Previous/Next sections
Introduction
Memory I : Fragmented identities
1.1 Presenting the unimaginable
1.3 What kind of immigrant filmmaker can I be?
Memory II Essentialism in diaspora
2.1 What part of me is intresting for you?
2.3 Memories of memories of memories
Memory III : The Swedish project
3.2 Re-thinking Us and the Others
Results
4 Navigating the discursive field(s)
1.4 Liminal experiences
I have always felt like I belong to the space of inbetweenness. Between the border of events. Shoe size 42 is too small for me and shoe size 43 is too big. My hair is neither curly like my father's nor straight like my mother's. I was born just after a revolution. The old world crumbled under us. As I took my first steps, so did a new order. I was born there, in the middle of two different worlds, in the midst of chaos.
My childhood can be summarized as a private life in a leftist family with both my parents holding degrees in literature, bookshelves filled with uncensored translations of authors and albums with forbidden music - in contrast with a public life, where all of this was to be unmentioned, where we had to recite the Quran and shout political slogans to greet the headmaster every morning in the school yard. I wasn’t part of the political movements from the era before the revolution (obviously, since I was not to be born until five years after). But the system, the regime, the TV, everything about this society was alien and disgusting to me. This displacement, this living between two worlds and not fully belonging to either side, defined growing up in the post-revolutionary era. Me and my friends were not The Rich Kids of Tehran (An instagram account exhibiting the privilige and luxurious life of some Tehranians who can be assumed to have been on the winning side of the revolution). We weren’t internally displaced during the war (like Bashu, the child refugee in Bahram Beyzai’s film Bashu the little stranger 1989). We didn’t run from door to door with torn boots, in a remote village on the hills, searching for our friends homework (as in Kiarostami's film Where is the friends house, 1987). While we did not identify with any of the typical characters of Iranian kids, we knew we did not live the life we saw on our illegal MTV film clips.
The sense of inbetweenness was hence something I had experienced long before migration. Music is the symbol which most vividly illustrates this no mans land. The alienation motivated me and my friends to search for symbols and identities outside our own society. I was in my early teens when we discovered a subculture of Norwegian neo-paganists that burned churches. They were our heroes for a while. For us, living under a theocratic regime, the concept of burning down religious centers was interpreted as a progressive act against an oppressive power. We didn’t have the capacity to understand the difference between Scandinavia and Iran, nor that this act, differently interpreted, could be understood as fascism with the same ideological logic as the regime that we hated. It was first when I came to Sweden and faced the xenophobia within the metal music community here, that I realized the fundamental differences between our experiences. Our thrive for opening up spaces to breathe in an oppressive theocratic dictatorship had nothing in common with their far-right anti-immigrant extremism in a functioning democratic society.
The middle phase of a rite of passage, the liminal phase, is charactarized by that individuals or groups are in a state of transition between their previous status and their new status (van Gennep 2019). I can be seen as a creative and transformative force but also a period of ambiguity and disorientation (Turner et al 2017). Turner argues that liminality is a crucial aspect of the ritual, because it allows individuals to experience a state of anti-structure, where the norms and social hierarchies are dislocated. Thus, new possibilities for social organization and identity can emerge - a situation that within post-structural discourse theory is explained through the increased contingency of symbols and meaning (Laclau & Mouffe 1985). A liminal position can hence give individuals the discretion to change the meanings and of their social roles and engage in new forms of social interaction - or as Turner puts it, they can break free from constraints (Turner et al 2017). But what happens when this liminal phase never ends? Perhaps the liminal position has become intertwined with my self-identification to the extent that if I ever get rid of it, I will also loose a part of myself.
When I lived in Iran, my identity was almost exclusively constituted by symbols that were considered either foreign or ant-revolutionary it the eyse to the regime. I dressed in the same jeans and band t-shirts that I continued wearing after immigrating to Sweden. My hair grew longer and eventually a little thinner, by most of my social norms, taste and values basically remained unchanged. Many aspects of life in Stockholm felt more comfortable than in Tehran. I could have my beer without checking over my shoulder and I could go to concerts that weren’t in somebodies uncles barn. I wasn’t shocked by the new culture, because it wasn’t very different. And I didn’t emphasis on the experience of migration, to be a migrant. To be a migrant filmmaker. I remember an early conversation with my then girlfriend, now wife, when she referred to us as non-white. I had never considered myself in terms of ethnicity at all. Even though my family is azeri and belongs to a language minority in Iran, I always had a million other labels to identify with above ethnicity. But in Sweden, slowly, a sense of self-identification both with the label immigrant and Iranian came over me. This probably happened in reciprocity with push-backs from society. Like my friend Ali, who has grown up in Sweden, said at one point: no matter how hard you try to melt in with the Swedish society, you will never be accepted as one of them. This society will spit you out like a used chewing gum.
I - who despised nostalgia and old Persian music, suddenly found myself alone in a student dorm in Stockholm, searching for Viguen and Delkash (musicians from the 1960’s). It was the push-back from society, the impossibility to melt in, that stopped the ritual of immigration in this liminal phase. For every year, every intensified anti immigrant policy debate, this position is further reproduced. As Derrida argued, our sense of belongingness is always in a state of flux, constantly shifting and evolving in response to changing social and cultural contexts. One of Derrida's key concepts related to belongingness is différance; the process by which identity is both created and deferred through language and social relations. Différance refers to the idea that meaning is always deferred and delayed, never fully present or stable, and that this process of deferral is central to how we construct and understand our sense of self and belongingness. Drawing on this idea, I can only become through differentiation in relation to others. I can become an immigrant filmmaker in contrast to the Swedish filmmakers, but if I push to be seen as a filmmaker without ethnic label or concepts of migration attached to me, I risk becoming incomprehensible to this society. In migration research, the concept of liminality is understood through its temporality; a transition from the home country to the host country (Massey et al. 1993). The state of liminality is during this period, as the migrants navigate the cultural, social, and economic differences between the two contexts. How this experience falls out is an important factor that shapes the migration process and ultimately the decision whether to stay in the host country or return to their home country, as well as their integration into the host society.
I argued above that the experience of cultural clash did not appear in my experience of immigration. What did happen was however a disorientation in relation to the public institutions. Every time I visit my daughters kindergarten, I’m amazed with the pedagogy, the way the teachers listen to the children and teach them about fairness and inclusion. It is the opposite to our schools in Iran. How things function, from the bank to the health care, to the working conditions in different sectors, is worlds apart. I can see how this affects so many aspects of life. Just like I didn’t reflect on myself as a person with an ethnicity before I migrated, I wasn’t fully aware of how dysfunctional our society was. As citizens living under a totalitarian regime, we experienced a permanent sense of liminality that was marked by disorientation, uncertainty, and a lack of control over our lives. We were constantly subjected to strict social norms and expectations, censorship, surveillance, and repression. According to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000), living in a state of liminality can lead to a sense of anxiety and insecurity, as individuals struggle to make sense of their place in society and their relationships with others. He argues that in such contexts, individuals may seek to create order and stability in their lives through the development of rigid social and cultural boundaries (Baumann 2000).
Living in the Islamic Republic has deprived us of seeing many images, hearing sounds and having experiences. A part of people's lives in this system was spent smuggling sound, image and experience into everyday life. Our cassette tape salesmen were wandering in the quiet streets around the main square of the city, you would approach them and ask in a whisper if they had your favorite bands latest album. There were video renting services, men on motorbikes who passed the committee checkpoints (what would later be re-organized as the morality police) to bring us the latest Scorsese film or to see the latest Tom Cruise performance or to watch three hours of random footage from MTV and wish that maybe a moment of the new Guns n’ Roses video was recorded in between. Even today, living in the west has made me a smuggler. This time, however, I am smuggling images and sounds out of Iran. I ask my brother and my cousin to send me a picture of the streets of Tehran. I send a VPN to them so that I can hear their voice for a few minutes. It seems somehow, whatever I do, I’m stuck in this role of bringing material from one side to the other.
In interviews regarding his latest movie Combatant, and also his previous movie the Charmer, Swedish-Iranian filmmaker Milad Alami, a depiction that is repeated is that these are stories about freedom, masculinity and a man whose body is his only currency (Etc 2023, Dagens Nyheter 2023). When I read these words, I thought they were spot on. This embodied experience of liminality, temporality and exclusion is the only currency with which we can build our trademark in the cultural sector. It is a currency that has been repeatedly devaluated in comparison to the exchange rate for Swedishness. It remains our only currency, even if we, like Alami, arrived to Sweden at the age of 6. Comparing the two movies with those of Reza Parsa (before the Tempest 2000) and Saeed Assadi (Mirage 1984), the latter were produced from the lived experience of the refugee immigrant, wheras Alami has the gaze of Danish migration regime. The main character in the first film presents bogus asylum claims, then takes advantage of women for the case of residence permit. The second film has a main character with patriarchal views, his wife having left her career for his sake. These examples reflect a gap between refugee migrants who arrived to Sweden in the 1980’s saw and depicted Iranianness and the arrival to Scandinavia, compared with the second generation. I imagine yet another gap between the second generation Iranians in Sweden and persons like myself - again, not because we all have the same perspective, but because we are more or less aware of this lack om homogenity.
In the eyes of many within the Iranian diaspora, the existence of my generation has been an impossibility. This explains why it has been so chocking and fascinating, if not hard to digest, the sheer amount of contemporary art coming out of Iran in the face of the recent protests. Where did these young artists learned to play instruments? How did they learn to produce art? They are educated inside a theocratic medieval islamic regime, heavily bombarded with anti western anti progressive rethorics. Everything has been forbidden in this gender-apartheid regime. How is it possible that they sing and dance? How are they possible?
I have heard Iranians in diaspora say Nothing healthy grows in Iran because it’s a rotten system to the root, becuase it is Kapak zadeh (moldy). This could be true. We are the Kapak. In terms of animalia, molds do not belong to any particular group of animals. They are classified as part of the kingdom Fungi. Fungi are a separate kingdom of organisms that are distinct from animals, plants, and bacteria. While they may have some superficial similarities to plants, such as their ability to grow in the soil, fungi are fundamentally different from plants and belong to their own distinct biological group. However, we, the moldy generation of in-betweenness, must find alternative visions for our existence, beyond the here-there dichotomy.