by Marie Mallare
Newsha Tavakolian’s photograph, “Untitled,” from her series Listen dabbles with silence as a tool of resistance. “Untitled” depicts a silent woman dressed all black garments, on her hands a contrasting pair of bright, red boxing gloves. The silent woman stands at the forefront of an empty road, her defiant stance forcing the viewer to confront her person. Tavakolian’s collection originated in response to the literal silencing of Iranian women singers, each photo from the collection being a fantasized CD cover of a woman. Yet, this specific photograph from the collection portrays a woman with her mouth closed – oddly enough, a series titled Listen features a woman with nothing to say. This image demands that we consider alternative modes of resistance—to contemplate the power of silence as a form of resistance to women’s oppression.
Women in the Middle East are often portrayed as “victims, without agency” or as “Muslim women in need of help” – tropes that depict oppressed Middle Eastern women as trapped by religion and in need of secular emancipation (Şimşek & Jongerden 2018). These Orientalist tropes emphasize and support the idea that silence is inherently oppressive. Middle Eastern women’s self-empowerment, struggle, and resistance are constrained by western narratives, their stories only capable of being read if they “speak up” or “speak back.” By equating silence with oppression, the resistance of women in the Middle East is obscured.
Women in the Middle East are forced to choose between feminist activism or their ethnicity or religion, asked to “speak as embodiments of these categories” and only understood within the pre-existing identities imposed onto them. The politicization of ethnicity and religion means that women in the Middle East must “represent themselves in terms that already subsume and contain their representation” (Şimşek & Jongerden 2018). Ultimately, western narratives silence Middle Eastern women as they are neither heard nor understood outside of western scripts of resistance. If by speaking up you run the risk of being either misunderstood or misrepresented might it better to stay silent than attempt to be heard?
Silence, or the “not opening of one’s mouth properly” can act as a tool in which one can be heard on one’s own terms. The inability to make sense of one’s silence consequently prevents misrepresentation, including the imposition of false understandings. With the ambiguity of silence presenting itself open to interpretation, it “draws power from its ambivalent status,” forcing an audience to think earnestly about the story being told (MacLure et al. 2010). Tavakolian’s Listen series ironically calls on its audience to hear her through its silence. For Tavakolian, her photographs allow “Iranian women singers [to] perform through [the] camera while the world has never heard them.”
Silence is active. In Tavakolian’s photos, it is a conscious decision to reject the imposition of false understandings. The “absence of public voice” that is, silence “is not synonymous with the absence of talk or action.” Silence can be “strategic”—“a voluntary act of self-preservation when a woman feels it is better to keep quiet” (Lazreg 2018). Silence, then, is neither simply nor solely oppressive, but can be conscious and decisive form of resistance. Tavakolian has brought me to realize that silence can be subversive. In response to the silencing of Iranian women, silence itself becomes the mode in which they are heard. “Untitled” shows us there is power and resistance in choosing to shut up.
WGS340 WOMEN & REVOLUTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST 