge. Here, I would like to share some thoughts on the volume for those who may have an interest on the topic. Every book is and offers a journey, and so, here is a part of mine... 

Following a decade of increased and violent polarisation between Left and Right in Turkish politics, the army decided to intervene to put an end to what appeared to be incipient civil war. The military intervention of September 12^th 1980 aimed towards a period of depoliticisation in society as it crushed all political parties and particularly leftist organisations, while temporarily suspending democracy and thereby bringing normal political life to a complete halt. I, Atıl Eylem, was born a year after the coup. My name is an extremely politically resonant name which literally means ‘go for action’ and has an overt link with the leftist political activism that both my parents were involved in. As I explain in detail in the Introduction of the book:

“The story behind my name does not only refer to the name of one of the left wing journals (Atılım) which had to be published clandestinely, but also assigns me the role and pride of carrying the keywords of the left wing activists who fought, and at times were either killed or went through serious physical and mental torture, for their ideas. I was born a year after my father lost his comrade (arkadaş) who was shot while being carried wounded in his arms (still trying to voice his ideas); and after my mother and father had cried for their books which died in the cold damp cellar of a friend’s house, while being hidden from the police, who were inspecting every house to find censored books. Whoever had a copy of Das Kapital, was to be stamped as leftist, and hence needed to be under strict scrutiny by the police. These books full of ‘dangerous’ ideas should be burnt. Those who had managed to read them did so by covering them with gazette papers or hiding them behind the covers of other non-dangerous books. I was born on a day when no newspapers were published, because it was a religious holiday.”

This personal background informs my initial interest in analysing this decade’s political, social and cultural environment from a critical perspective. In the repressive and depoliticised atmosphere of the post-coup period, the first social movement that emerged and articulated its demands was the women’s movement. It expanded the scope of pluralism and democracy in Turkey through different concerns communicated by women in the public realm. Although feminist ideology is overtly political, in this period of depoliticisation the movement was only able to exist because its activists sought to free themselves from both the Right and the Left and any other clearly partisan political label and they did not found any institutions seeking to increase women’s political representation. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 women had been given rights by the state through what is often termed state feminism. In the 1980s women were, for the first time, raising their own independent voices through campaigns, festivals, demonstrations, publications of journals and the forming of consciousness-raising groups.

Profoundly affected by the social and political milieu, Turkish cinema went through a period of change in the 1980s. Overtly political or social realist films were censored, banned or destroyed as a result of the forcible depoliticisation in the aftermath of the coup. Women’s lives and issues (perceived as neither Left wing nor Right wing and hence apolitical) became prominent in Turkish cinema and this led to the production of an extensive body of women’s films.

This brings me to the central proposition of this book, that is: the enforced depoliticisation introduced after the coup is responsible for uniting feminism and film in 1980s Turkey. The feminist movement was able to flourish precisely because it was not perceived as political or politically significant. In a parallel move in the films of the 1980s there was an increased tendency to focus on the individual, on women’s issues and lives, in order to avoid the overtly political.

The key questions that frame my analysis here are: What is the link between the women’s movement and representation of women in Turkish cinema in the 1980s? Were cinema and the women’s movement both affected in the same way in the post-coup political milieu? Were films affected by the movement or were they simply marginalising political issues by focusing on women’s lives?

In the book, I also focus on contemporary women filmmakers in Turkey who tend to concentrate on a range of issues around political, cultural and ethnic identity as well as memory. It is also in this section that I offer a further study into the representation of women of Turkey in several documentaries made by women directors who live outside Turkey, which has the relationship between religion and women’s place in Turkey in the centre of their narratives. Olga Nakkas’ 2006 film Women of Turkey: Between Islam and Secularism, for instance, draws on interviews with women and examines the individual and political resonance of the headscarf and veiling. Binnur Karaevli’s 2009 film Voices Unveiled: Turkish Women Who Dare provides a critique of the ban on wearing headscarves at the same time as touching upon issues including female officers in mosques; violence in the name of Islam; lack of education and economic dependence of women; women and Turkey’s EU candidacy and the tensions inherent between Muslim and Western cultures.

A note on Vendetta Song (Eylem Kaftan, 2005)

Eylem Atakav

In Eylem Kaftan’s 2005 bio-documentary Vendetta Song a group of men are asked what honour means and one answers: “Honour is everything for Muslims. It is everything in Islam.” Vendetta Song is a significant film that calls for an analysis for its exploration of honour killings, gender inequalities, the traditional practice of arranged marriages and the semi-feudal social structure in Eastern Turkey within the context of Islamic tradition. The film problematizes the relations of the West to the East (both within and outside Turkey) as the narrative is structured as a travelogue of a woman travelling from Canada to Istanbul and then from Western to Eastern Turkey.

Religious values are significant determinants in cultural practices and customs in Turkey: honour crimes may not be religious but they are certainly religiously practiced. Indeed, violence shapes gender relations in various ways: both in reality and at the level of representation it resonates at different levels: verbal, physical, emotional. I raise three main questions here about the relationship between cinema and religion. The first question is: what can be said about the nature of the relationship between religion and tradition at the level of filmic representation? The second question is: why and how are honour crimes regarded as a customary practice of ‘the East’? And finally: how does Vendetta Song as a film which takes the previous two questions as its focus represent these complex links between the concepts of honour crimes, religion, patriarchal tradition, and ‘the East’? Honour crimes are generally associated with Islam and the East. However, there is in fact no intrinsic or necessary link between them.

Vendetta Song problematises the concepts of Islam and tradition whilst at the same time positioning honour crimes within an Eastern context. The film, on one hand, critiques gender politics through its feminist discourse and, on the other, attempts to deconstruct this misperceived connection between Islam and violence against women. Whilst doing so it also places emphasis on tradition rather than religion. The two are distinguished, and whilst it is accepted that they might intertwine, or that one might be overlaid on the other in practice, by thus distinguishing them, space is opened up for the possibility of critique. The tradition is a patriarchal tradition – and this is what the film focuses on. However, there is a serious issue whether the film, although it appears to want to draw this distinction between tradition and religion, succeeds in doing so clearly or consistently. Whether this is because of the aesthetic choices made in the film or whether it is a consequence of the self understanding of those filmed is another issue which needs to be carefully considered. Members of a society can subjectively (but falsely) believe that things which are not intrinsically linked are thus linked. The point, then, is that religion and culture or tradition are different categories and should be distinguished as such. The fact that a certain tradition or culture is largely based on religious practice in fact does not obscure this point. To conclude, I argue that tradition should not be thought of as justification to practices including honour crimes. To invoke tradition to justify a (violent) practice is not sufficient. Instead, institutional practices must be targeted to think about the reasons behind patriarchal discourses and violent practices.