I spent Saturday afternoon at the Noor Iranian film festival with my friend Johanna to see Nasseredin Shah and His 84 Wives. The documentary, made by a Norwegian director, combined animation with a photos taken by Nasseredin with the camera he received from Queen Victoria in 1842. Much of the film centered around political and familial intrigue between the women as they rose and fell in their husband's favor. (For a brief interlude he preferred a cat to all of them, but it met an untimely end.)
One striking thing about the group photographs of the women, aside from the fact that the photos exist at all, was that it showed a standard of beauty for the time that's markedly different from the one I'm accustomed to. Although they came from different regions and ethnic groups in and around Persia, many of his beauties were heavyset and most had dark facial hair, with their "mustaches" and "monobrows" being coveted features. During the Q&A after the film one of the festival organizers said she'd researched this and learned that these traits suggested a woman who would give birth to strong sons.
This preference is a far cry from modern-day Seattle. Certainly there are men who fetishize ample women's bodies (many of whom say so in rather tactless ways). The opposite seems more common though. Just this week I skimmed a dating profile where a man specified that his future girlfriend's BMI (body mass index) would need to be less than 24, "otherwise don't bother." (He didn't appear to be particularly fit himself, but she needs to fall in the "normal" category to be considered. I can't imagine why he's still single.) His online brothers content themselves with the more straightforward description "slender", the encoded HWP (height weight proportionate) or the euphemistic "takes care of herself."
Another source of ideas about ideals is that's been on my mind lately is Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. I've been reading the Shahrazad stories a few at a time over the summer. The Penguin edition has an introduction that says the stories owe their origin to three distinct cultures: Indian, Persian and Arab. "They can be regarded as the expression of the lay and secular imagination of the East in revolt against the austere erudition and religious zeal of Oriental literature generally."
I expected desert tales and was surprised how many shipwrecks and islands there were. Apart from sailing, mules and camel caravans, travel is expedited by tricking a giant mythological bird called a Roc into carrying you or by calling upon the power of a jinnee. I was less surprised by the way beautiful women are described. Here are sisters from The Porter and the Three Girls of Baghdad ("city of peace"):
p. 243 "A young woman, dressed in rare silks and cloaked in a gold-embroidered mantle of Mosul brocade, stopped before him and gently raised her veil. Beneath it there showed dark eyes with long lashes and lineaments of perfect beauty..."
p. 244 "...the door was opened by a girl of surpassing beauty. Her forehead was white as a lily and her eyes were more lustrous than a gazelle's. Her brows were crescent moons, her cheeks anemones, and her mouth like the crimson ruby on King Solomon's ring. Her teeth were whiter than a string of pears, and like twin pomegranates were her breasts."
p. 244 "A third girl, slim and exquisitely beautiful, was reclining on the couch. Her face was radiant as the moon and all the witchcraft of Babylon was in her eyes. A paragon of Arabian grace, she was like a star twinkling in a cloudless sky or a golden dome shimmering in the night."
I'd like to see a classroom full of young writers have fun with this - perhaps a description of their society's ideal, or a subverted version of it, or a translation of it into more lyrical language...
Friday, September 21, 2012
Friday, September 7, 2012
Jason Elliot's An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan
I'm clearing out my physical bookshelf as part of my preparation for life's next adventure, so I'm starting this blog as a place to put some dog-eared pages. Maybe they get incorporated into lesson plans later or maybe they just help me lighten the load in my next move. My sturdy 4-year-old laptop recently gasped it's last overheated breath and my public library generates myriad "send error report" messages when I try to reach my Wordpress blog, so here are some excerpts to consider over breakfast.
Elliot's book about his travels in Afghanistan was both interesting and a slog to read at times- florid writing that occasionally was as pretentious as it was informative. Three passages about the experience of being a solo traveler with imperfect grasp of the local languages made me mark page numbers.
p. 191 "By one o'clock the sun had thrown a pale yellow light over the bare hills and the day felt already spent. I was worried about the way ahead. Always there is this kind of suspense on a journey where you are both isolated and robbed of your own language. Under such conditions the means by which you make sense of things begins to be transformed; you can no longer rely on familiar signals but a cryptic sequence of tiny events, the pattern of which you sense more keenly as your isolation grows. It leads to a kind of parting of ways; you either let go of your worries and put your faith in the natural unfolding of events or are plagued with anxieties, which multiply as darkness falls.
I could hear the two voices at work. One was an incessant reminder about safety, fear of loneliness and insecurities of every kind. How would I know if a truck came and went? Would my bag be safe in the serai? Time and again I had been told it was unsafe to travel alone...I had been from the beginning of the trip aware of this first voice; an almost relentless tale of worry about how things would turn out at every stage, like that of a homesick child longing for the familiar. It had its own legitimacy but as anyone knows who has been touched by the spell of travel there is another voice longing to be heard, and now for the first time I was able to hear it; a calmer signal on which I was unwilling at first to rely. It was the impulse to put my trust in the natural course of events, and to surrender not passively but intelligently, to the restraints and opportunities of the moment. Was I not fed and warm and in a place of beauty? Things would work out..."
p. 289 "What, after all, was a travel book? That young Italian [Marco Polo] had started it all in the thirteenth century, and had given the telling of tall tales from foreign parts its subsequent respectability. On the whole it had not changed much since Polo's time: a man or a woman sets off for foreign parts ignorant of both the language and geography of the place, with an out-of-date map and borrowed phrase book, preys shamelessly for as long as the family trust will allow on the hospitality of the native people, and returns home to hastily record his or her first impressions in a semi-fictional collection of descriptions that affirm the prejudices of the day. Then reminded of the mediocrity of the experiences described and to ease the risk of any intellectual burden on the microscopic attention span of the reader; he or she retrospectively invents a fashionable 'quest' around which the narrative can be twisted in every direction except toward the truth, fits it tidily with invented dialogues, speculative history, sweeping inaccuracies, mistranslations, verbose accounts of having braved hazards endured daily by ordinary local people without complaint, portrays as a revelation long lists of trivial facts known to every local schoolchild, and bludgeons the original spirit of the endeavor in an attempt to appear erudite with the academic verbiage of out-of-print encyclopedias, disguising all the while the discomfort of being at sea in an alien culture by resorting to the quirky, condescending humor that its couch-bound audience will think of as funny. The result? Only a confirmation of what everybody already knows: better to stay at home."
p. 345 "Under the scrutiny of a dozen stern gazes I felt an old pang ignite defensively: to travel with an Afghan friend. With the right company, the inevitable burden of enquiry would be shared more evenly between visitor and host, and polished exchanges would replace my own cracked idioms. There would be no need to reach that point of mental debility where expression in another language seems an impossible exertion. Only an Afghan friend could help decode literal truths from cultural prejudices or, conversely, explain satisfactorily to others the strange Western habits that risked giving offense; the wish to slope off and write, to be alone from time to time, to know the names of things, to visit places for no obvious reason.
In an unfamiliar language you make up a lot of what you lack in the spoken word by interpreting tensions of voice, gesture and ritual that betray another's meaning. In a strange of dangerous place you are forever reading these signals, consciously or not, through an alliance of the analytical and the intuitive, and the more hazardous or unfamiliar the circumstances, the greater the meaning you come to extract from ever smaller events. Sometimes lack of language seems to lighten things, and your contact with others is unburdened by definitions. Bu at others there comes a point of exhaustion when you simply want to talk about ordinary things and not have to think about every word. A journey magnifies both extremes; I was feeling the weight of the latter and, meeting the stares of twenty silent men, felt mute and helpless."
Elliot's book about his travels in Afghanistan was both interesting and a slog to read at times- florid writing that occasionally was as pretentious as it was informative. Three passages about the experience of being a solo traveler with imperfect grasp of the local languages made me mark page numbers.
p. 191 "By one o'clock the sun had thrown a pale yellow light over the bare hills and the day felt already spent. I was worried about the way ahead. Always there is this kind of suspense on a journey where you are both isolated and robbed of your own language. Under such conditions the means by which you make sense of things begins to be transformed; you can no longer rely on familiar signals but a cryptic sequence of tiny events, the pattern of which you sense more keenly as your isolation grows. It leads to a kind of parting of ways; you either let go of your worries and put your faith in the natural unfolding of events or are plagued with anxieties, which multiply as darkness falls.
I could hear the two voices at work. One was an incessant reminder about safety, fear of loneliness and insecurities of every kind. How would I know if a truck came and went? Would my bag be safe in the serai? Time and again I had been told it was unsafe to travel alone...I had been from the beginning of the trip aware of this first voice; an almost relentless tale of worry about how things would turn out at every stage, like that of a homesick child longing for the familiar. It had its own legitimacy but as anyone knows who has been touched by the spell of travel there is another voice longing to be heard, and now for the first time I was able to hear it; a calmer signal on which I was unwilling at first to rely. It was the impulse to put my trust in the natural course of events, and to surrender not passively but intelligently, to the restraints and opportunities of the moment. Was I not fed and warm and in a place of beauty? Things would work out..."
p. 289 "What, after all, was a travel book? That young Italian [Marco Polo] had started it all in the thirteenth century, and had given the telling of tall tales from foreign parts its subsequent respectability. On the whole it had not changed much since Polo's time: a man or a woman sets off for foreign parts ignorant of both the language and geography of the place, with an out-of-date map and borrowed phrase book, preys shamelessly for as long as the family trust will allow on the hospitality of the native people, and returns home to hastily record his or her first impressions in a semi-fictional collection of descriptions that affirm the prejudices of the day. Then reminded of the mediocrity of the experiences described and to ease the risk of any intellectual burden on the microscopic attention span of the reader; he or she retrospectively invents a fashionable 'quest' around which the narrative can be twisted in every direction except toward the truth, fits it tidily with invented dialogues, speculative history, sweeping inaccuracies, mistranslations, verbose accounts of having braved hazards endured daily by ordinary local people without complaint, portrays as a revelation long lists of trivial facts known to every local schoolchild, and bludgeons the original spirit of the endeavor in an attempt to appear erudite with the academic verbiage of out-of-print encyclopedias, disguising all the while the discomfort of being at sea in an alien culture by resorting to the quirky, condescending humor that its couch-bound audience will think of as funny. The result? Only a confirmation of what everybody already knows: better to stay at home."
p. 345 "Under the scrutiny of a dozen stern gazes I felt an old pang ignite defensively: to travel with an Afghan friend. With the right company, the inevitable burden of enquiry would be shared more evenly between visitor and host, and polished exchanges would replace my own cracked idioms. There would be no need to reach that point of mental debility where expression in another language seems an impossible exertion. Only an Afghan friend could help decode literal truths from cultural prejudices or, conversely, explain satisfactorily to others the strange Western habits that risked giving offense; the wish to slope off and write, to be alone from time to time, to know the names of things, to visit places for no obvious reason.
In an unfamiliar language you make up a lot of what you lack in the spoken word by interpreting tensions of voice, gesture and ritual that betray another's meaning. In a strange of dangerous place you are forever reading these signals, consciously or not, through an alliance of the analytical and the intuitive, and the more hazardous or unfamiliar the circumstances, the greater the meaning you come to extract from ever smaller events. Sometimes lack of language seems to lighten things, and your contact with others is unburdened by definitions. Bu at others there comes a point of exhaustion when you simply want to talk about ordinary things and not have to think about every word. A journey magnifies both extremes; I was feeling the weight of the latter and, meeting the stares of twenty silent men, felt mute and helpless."
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