Iranian Love Stories
2021
I've started wondering if keeping this list is changing the way I read, or if I always had a rhythm of reading a few longer works and then several really short ones in a row. I'm not really doing it just to 'get my numbers up' - but keeping track like this almost makes it seem like I am!
Iranian Love Stories is a non-fiction comic that depicts 10 interviews between 'Jane Deuxard' (actually a dating couple who are both journalists) and young Iranians conducted shortly after the election of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013. The failure of the pro-democracy Green Revolution movement of 2009 is also very much on most interviewees' minds.
The journalists interview some couples, some individual women, and a couple individual men. What they mostly find are people in their 20s and 30s who, even if they are in love and in a committed relationship, are afraid to have sex before marriage because the man's family could insist on a 'virginity inspection' before the wedding, and who rarely even get a chance to kiss or hold hands because there's nowhere they can go where they aren't being watched. Surveillance by their own family members, the uniformed police, and I think at least two different kinds of plain-clothes 'morality police' is omnipresent. Almost everyone is afraid and feels powerless to change anything.
One young woman who seems very foolish goes on and on about how wonderful Iran is for women since she is never 'forced' to work for money. One woman says she might be a Muslim if she were born somewhere else, but in Iran she sees the religion as 'all lies' told to benefit the mullahs who form the country's ruling class. Another man alleges that it's easy for the mullahs to forbid sex since they can visit prostitutes while traveling internationally.
Half of Deloupy's art depicts the interviews and half illustrates whatever the person is talking about, sometimes literally but usually metaphorically. The image of eyes watching from the shadows represents the ubiquity of surveillance. We also see mullahs like giants eating platefuls of ordinary people, running over them with railroad trains, etc, as representations of their political power.
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