By Eyvaz Taha - December 24, 2018
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| Eyvaz Taha |
One could approach this issue from a narrow nationalist perspective, but I consider it through the liberatory nature of the political, and I speak through words. As Elfriede Jelinek puts it: “One who no longer speaks may immediately commit murder.”
In a country where the official language is Persian, writing in that language should, on the surface, be the most natural act. Yet for nearly a century, this land has been home to a preconfigured nation-state formed under the hegemony of a single language—a single official language imposed upon a multilingual empire. But what happens when we recognize that this nation-state emerged at the intersection of the nationalist aspirations of a segment of the population and the geopolitical ambitions of two or three transregional powers? Under such recognition, writing in Persian becomes problematic for another segment of Iran’s population. If other languages had received state support, and national wealth wasn’t funneled solely into promoting one language, the nature of this difficulty might have been entirely different. There would no longer be a need to uphold the current order by denying the most basic rights of the country’s diverse nations.
No condition is an “absolute truth.” Reality is a given—socially constructed and naturalized through processes of domination. In other words, “The ruling class not only controls society politically and economically, but also imposes its worldview in such a pervasive way that it becomes ‘common sense’—and the dominated internalize it as part of the ‘natural order’ of the world.” The political emerges in the challenge to this normative state of affairs. Otherwise, the subject cannot speak radically against domination through the very patterns of domination. Without a radical confrontation with the status quo, the emergence of a genuine citizen becomes impossible.
One mode of confrontation is this: the segment of society that has been marked with the stigma of otherness should write as much as possible in its own language. To produce thought and literature exclusively in the dominant language—even in protest—is to abdicate subjectivity. It is to submit to a condition embedded in ideological structures. Writing within such a normative discourse is like participating in a sham election; in both cases, the result is the reproduction of an unjust status quo. Regardless of content, the very act of writing under these conditions reinforces domination. In contrast, truth spills out of rupturing hegemonic frameworks. Only by grappling with the text—by unsettling it—can a political project gain meaning. The first condition of such a project is to strip away the mask of the existing structure and cling to the gaping hole it attempts to conceal.
Moreover, one of the foundational pillars that sustains the symbolic order—history, society, culture—is language. In any discursive order, the subject is first and foremost subjugated within language. Liberation of the subject thus requires breaking the chains of this very subjugation.
The center, relying on a kind of political romanticism, attempts to present its ethnic narrative as the very essence of collective aspiration. It names itself a benevolent totality devoid of any ethnic specificity, while labeling the Other as an ethnic force with demonic potential. In doing so, it positions this “Other” outside the law, should it refuse to assimilate. Through guidance, coercion, and bribery, the central power imposes its grand narrative upon the margins—by artificially extending its history, by claiming as its own the ruling dynasties it has often stolen from the margins, by spreading degrading jokes, by enforcing a so-called public culture that monopolizes meaning-making.
And yet, Tehran cannot be reproduced in a city like Tabriz without leaving a residue. Tabriz has its own eternal memories, desires, longings, intellectual traditions, and political experiences. When the ideology that legitimizes the center's narrative begins to crack, the insistence on assimilating the periphery into the center ends up—as a paradox—producing a form of Otherness for the marginalized. As the center pushes the margins away in a bid to seal its own fractures, it inadvertently opens up a space for the formation of the Other’s identity.
This residue, born out of failed assimilation, becomes the unintended product of the center’s Othering of the margins. Attempts to dissolve the periphery into the center do not destroy it; rather, they lead to reverse-identification—a rival discourse, no longer a mere ethnic identity in the margins. In such a situation, the solution is not to sustain the existing state through force but to adopt a democratic approach. A democratic approach entails the circulation of hegemonic power through competing discourses—not the authoritarian closure of all matters within a dominant framework. Otherwise, the political is extinguished—and violence and death emerge in its place.
Original article in Persian