A new course this past semester examined how the Middle East has been represented in various media over the last hundred years, by natives to the region and by foreigners. The "Representing the Middle East" course was co-taught by Rebecca Stein, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology, and ErdaÄŸ G¶knar, a visiting assistant professor of Turkish language and literature. They asked students to analyze depictions of the Middle East in novels, comics, films and other media. Below are excerpts taken from student papers and class discussions.
In this image from the Iranian graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, three young girls have left school and found two boys at a cafe in town. The youngest of the girls is Marji, the nine-year-old character of the book's author Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi's autobiographical Persepolis chronicles her memory of life as a nine year old girl in Tehran, Iran, just after the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Sophomore Michelle Madeley, in the following excerpt from her final paper, discusses how the flirtatious behavior of Marji's friends in this scene affects the cultural significance of the veils they are wearing.
Part of Marji's personality is shaped by her liberal activist parents and her education at a French school up until the revolution. As a relatively wealthy and educated family, they have access to Western culture and popular culture. As Marji grows up, she is often torn between following the strict regulations regarding dress and behavior and her friends' influence to break the rules. This intersection of teen-age rebellion and state-enforced rules is exemplified in the scene in which Marji sneaks out of school with her older friends to go to the hip part of town. There, she notes that the older girls were not interested in the hamburgers at the restaurant, but chose to go to flirt with boys. She says, "We let the boys know they could follow us by a few signs." Because of governmental enforcement of behavior, the girls could not overtly flirt by wearing revealing clothing or by talking to strange boys. So they just developed more creative flirting mechanisms. This type of communication and interaction changed as a result of the veil, but still existed.
Because the veil was required in Iran at this time, it did not necessarily symbolize religion and modesty because dissenters wore it too. In fact, the veil could hide irreverent, unchaste women because they could conform and publicly blend in. Marji and the other girls did not let themselves become oppressed because they did not acquiesce passively, but rather, took small steps to resist; they rebelled socially. Women did have the liberty to wear a particular brand of scarf and to choose their own outfits. Later, Marji even risked arrest and unknown consequences for the principle of dressing how she wants.
In these panes from the comic series Palestine, the author gets a lesson on hijabs (a covering of the head and body) from a woman he meets in a taxi. The author, Joe Sacco, a Japanese-American cartoonist, chronicles his travels in Israel and the PalestinianTerritories in Palestine.
In his final paper, Junior Benjamin Perahia examines how cultural insiders and outsiders can see different meanings in a cultural symbol. In the follow excerpt, he focuses on the hijab as treated by Sacco.
Sacco describes women who wear the Hijab as "nondescript": "I blank out most all the women who wear it, they're just shapes to me, ciphers, like pigeons moving along the sidewalk." Thus, Sacco's character and the Western reader are surprised when they meet a woman in a taxi. She wears a Hijab and yet is educated; she speaks "perfect" English. She is also talkative and friendly. Her wearing of a Hijab has not stopped her from maintaining her individuality. Sacco then shows us that although one could be forgiven for believing that Hamas had ordered the wearing of the veil, most women wear it out of choice. The Western reader is then introduced to Women who wear the Hijab for religious and political reasons. They have articulate and free-thinking points of view: "Of course there is male oppression of women and this to change " said one woman, "but the struggle for women's rights can coexist with a strict understanding of the Koran " Another woman tells Sacco, "I see wearing it as a positive thing, it's a way of obtaining respect." These women are a far cry from the oppressed, characterless women who need Westernization to live freely.
This simple scene of family life in Iran points up a characteristic of Iranian film, Duke literature assistant professor Negar Mottahedeh explained in a guest lecture to the class. Government rules instituted after the Islamic Revolution require Iranian films to adhere to laws about public modesty, she said. That presents a challenge for filmmakers wanting to portray even innocent domestic scenes, said Mottahedeh, an Iranian native: "How to show a loving relationship between a husband and a wife when you can't show them touching?"
The scene above addresses that challenge, she explained, first by having the woman be outside. That way her headscarf -- not typically worn inside the home but required in public and therefore required for a film screened in public -- is recognized by the audience as a normal article of clothing. Then, the woman talks to her husband while he takes his lengthy shower. This places the couple physically apart, while still suggesting the intimacy of their relationship.