It was in China, late one moonless night - Part V: representations of privacy in literature and film

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Hamid Dabashi

A Visual Counter-Coup

In the absence of Hafez's astonishing poetic revelation, the private is discreet, the discreet secret, the secret sacred. The public, on the other hand, is open, the open indiscreet, and the indiscreet profane. The public is also visible, the visible untrustworthy, and the untrustworthy disposition of the visible the very cornerstone of Islamic hermeneutics. The private is invisible, the invisible is The Real Thing, and the invisibility of The Real Thing the very definition of Truth in Islam, for the simple fact that God cannot be seen. (3) What Shirin Neshat is thus up against is the very hermeneutic foundation of her own sacred memory, the sanctity of her own ancestral culture. Her task, yet to be fully grasped by her unobtrusive disposition, is to reverse an entire history of hermeneutics in which the lie is public, open, and visible, while the truth is private, closed, and invisible. What she has been doing over the last two decades is to teach the unteachable by showing the invisible: to trust the surface sign of the visible and abandon hope in the hidden promise of the unseen. What she is up against is nothing short of the Achilles heel of her own culture, an entire constellation of visible metaphors having been commissioned to represent The Real Thing but that conspired to forget that they were just metaphors. But she does not abandon her audience in the desolation of that verbal vacuity. Her vision is prophetic and pregnant.

With one act of creative brilliance, Shirin Neshat and her collaborators have in their "Logic of the Birds" (2001) exposed publicly the private predicament of a cultural malaise in which literary metaphors have staged a coup and completely taken over the sensual realities they were meant to represent. (4) In Persian literary imagination, and by extension that of Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu in its immediate vicinity, and of which Farid al-Din Attar's "Logic of the Birds" is a masterpiece, privately codified literary metaphors become so paradigmatically powerful that they gradually rise to terrorize and thus dominate the publicly rambunctious sensual realities they were duty bound to signify. The paradoxical binary between Haqiqat and Majaz, or between Truth and Metaphor, in Persian poetic parlance, so radically tilts in favor of the immaterial Majaz (or Metaphor) that it in fact takes over for the Haqiqat (or Truth) that it was meant to characterize. Persian literary metaphors, like Platonic ideals, have emanated and ascended from the sensual realities that have originally suggested and sustained them, and thus in the air of their immaterial majesty have begun to form a conspiracy of verisimilitudes against the sensual evidence that had politely asked them to please represent them in polite conversations. The history of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu literatures is the sad saga of a hostile takeover by a band of superannuated metaphors having a long time ago conspired and staged a coup d'etat and taken over with dead certainties the democratic uncertainty of sensual realities. In this paralyzing conspiracy of the metaphoric elders, wine is no longer the real wine that one drinks and gets joyously giddy; beauty is no longer in the face of a mortal human being that one day one adores and another day it perishes; truth is no longer the palpable evidence of earthly generation, worldly growth, and material corruption; this world in short becomes in its entirety a Majaz, a Metaphor, for a reality beyond itself. What is real becomes unreal; what is unreal becomes real. If there ever was a transvaluation of values, as the madly wise man used to say, this was it: where what we touch, feel, love, embrace, and ultimately mourn is not real; and what we will neither hold or behold becomes real, paramount, persistent. What was in full public view and was thus palpably evident was denounced and dismissed as metaphoric and ephemeral, and conversely what which was so private and exclusive that had become sacred was celebrated as Truth Everlasting.