Café Transit (Border Café)

The text or story of Café Transit is pretty straightforward: Reyhan is newly widowed with two young children and wants nothing more than to be left to her own devices and run the restaurant left behind by her husband. However, Nasser her brother-in-law desires Reyhan to leave her home and move into his house, as is the custom of the village. Reyhan has no desire to relent to this tradition and continually declines the offers of her brother-in-law, angering him and his younger brother Karim.

Reyhan eventually reopens the restaurant with the help of her husband’s business partner and, to the consternation of Nasser it soon becomes a great success. Many regulars and interesting characters are touched by their experience with Reyhan and for a short while she is happy. The story comes to a head when Nasser appeals to the law of the community to close down Reyhan’s restaurant. Despite her best efforts the judge appointed to decide between the disputants rules against Reyhan and the restaurant is shut down.

At its core Café Transit can be seen as a commentary on control. It can be seen as the struggle for feminism in Iran. It can be seen as a love story, or as the clash of old and new world values. One of the measures of a great work of art is its ability to evoke multiple meanings and invite new readings with each new exposure. Café Transit lends itself well to the post-modern inclination of granting to the audience the privilege of reading into a work of art whatever they believe to be it’s purpose or intent. Of course there is a limit to what one can legitimately claim as the telos of a work of art, but great art has the ability to resonate on some wavelength with the particular experiences of a multiplicity of audience members, illuminating some truth for any given individual. So, depending on where we are in our own life’s journey we may see in Café Transit a love story, or a feminist struggle, or a story of domination and control, or a clash of cultures.

When all is said and done Café Transit is above all an entertaining, moving, and thought -provoking film. It is well acted, well written, and smartly directed. It has the beauty and economy of a Hemingway novel, never going for the easy sell of pulling in the audience through over-wrought sentimentalism or heightened suspense. Instead, like all great storytelling it trusts in its humanity to resonate across languages and cultures, connecting to us through the universality of authentic human experience.

Queens and Kings

Substance is King. Style is Queen. When their rule is shared equally, tranquility reigns. When one is privileged over the other, balance is thrown off and discord arises. A deception takes place. So, as I reflect on Roya Hakakian’s “Journey from the Land of No”, I would do well to remember that it is both Art and Journalism - manifestations of style and substance. In terms of it’s content “Journey from the Land of No” presents a picture of the Iranian revolution of 1979, its antecedents, and subsequent outcomes, consistent with similar texts on the subject such as “Persepolis”, “Funny in Farsi”, and “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. This is all the more amazing because all of these books are so divergent in style.

“Journey from the Land of No” is a stylized presentation of reality. Roya Hakakian filters her story through a romantic lens, presenting us with a perfect family residing in a perfect community, nestled in a perfect country. Then, chapter-by-chapter the perfection slowly erodes, the surface beauty is peeled away until we suddenly find ourselves in the least wonderful place on earth. We begin in a child's utopia and end in an unspecified circle of Dante’s Inferno. Throughout the tour Roya never removes the romantic filter through which she views and conveys her experience. What she chooses to omit is as important as what she choose to highlight. Style is shaped through a careful sculpting of substance, and we are left with a highly refined vision of life in pre/post revolutionary Iran. Like an adult re-living her past through the eyes of her childhood, quotidian and mundane encounters are re-presented as sublime and fantastic, resulting in a distortion of the Iranian experience such that the reader is forced (or fooled) into interpreting the life of all Iranians as idyllic romance or perilous adventure. Hakakian gives us melodrama, which makes for great story telling but leaves the true nature of Iranian life to be told by fiction writers.

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. We orient our hopes toward an endless series of tomorrows and root our dreams in an irretrievable return to yesterday, and somewhere between our rising and sleeping we sail through Today, scarcely paying heed or due respect to Today's rightful dominion. And yet, the presence of Today is all that we have. It is all that is, the only thing approximating true reality. Only in those rare instances when we allow ourselves the indulgence of friends and festivity do we fall into accord with the moment, Today's handmaiden. Throughout the span of human history our occasional awakenings to this moment in time are often accompanied by Dionysus's gift of Wine. In the Bacchanalian spirt of giving ourselves over to the moment we are enjoined; "Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring, The Winter Garment of Repentance fling", and thus we are granted a brief reprieve from our Sisyphean labors, momentarily allowing life! to intrude upon our living.

Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám reads as an ode to the son of Zeus and Semele, imploring us to seize the moment and indulge. Wine, Women and Song are the order of the day as Khayyám commands: "Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup, Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry." Omar Khayyám understands the transience of life and sets his sights on awakening his readers to the importance of not now, but "right now".

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultán's Turret in a Noose of Light.

Like cold water to the face Khayyám's opening quadrille jolts us: "Awake!" Here the poet makes manifest to us the recognition that we are sleeping our way through our waking life, and the pervasive sentiment of the poem is that life passes quickly, so grab a goblet, quaff a dram, and enjoy the moment!

But beware! Reading The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám might just inspire a weekend debauch from which you may not recover.

Idealism and Coercion

Idealism is the first form or iteration of coercion. Why is it that the intellectuals are always the first to be purged after a revolution? Because intellectualism invites questions, questions raise skepticism, and skepticism pierces the fragile skin of over-blown ideals releasing the hot air and bringing the whole enterprise crashing down to earth. Close inspection of the remains of a failed ideal reveals the impossibility of its mechanics for practical purposes.

Coercive idealism is beautiful in its stealth; a devil in angles vestment. The halo shines so brightly that the horns are hidden in the beam of its rays. Thus garbed the messenger can deliver his directive without suspicion of coercion. Indeed, the subjects are all too willing to act bringing into question whether a coercion is taking place at all. So the question arises: when the victim has a hand in his own tragedy through a willful suspension of skepticism, who bears responsibility, the dupe or the duper?

Persepolis brings this question to the fore as it presents to us a nation of a willing many swept up in the fervor for change, all too eager to buy into the rhetoric of an idealist and ideologue, suspending reason for hope. When oppression is ripe and revolution is in the air it is all too easy to be lead astray by the beauty of words, and the power of words, and one can lose ones sense of practical reason. Marjane’s father exemplifies this when he dismisses the possibility of a repressive theocratic regime in the face of rhetoric that leads to that logical conclusion. Instead, lulled by his Marxist belief in the good of revolution, and the zeitgeist of the moment he erroneously concludes that all will work out well for Iran and Iranian freedom.

Hindsight has shown that the Iran so many wanted and wished for during the revolution was not realized. One yoke of oppression was thrown over at the service of a new oppressor. Whether the new oppressor is better or worse than the old one is up for debate. But, what is not debatable is that as we inspect the remains of the Iranian revolutionary apparatus, the ideals and hopes of people like the Satrapis were never realized.

Oh History, are we forever doomed to ignore your lessons?