Iranian dissidents censored and rejected in the West by publishers masquerading as mullahs

The Iranian artist Taravat Talepasand was due to exhibit at Macalester College in Minnesota a sculpture bearing the words ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ (the slogan of the Iranian women’s uprising) and a satirical piece depicting Khomeini and women wearing the niqab as they pull up their robes. But she was censored. Now the Iranian poet and translator Bänoo Zan reports in the Index on Censorship that Western publishing houses and literary magazines are censoring Iranian dissent. The Index on Censorship is the magazine founded by the poet Stephen Spender in the 1970s to defend Soviet dissidents, featuring contributors such as Václav Havel, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing and others. “As an Iranian-Canadian poet and translator, I have recently had alarming encounters with editors and academics,” writes Zan.

“None of my poems criticising the Islamic Republic have appeared in recognised magazines. In July, a magazine in the United States rejected a poem inspired by an Iranian activist. It didn’t matter that he was opposed to the war. ‘The greater good,’ they said, ‘is the defeat of Zionism and imperialism’.” In another recent instance, a magazine initially accepted Bänoo Zan’s translations of works by the dissident Iranian poet Sina Behmanesh, only to reject them later.

“The editor explained that he had changed his mind because of the war,” writes Zan in the Index on Censorship. “To justify his decision, he wrote: ‘Now is the time to remain silent and seek reconciliation. Speaking out will not help anyone’.” Zan describes a deep-seated ideological rift which, in her view, is behind this censorship. “I have served on literary juries and have witnessed how my colleagues favour works that do not criticise political and religious systems in the Global South. Some of these jurors teach English and creative writing at universities. Magazine readers, judges of literary competitions, editors and publishers are all products of this unengaged aesthetic.” Zan quotes the African-American poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde: “Your silence will not protect you.” “It is also true that silencing others does not protect them,” concludes Zan.

“Silencing writers, journalists and activists exposes them to greater danger. It empowers dictators and perpetrators of crimes against humanity and allows them to continue their violent actions with impunity”. In noting that today a book and a film such as Persepolis by the late Iranian director Marjane Satrapi would not be published or produced, the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud wrote in Le Point: “What Satrapi’s only film denounced – initially as an ‘Iranian evil’ or a ‘Muslim evil’ – has now also become a Western, if not a global, evil. Iran’s slow descent into political medievalism and intolerance since Khomeini’s return – which Persepolis portrayed as a distant fate – has become a widespread, everyday reality in the West.”

“An epoch-making reversal: here is Iran fighting to free itself, whilst we, here in the West, are mobilising to enslave ourselves.”  Last month, a report by the American Anti-Defamation League examined ‘the ousting of Jews and Israelis from the cultural sphere following 7 October’. Now we discover that, in the name of anti-imperialism – which is the new socialism of fools – even Iranian dissent deserves a bit of censorship.