Most Ridiculous Censorship Stories, Iranian Style: Friend of my Youth

Many of us experience censorship at a very early age. Some of the funniest and most ridiculous examples come from our primary school days.

It was my first teacher who told me my first lie, thereby giving me an introduction to society and its realities. It was the first day of autumn and my first day of school. I was crying, afraid of the new environment. “Men don’t cry!” my teacher said, with a dutiful smile pasted on his face, a smile I would come to recognize. It did not occur to me to tell him that I was not a man but a six-year old child and he should not expect me to behave otherwise. I did not tell him that he should not censor my homesickness.

Time passed; school bells rang and rang. And then we began composition. I first experienced self-censorship the night before I was due to read an assignment in front of the class. We had been asked to answer the following question: “Which is better: Knowledge or wealth?”

My mother, her belly croaking, told me that knowledge was definitely better than wealth.

Now that I look back at those years, I see how funny we were: with our shaved heads and fearful of misreading the assignments our mothers had written for us, we practiced lying to get a better grade from Mr or Mrs Teacher.

Another lie – another example of censorship  – was anything pertaining to the subject “The Life of My Generation”.

We grew up with bombs falling around us and in constant fear of death. We were prohibited from eating bananas at a party. In those years  – I mean the war years, 1980-1988 – bananas were for guests only.

All in all, my generation’s experiences are ridiculous. The generation itself is ridiculous. Because it practiced self-censorship. Because it was in love with the neighbor’s daughter, and perhaps had wet dreams about her, but had to greet her in the street like a sister.

Falling In Love In Secret

We fell in love in secret. Isn’t this the most ridiculous self-censorship in the world? We grew up in secret. Isn’t that one of the silliest kinds of growing up? We experienced sex in secret, in fear and under stress. Isn’t that a tragedy? Shop windows censored the name of the French cheese La Vache Qui Rit, omitting the “Q” because, otherwise, it might remind people of “kir”, the Persian term for penis. During puberty, the only pleasure we were allowed was seeing the half-naked image of a woman on the bars of soap found in so many houses at the time.

We reached high school. In those years, for my generation, the most ridiculous censorship was being forbidden to dress like singers and actors, whether they were Iranian or not. In the summertime, the Morality Police enjoyed nothing more than covering the arms of those who dared to wear short-sleeved shirts with paint.

The war was over but the shrapnel was still ricocheting around our society. We read books and listened to music in secret. The national radio station occasionally played classical singer Mohammad-Reza Shajarian, but that was it. Cassette and videotapes were forbidden. You could not buy condoms.

Then we grew up. The reformist government [of President Khatami] arrived and censorship was somewhat modernized.

My generation grew up with censorship, came of age with self-censorship and learned our rights as citizens through censorship. When the events of 2009 [the presidential elections] took place, protesting silently against stolen votes became the most prominent and ridiculous social censorship of our time. Why should I have a problem with something that I grew up, that I’d known for three decades? We have no problems with censorship. It has been our playmate and childhood buddy. And it still is. It was the friend of a secret generation, a generation that even now has to read this article using proxy servers and circumvention tools. 

The day IranWire’s editor emailed me about contributing to its “Funny Censorship Special”, I could not decide on a single moment to write about. I couldn’t settle on one day in my life, or in the lives of others, or on moments witnessed by society as a whole. What has been the single most ridiculous moment?

I could write about a recent photograph published in Javan newspaper. It’s a photograph of Catherine Ashton [the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy] meeting the mother of Sattar Beheshti [the Iranian blogger who died while in custody]. When the newspaper published the photo, Beheshti’s mother was simply cut out.

I could write about web filtering in Iran, but in some ways it’s too easy. And it needs a serious approach.

And the censorship of Baha’is and Sufis is not funny. It’s a tragedy.

So I’ll just say we are a ridiculous generation. We know and enjoy censorship.

Maybe the most ridiculous thing is that I am able to write these things for you, the reader. And that, in this environment, censorship is simply not a problem. 

 

 

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Most Ridiculous Censorship Stories, Iranian Style: Lies and Sexual Identity