“Art or politics?”
“Quit separating them and the question will disappear,” she texted back.
I’m not generous with the word best, but she really is my best. She doesn’t cut me any slack, especially if she knows I know the answers to questions I keep obsessing about.
And I do obsess over art and politics every day. I feel uneasy if I pay too much attention to one of them and forget the other. And I am aware that this separation in my head is absolutely artificial. It has been imposed on me by a society that still has people saying “women shouldn’t be presidents because they get moody when they get their period.” And unfortunately I didn’t hear this in Iran, but at a party in Canada.
That’s the problem. And the problem starts early, from when I’m barely 12 and desperate for a short cut and my parents say no. It’s why I shave my head when I’m 19 and everyone thinks I’m having a meltdown (granted, it was Britney Spears era). But here’s the big secret: when I have short hair, it takes five minutes for me to get ready after I shower. And given my dysfunctional relationship with punctuality, I’d do anything to save time. So sometimes I let my hair grow and develop into a mess of a curl and sometimes it is red or black or brown, but frankly, my dear, who cares?
All these binaries have confused a woman like me. A woman who writes poetry about love (sex?), and loves talking about totalitarianism and the Mid-East uprisings. But I’m gradually erasing the line and it feels so liberating. To be both, be all, do all. (Fail, get tired, change, repeat).
Today I took my short hair to the salon, and since I needed a quick fix for my addiction to change, I had it bleached, two painful times, to blond. Feels ok. Actually it doesn’t feel like much because as I always say, it is just hair and I’m pretty sure it will grow back. While this procedure was taking place, I come across an article in AnOther Magazine about the ladiest of the un-ladies, the adrenaline junky and offence-playing interviewer who has unsettled men of power with her words and not her legs, mostly: Oriana Fallaci.
Her last years seem to have been tainted with bitter racism and xenophobia, which I strongly condemn (don’t you hate this political jargon, though? What does verbal condemnation ever do? When an innocent citizen is getting unjustly executed by a brute regime, for example…).
But look at her beauty, smoking herself to death. Look at her being the only woman interviewing Khomeini and taking off her chador in front of him. Look at her going to war zones and not just recording, but influencing history. Look at her asking the last Shah of Iran: “If I were an Iranian… and criticised you, would you throw me in jail?” And him replying, “probably.”
I’m probably not the first or the last person concerned with this dichotomy. I’ve come across many brilliant minds talking about the enigmatic tangle that is artpoliticspoliticsart. Jacques Rancière for example, who is by the way, not a dead philosopher.
So here it is. A whole me. Albeit blonde.