Pardis Mahdavi: A Creative Spark That Lights Up The Dark

Good morning. Good morning. Awesome, great crew. Thanks everybody. Thanks for having me. Thank you to Erica and Prescott. Thanks to Creative Mornings. I never heard about Creative Mornings until Being invited to do this. So I'm really excited to have found a new community. I've just recently moved back to Arizona about a year and a half ago, and so I'm really thrilled to get to find out about this community. So no one could have predicted when this theme was chosen, or when Erica reached out to me even just 2 months ago, how timely this topic would be. how timely it would be to talk about hope in the darkness in general, but in particular, to use an Iranian word. No one could have predicted that Iran would be in the middle of a revolution. No one could have predicted that it would be led by the very same people that I've been studying for 25 years. These are the young people that we call the Children of the Revolution. I am also a child of the revolution. I was born in 1978 during the Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Revolution. And this is an intergenerational movement and an intergenerational moment of resistance that carries forward intergenerational hope. What I love about this moment and what I love about this theme is typically when you hear the word intergenerational, there's something negative after it. It's like intergenerational trauma, intergenerational poverty, intergenerational pain. This is a story of intergenerational strength. and intergenerational hope. Because these protests are being led, yes, by my generation, the children of the revolution, but the people at the forefront are our children, the children of the resistance. And so for any of you who followed the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which I'm going to talk about today, it was people my daughter's age. My daughter's 15. I'm in my late 40s. My mom is here. She's also a resistor. 3 generations of resistance coming together to push out a regime that has been one of the most brutal and oppressive regimes and that has absolutely challenged our ideas of hope. So when I was first thinking about this theme of Korsu, this idea of a glimmer of hope and this light that refuses to go out, it's typically used in Persian poetry in the context of the phrase Korsu-e Umid. which is hope in the darkness, right? It's that moment that darkness briefly parts and a way forward becomes visible and viable. And when I first started thinking about this theme, I was thinking about my own research on Iran, and I was thinking about how much the resistors that I've been studying since the late 1990s have given me hope and how they have done so by embodying that hope through their creativity. So the fact that it was this theme in the context of creativity felt like— I mean, it gave me chills when I was thinking about it. Throughout my research, I have seen that creativity has been a form of resistance in Iran. So not only have they been creative in their resistance, and I'm going to talk about that today, In the fashion that they wear, in the way in which they wear their lipstick. Red lipstick is illegal. Red lipstick could earn you getting your lips slashed on your way into university. It's not just a fashion choice because the consequences are so high. And these women went out every single day with red lips. That was an act of resistance. Wearing your headscarf slipped back millimeter by millimeter, that was an act of resistance. It's embodied resistance. And they got more and more creative because they understood that this was a regime that came to power under a fabric of morality. And so they were attacking that regime by using their bodies and their art to speak back to a regime. So rather than guns, rather than violence, they turned to their art and to their bodies. And as a result, Iran has one of the most celebrated— Iranian cinema is one of the most celebrated bodies of cinema. A lot of the Iranian art that you see coming out, they turned to their music, they turned to dance, they turned to embodied resistance as a way of keeping up their hope as they built towards the moment that we are seeing today. And make no mistake, the moment we are seeing today is not just protests. It is a revolution. That is what we're seeing today. What lit the way for that revolution is the hope that these young people carried through creatively resisting, through resisting censorship, and through using their creativity as resistance. So their creativity became that well of hope that they kept coming back to. It became that candle that they kept lighting in the darkness. And eventually, over the last 25 or 30 years, we have watched these individual candles spread and become a roaring flame that we see today. So a little bit about me. I'm an interdisciplinary kind of— I have an interdisciplinary background. I kind of say I'm like a living bridge. This is my background educationally. These are just some of my books, but the very first one was my very first book. It was called Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution. So I wrote the very first book on social movements in Iran based on ethnographic research, post-revolution. So back in 1999, I went to Iran as a stringer for the Los Angeles Times to write about the Iranian women's movement. And when I got there, I was absolutely bowled away— blown away by the Iranian youth movement that they called the sexual revolution. That to me was a very creative form of resistance, and that's what I'm going to talk a little bit more about today. But about who I really am, the books and the accolades don't actually tell you who I am. I talk about myself as a recovering academic. I spent 25 years in the academy. I was a professor, I was a dean at the University of Denver, I was a dean here at ASU. That's what initially brought me to, to the area. And then I was the provost of the University of Montana and the president of the University of La Verne. And all that time, the higher up I went in academia, the more miserable I became, the more I saw firsthand how education was broken. The more I saw firsthand how education was killing creativity, the more I saw and watched how the systems were absolutely dampening those sparks, dampening those candles of hope in young people. And so a year and a half ago, after I had awarded my 25th posthumous degree to a student who had died by suicide, I made the decision to step down and out and actually turn to creativity as my hope, just as I'd seen people who I'd been studying for 25 years do. do. It was a very dark time for me. The higher up I was rising in academia, that's when the darkness came for me. And the only thing that kept my hope alive was my creativity. And so I finally leaned into my writing as a creative. I finally was able to shed that snake skin. Very prescient, right? Yeah. Year of the Snake is ending, Year of the Horse is coming, um, and we're in this final moment of shedding here this— in this month. But I was finally able to shed that snake and become the kind of writer I always wanted to be, which was to write fiction. So in that moment, in those moments of darkness, it was actually— I was inspired by the people that I had been studying who, in the face of such brutality, continued to make their art, continued to use their art to speak back. And I thought to myself, gosh, if my own people can go out and use their bodies and use their art to speak back with such high consequences, Shame on me if I don't do the same thing. And so I used their hope, I used their candles to light my own candle, and I became— I leaned into becoming a creative as a writer. And I've also now most recently founded something called Myuni, which is a new approach to education based in consciousness. And I can talk about that if people want. But I want to talk a little bit more about Iran again because of the theme and because of the time. So what a lot of people don't know about Iran, if you take away nothing else from my talk, just take away 2 things. One, the people are not the regime. I think everybody's seeing that right now. The people are not the regime, right? They are creative resistors. And creativity has been a means of resistance for decades. So if you take away nothing else from what I say today, just remember these 2 things: people are not the regime, and creativity has been a means of resistance. They've gotten creative in their resistance, and they've used arts to resist. But it is important to think about the demographics, because the children of the revolution and the children of the resistance It's now a numbers game. You cannot ignore this many people. And one of the examples that I like to give is during 2000 to 2006, that was the sexual revolution that I studied. And one of the examples that— this is my favorite story. I talk about 2004, which was this— we called it the summer of the cockroaches. Prior to 2004, if you were a woman and you went out with red nail polish or red toe polish, the morality police would come. They were the ones who— they are the ones who police the body and any kind of comportment and art and fun. That's a big thing. They're like, no fun to be had. But prior to 2004, if a woman was seen in the streets with red nail polish or toe polish, your hands would be dipped in cockroaches. They'd put cockroaches on your feet. That was your punishment. Sometimes there would be other consequences, but that was one in particular that I found so fascinating. And then someone had this brilliant idea And they're like, if we all come out in open-toed shoes with red toe polish or bright— like, there aren't enough cockroaches in all of Iran, right? So someone had the brilliant idea in July of 2004 to go out with red lipstick, red nail polish, red toe polish. We all went out. And it was true. The first, like, 1,000 people, yeah, they got either arrested or the cockroaches. But in effect, there were not enough cockroaches to punish everybody. And so after that day, we could go out in open-toed shoes. Now we laugh and we're like, oh my gosh, okay, whatever, you can go out in flip-flops now. But it's significant. It's significant because it resisted the regime. It's significant because it was an embodied practice of vibrancy, of hope that challenged the darkness, that also gave people hope. That milestone gave people hope. And so each successive movement has built on itself. And that's one of the other things I want to underscore here. We think that this moment is this isolated moment that we're seeing right now, and it's not. It's important to look at, and these are all the movements that have been led by my generation as well as the generation that's come. And so 2009, many of you probably remember, this is an image from the Green Movement. Some of y'all remember people went out protesting. And then 2011 was the Arab Spring, and Iran was also, a lot of people say the Green Movement inspired the Arab Spring. 2014 was a big movement called My Stealthy Freedom, where women took photographs and film of themselves without the headscarf in public places. And that's what had started leading to a lot of the pushback on the Iranian morality police. The movement probably best known is Zan Zendegi Azadi, which is Women, Life, Freedom. That was just in 2022, and that was ignited actually by the very, very tragic and brutal death of a young woman named Mahsa Jina Amini. Who was taken in by the morality police for wearing red lipstick, the shade that I'm wearing today. And she was brutally, brutally beaten so much that she died in the hospital. So she died at the hands of the morality police. And that ignited a movement. That movement to me was really exciting because, again, it was led by 15-year-olds like my daughter's age who would stand up in the classroom and tear up, tear up the books and tear up photographs of the ayatollah. And that earned them the front cover of Time magazine's People of the Year, were these young women. Which then takes us, of course, to the moment that we're seeing today. So the sexual revolution to me was kind of the beginning of a lot of this. These were young people who were using their bodies to speak back to the regime. And even then, unemployment was at 60%, even though Iran has some of the highest, highest literacy rate and the highest number of university graduates in the entire region. So they had over 70% of the population were university graduates, and yet the unemployment rate was roughly 30% when the sexual revolution started. Today it's even worse. And so here you see people calling the regime to the carpet and telling them this is unacceptable. So just some examples for you all visually. This is how the regime asks that they should dress, right? Only showing the oval part of the face. That's technically what they're supposed to wear. This is more like how they do dress, right? And so you might be like, well, so what? You know what, she's wearing like an orange— this orange headscarf and a white outer coat, she would be arrested for that. Now, initially when the regime first took power, and even in the '90s and early 2000s when I was doing my fieldwork, but this photograph was taken in 2006 towards the end of my fieldwork. And these women are just sitting in the cafe. We might look at it as like, okay, so they're sitting in a cafe, they still have a headscarf on. But you have to understand that they went from this to this millimeter by millimeter, and every single millimeter that they gained, that was power. Every single moment that they pushed back, every bright color that they wore— colors also were signals. White was you were a part of this particular women's resistance movement. Green is the reclaiming of spirituality because they there's a disagreement with the way the regime has taken God from people. Orange is another signal of a different group. So colors were even signals. And one of the examples that I use— people say, well, so what? So that they have their hair showing, so what? Like, maybe that's just a fashion choice. And the example that I always use for my students was back in the '60s here in this country, rocking an afro would have gotten you arrested. Okay, it's the same thing. People use their bodies to speak back creatively. So then it succeeded in capturing the attention of the state. It caused a pretty big discourse shift throughout where people were able to comport their resistance. And I like this picture because it shows the intergenerationality of it. So these are women who were like at the time 20, and these are their moms. So these would be my mom's age. So the intergenerational nature of this movement and the fact that people were able to pull on that creative streak across generations is, I think, what makes it really salient. And that's what makes it different from a lot of the social movements that we have seen. And that's what I think makes it contagious. These are some images from my fieldwork. This is an underground dance class. So dance is illegal in Iran. However, you still saw young people having dance classes. And by the end of my fieldwork, people would— I'll show you a picture from some of the cars. They would actually just park their cars, block off the streets, and start dancing in the streets. And you see that now too. Too, even in the midst of this bloody, bloody, bloody revolution. Make no mistake, 15,000 people have been killed in the last week alone. It's staggering. And even in the midst of that, people are still dancing. They still play music and they dance because that is a form of hope. That is a form of resistance. That is a way for them of saying, you don't get to win our hearts or our minds. So these are like street parties. People will just turn the street into a party. Again, they could get arrested for this. She could get arrested for red lipstick and she's dancing, which is illegal, but they're still doing it. That's that korsu. That's that hope in the darkness. This is a very popular kind of the look of the rope. She's got her red lipstick on. So this is a university student. Their uniform says that they have to wear that. It's supposed to only show the oval of the face, but you see she has hers pushed back. She's got her Dior glasses on. She's got highlighted hair. This is a very significant— again, from the outside, you might say, well, she's just making a fashion choice. This is not just a fashion choice. This is a signal. This is a signal, and this is resistance. You've also seen a very burgeoning underground music scene. Again, women are not allowed to sing or play many instruments. That's an instrument a woman is not supposed to play. Again, all of this is seen as sexualized, but they do. There's a very popular video that just started circulating this week of a group of female rappers in Tehran, and I can send it out to you. I mean, it's inspiring. They're like 16-year-olds and they have put together this incredible rap song. Again, they could get arrested for this and they do get arrested and they continue to do it. This is a women's gathering. They were supporting the Democratic candidate. Again, even in the face of such repression, they're constantly coming together and they're constantly pushing back. So this creativity has coursed through. People have been resisting the regime openly since the 1990s. Through subversive art, music, dance, films, and writing, they've been articulating their disenchantment with the regime. So even the films, even the cinema that's come out of Iran, even the music that's coming out of Iran— there's a very famous Iranian singer who's now in exile, Mohsen Namjooh. The New York Times called him the Bob Dylan of the Middle East. If you listen to the lyrics of their words, if you look at the films right now that are celebrated, the Iranian films that won the Cannes Film Festival, If you look at some of the art, some of the fashion I'm wearing, this is an Iranian artist who— so the long cloak was mandated, a part of the uniform, because you're supposed to hide the curvature. But they got really creative and they took these long cloaks, they made them more form-fitting, and they put Iranian poetry and scripture that's super resistant at the bottom. So they turned every single thing, everyday acts, every clothing, every song, every opportunity that they had, they used it as an opportunity for hope. They used it to signal hope in the other person. So if you look at this photo, like, this was not just about her taking a risk and coming to the university. This was her saying to somebody else who was walking into the university that day, don't give up. Don't give up hope. Keep pursuing your dreams. keep pushing. So every single opportunity that they had, they were trying to find this hope in the darkness, and they were trying to be those candles for each other so that when one person's candle went out, they could light another candle. And so they've used creativity, which has given them hope, and have been creative in orchestrating their resistance. Car culture is a very, very strong example. They use the car as a space space, as a public/private space. They would blast their music from the car. They still do. And they would use the car to physically take up public space. And many people have created art cars. So we joke about Burning Man art cars. We're like, people have been doing art cars in Iran since the '80s. They take over the streets. They're very involved in pursuing their own candidates. The implications are very high, and that's one of the things I want to underscore. Punishment for resisting behaviors includes jail, lashings, and sometimes more. There's multiple levels of risk. Many artists have been arrested and exiled. They've put families in danger. At a certain point, people were calling Evin Prison Evin University because so many professors were locked up there. So many artists have been locked up. So many of Iran's best singers are now living here in the States. The implications are high, and yet people continue to do it. The consequences— these are people getting rounded up and then, of course, going to jail, life in the shadows. But nevertheless, each movement doesn't get smaller. It only gets bigger. It only gets more pronounced and only gets more prominent. So for many of us in the diaspora, their embodied resistance has for us been a signal to start to release our own masks, to start to find our own courage, to be creative and courageous and resistant all at once. That's the biggest takeaway for me, is watching these people— this is from the My Stealthy Freedom campaign— people standing there taking such great risks and being so creative in what they're doing. That to me has been the biggest signal of Korsu, that courage is contagious, that we can create fearlessly, that we can create to be fearless, and that we can create curiously. Fortunately, these movements have started to spread. The same time as the Women, Life, Freedom movement was spreading, you had the Enough campaign with— these are high schoolers here. This was the Enough campaign where high schoolers We're talking about gun violence, Mujeres en la Marcha that was in Guatemala. These were all kind of interwoven, these resistance movements. It's one of the things you see is they're all intergenerational, they all have embodied practices, and they all use art and creativity to resist. So for me, Korsu is not just about hope, but it's about resistance, because I do see that resistance takes creativity and that creativity is hope. That hope lights up the dark, that courage is contagious, and that korsu, that little candle, that tiny flame, can actually ignite and become a fire that leads to a revolution. Thank you.