Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In "Persepolis," the familiarity of your family life makes it more harrowing and frightening when the revolution and the war with Iraq intrude. It makes you see how normality can be blown wide open.
Exactly, and suddenly it's completely leaning the other way, and you have to react very fast. Suddenly there's this really big change and nobody was expecting it. Talking and laughing was the only way to survive. Either we had to laugh or we had to die.
Reading your books, I sometimes think that people are the same everywhere. But even though the women in your stories are very ironic and sophisticated, there is still a big difference between the sexual mores of Iran and the West. How significant is that difference?
The subject of sexuality is, I think, both more and less a taboo in Iran. In the West I have the feeling, living here for a long time, sex is much more related to sin. In Iran, sex is not considered a sin. A woman, even in the Islamic Republic of Iran, if she can prove that her husband cannot do it with her, then she can ask for a divorce. It's not a sinful thing, the sex act itself.
I'm not talking from the legal point of view. I'm talking about the way the people think about it or talk about it. But then comes the issue of virginity, and virginity for me is really the sign of a patriarchal society. In a patriarchal society in which the father is the chief of the family, he owns the land and he owns the cow and he owns the house and he owns his wife, and so it's better if she is not secondhand. If you want to buy a pair of shoes, it is better that nobody else has worn them before you -- it is something like that.
But at the same time, nobody stops any divorced woman from remarrying. Divorce is not considered something terrible in Iran. In Tehran, actually, one couple out of two gets a divorce.
In Iran, sex is a problem before marriage. After marriage, it's much less of a problem. Here in the West, I very rarely hear older women, 60 or 65, talking about sex. From the moment they have menopause, sex is over for women. In Iran, I think it goes for a longer time.
America is much more open than Iran, and our public culture is more sexual, but the women in your books strike me as more down to earth about sex and relationships than we are. In the United States right now there's an absolute panic about divorce, that it's destroying our culture. And there's a hysterical romanticization of marriage...
Absolutely, absolutely! They show the belly of pregnant women every second, and write that this actress and that actress is pregnant ... they consider that the belly of the woman is just made to make children.
And also they teach in the schools -- I know American teenagers -- instead of teaching them how to have safe sex, they tell them that they shouldn't fuck at all! It doesn't work. People, when they are 17, they are so full of hormones, and the only thing they think about from the morning until the night is sex, sex, sex. Teaching them how to have safe sex is much more logical.
You have gone through a period in the '60s with sexual liberation and all of that. Now there is this whole thing in America about having to be secure -- security makes us very conservative. And there's a very big coming back of these very moral, religious, heavy things -- not having sex before marriage and all of that.
On the contrary, in Iran people are on the way to make a sexual revolution. It's a little bit later than what has happened in Europe.
I read that Iran has just liberalized its abortion laws.
Abortion in Iran is not considered a sin. Even when it was not legalized, if a woman says, "I had an abortion," it's fine. Nobody will judge her. It's considered something normal. I have seen so many people having abortions in Iran and they are not suffering, because the society doesn't make them feel sinful. If you have a child and you abandon your child, then people will say, "What a bitch, why did you do that?" But why make unhappy kids, if you already know you're going to make them unhappy? Even when you decide you're going to be an excellent mother, you fuck up your child. So if from the beginning you think that you're going to be a lousy mother, it's better not to be one.
In America, the religious right thinks that, through new laws and strictures, they can change the way people behave in their private lives. Everything about your work shows that that's impossible.
This is impossible! Do they think that children in the high school, because they tell them "Don't fuck," that they will stop doing it?
Especially when they couldn't even stop people in Iran, where you could be arrested or whipped.
Exactly.
At the same time that Iranians have a much more conservative regime and government, I have the feeling that they're much more liberated. They're much more liberated talking about abortion, talking about sex, talking about divorce.
When I got divorced it was no big deal. Life moves on. Yeah, I made a marriage and it was not the right one. My grandmother, she got divorced also. Almost everybody in my family has had a divorce. It's not a big deal. And normally, their second marriage has been much happier. Or if it hasn't, so you marry six people, seven people! It proves that you've lived, that you haven't been bored your whole life!
