by Justin Ebrahemi The Nawkhatt in My Mother’s Living Room
Come, I am lovesick and desolate without you Come and see how sick I am in this sorrow without you At night I lament your absence, oh fairy-faced, And when the morning comes, it is as if I am on fire without you. –Sa’di
With each return I see my mother’s home in sepia tones. Pan to her zereshk polo dish being served in technicolor, my father har- vesting lemons in monochromatic static. Despite my nostalgia remembering these images in obscura, my parents’ home is luminous in color. The carmine Persian rug vining paisley knots, the precious saf- fron-stained rice tahdig my siblings and I fought over. This is the house I grew up in. Next to the Starbucks we contested that leads the way to a labyrinth of forested suburban roads. As a child I stared endlessly at the artwork ornamenting the walls. Behind glossy frames sumptuous Sultans looked to me with sol- emn almond eyes. The females adorned a sin- gle unibrow, akin to Frida, and a faint mus- tache. Their long, willowy bodies contrast the curves in the Renaissance paintings I saw in grade school. The men, too—with slender bodies and delicate, hairless faces—opposed western binaries. If it weren’t for turbans and crowns, the bodies and faces of these painted fig- ures would be indistinguishable. There was a muted poetry within these genderless humans that I tried to understand through my youth. As male peers implored I should man up, I must eat more, I’m too skinny (yet women, of course, must grow inversely), the characters in the paintings grew to deities. Why did they look so similar? What legacies did they know? My premonitions were fore- shadowed by historic truths. In 18th century Pre-Islamic Persia, young effeminate men, or nawkhatts , were the portrait of beauty. 1 Sexual mores permit- ted homosexuality, though as travel between Persia and Europe rose, Persian beauty ideals and sexual sensitivities shifted. Persia sought assimilation. The establishment of the first Iranian Muslim Kingdoms fur- ther ushered new cultural vicissitudes. 2 Overtime genderless figures and same-sex practices were cryptic taboos, reserved for panegyrics and portraits to carry on ancient secrets. Visiting my parents in Saratoga, Califor- nia, the bathroom mirror blurred my pedi- gree. I branched out my arms beneath photo- synthetic fluorescence and pondered my thin frame. A century ago, would these soft con- tours belong to a unibrowed nawkhatt ? When we conjure medieval Persian folk- tales, we learn that their secular scriptures were purposed to praise a prince, an erotic love, and later, mystical verse reinforced the ambiguity in these messages. Classic Persian literature dreams of imaginary utopias, where nothing vulgar or abrasive—including gender—can obtrude. Such is the ambiguity of genderless language and portraits, where gender is nothing more than abstraction, and unisex figures could be either a lover or a mystical god. In these vague panegyrics, we don’t know if the addressee is a lustful prince, a deity, or both.
Photo of classic Persian artwork taken in mother’s liv- ing room; source unknown
Miniature Painting. Two Lovers, Safavid Period, Isfahan, Iran. Date: 1630 AD. Artist: Riza Abbasi (ca. 1565–1635).
Boy Holding a Falcon, Iran, Late 18th century, Qajar Dynasty, Hermitage Museum
In Untitled 1396 —as part of Hope Mohr Dance’s 2017 Bridge Project—Maryam Ros- tami lip synced classics from Persian pop icon Hayedeh. She danced in high-femme drag, sparkly gold Persian garbs juxtaposed with faux-cheerful expressions as a satiri- cal wink to the audience. Her classic Persian dance moves are notable in Persian weddings and pop culture, a twist of the wrist like you’re screwing in a light bulb, arms curling upward, a twitch of the hips. Yet there was something disquieting lurk- ing in Untitled 1396 , later revealed in Mary- am’s journal readings. The solo work, named after the year used in the Iranian calendar corresponding roughly with 2017, asks "how does a Texas-born, Iranian-American Muslim femme deign to decolonize her body?'" After seeing Maryam’s work, I gazed at the nawkhatt in my mother’s living r oom and wondered how one begins to unstitch the fabric of colonial histories within a body.
Like a flower I shall embrace your love And then switch off the light of reason. I shall place my head between your breasts, I drink love from the scent of your body. –Homa Katouzian The tropes among classic Persian poetry intertwine in ceaseless harmony with the artwork. Romantic adulations interlace with intricate rugs that allude to animals, struc- tures, and plants–all entangled with entropic beauty. Rather than using a subject, classical Persian painters used imagination inspired by literature to create exotic scenes, resulting in dreamscape imagery free from western art conventions. According to Art History Professor W.J.T. Mitchell, polychromatic Persian visuals are "inevitably contaminated by language, and that …the dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves around itself." 3 Language, poetry, and divine praise spin and intertwine with myriad interpretations. Gender fragments from its binaries and enters a new ontology. Genderfluid becomes artfluid . Let me offer a critical framework. In con- versation with Julie Phelps, Judith Butler speaks on gender performativity at the 2013 Dance Discourse Project:
Look, we all emerge in the world entangled, like being caught in a web of gendered meanings, like this is what is a woman, this is what is a man, and there are norms and constraints and also ideas of pleasure. And yet what’s really interesting is what people do in the middle of that web. It’s not like it’s forcing you to be one thing or another, or that you don’t have a choice or there’s no room to play. There is room to move and work in it and cut holes through it. So although we’re born into a sometimes very contradictory set of gen- der norms, they don’t determine who we are. We’re able to exercise what I would call agency in the midst of that entangle- ment. In college I learned of cultural discourse patterns. The Eurocentric model asserts that you must stake your claim with evidence. Middle Eastern writings, conversely, are riddled with metaphors, spinning around one another, kaleidoscoping into new geometries of interpretation. Through my research gen- der revealed itself to be a Fibonacci sequence, tangled through colonial histories.
10 in dance DEC 2018
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