The Handmaid's Tale and it's Parallels with Iran
Last night I watched the last episode of series three of The Handmaid’s Tale.
It has stirred up so many bitter emotions, memories and has pushed my brain to think really hard.
A perfect remedy for my struggling mind during this third lock down!
Margaret Atwood has a fascinating mind. She is sharp, clever, observant, sarcastic, funny yet very tender. Her attention to detail for female self talk (the internal dialogue) is just so beautiful, raw and real.
Alongside watching the series I started listening to the audiobook and as many as interviews possible with her and the whole team who made the book into this brilliant TV series. A lot of work has gone in it. Nothing has been taken lightly and it shows.
I often feel like I know June Osborne! Her self talk sounds so familiar to me, so close to my heart.
Most nights after watching one or two episodes I found myself with a pounding heart and a spinning head. A woman’s self talk, her struggle to survive and to stay sane when all around her is shifting to conformity and suppression. How she is working hard to keep her individuality and preserve her identity is astonishing. I wish I could write as eloquently!
There is a big part of me taking the series so personally as if it is showing me a road map which my life depends on. I often find myself questioning why am I so obsessed? is it because of my past? is it because I have experienced my own Gilead after the 1979 revolution in Iran? Or is it this personal for all women? To me it felt like going for a deep dive in an unknown ocean, I had a vague idea of what I might find but could never have imagined what I found. The ocean has taken me by surprise.
Whilst watching series 1 to 3 over a period of two months or so it almost feels like I have been living a parallel life to Gilead. It takes me back to Iran and what happened after the revolution almost overnight the lives of so many changed at the hands of The Islamic Republic, especially women and girls. Basic human rights were taken away and the hijab was forced upon them, covering them from head to toe in black cloaks (chador). Many women were stripped of their professional credentials or were made redundant simply because of their gender. The preference was, and still is, for women to stay at home and to become mothers and wives not by choice but by fulfilling their god given duties!
I well remember the shock reflected in my parents behaviour and in fact all the adults in my life. People started to leave the country by any means possible – legally or illegally. We all started to censor our normal lives and pretend to be what we were not. Every morning my dad would remind us before dropping us at school gates “We don’t listen to music, we don’t sing along to pop songs, we don’t own a VCR to watch movies, we don’t host mix gender parties, we don’t treat our cousins like siblings, we don’t object to the forced hijab, we don’t have relatives in the West”. And the list would go on.
I used to go to an International School before the revolution. A beautiful happy school where colour, music and storytelling was part of my daily life and suddenly all the colour went away from our outside world, everything became grey, black and brown with lots of angry teachers drumming religion into our naive minds. I was a six year old who was in love with colours. My favourites were fuchsia pink, bright yellow and different shades of ultramarine blue. I loved to laugh and be silly with my brother and cousins, to go for long bicycle rides in our holiday home in the North of Iran and suddenly all of it was forbidden.
I kept asking my parents “But why?” And they kept shrugging their shoulders and saying perhaps it is not Islamic enough. Their answers never satisfied me. I felt lost and started to experience the need to escape my reality. A sensation I struggle with to this day. I recently read in a tweet that Iran may be the only country in the world where it’s photos from 45 years ago seem like the future.
We started living a double life… one outside and the other inside our own private home. Living a double life allowed us to stay under the radar and live a semi trouble free life. We just kept our heads down and mingled with like-minded families, stayed very cautious when choosing friends and always mindful of what we shared about ourselves or families with them. We became experts at not asking questions and taking things as they were, which slowly, slowly led to the loss of the a questioning mind and a switch to a survival based mindset.
Maybe the biggest problem about living in survival mode for too long is that you can never plan ahead effectively as your main focus is getting through each today and waiting to see what the next tomorrow brings. Slowly, slowly, it became normal to find yourself dreaming of a better day, a different life, a better world but you can’t or don’t do anything to make better things happen. Somehow It either seems pointless or impossible.
Living a double life takes up so much energy and space in one’s being, it digs deep inside of you leaving an enormous dark hole. You are never quite sure who you are, basically you lie to yourself every single day, pretend to be someone you are not, and eventually your sense of self-worth begins to erode. And it’s easy to develop all sorts of addictions to fill that damn hole; and gradually, unknowingly you can begin to drown in them.
Now talking about drowning reminds me of the masses of refugees that risk their own lives and the lives of their little children to get themselves over to a safer land. SO many of them will never make it. I remember the Iran-nejad family of five that took this journey and didn’t make it. Sadly all five drowned. Their youngest was only 15 months old and his body was never found. My upset husband asked “Are these people crazy or is living in Iran so terrible?” With tears in my eyes I nodded and said it must have been a choice between death and death, a real choice between death but with just a faint glimmer of hope: “What if we make it? What if our children can have a better life?”
It was so powerful for me to witness how June Osborne’s character slowly changed in the television series, especially after giving birth for a second time to a baby girl. It became her mission to save the children as she knew they were the most vulnerable group who hadn’t had the chance to develop a self yet, they didn’t know of a life outside of Gilead. Gilead was their world and it was all they knew. This resonated so much with me.
None of this of course happens in the book, as Atwood herself says June is far more submissive in the book. The book is generally gentler than the television series. The book only covers her story up to a certain point. With the television adaptation we get to see more, to know more and to feel more.The brilliant production team had to dive even deeper to create the series. Making it as real and believable as possible to today’s minds. Each character is beautifully multi-layered, they can be either brutal as hell with a hint of humanity or human with a hint of ruthlessness.
I absolutely loved the art direction of the series too, the extreme close ups, the beautiful facades, the interior design of each household, the marvellous landscape and the creation of a sense of an orderly, harmonious perfect world on the outside (the image). There are many scenes in which June does not say much but you can read a whole volume of emotions in her eyes and body language. It is a masterpiece of good television. Our TV screens nowadays are filled with reality shows and stuff that doesn’t require any thinking or questioning. Maybe this is the reason such a series becomes a sensation to watch. The sharp contrast.
I keep asking myself who would I be in Gilead? Definitely not June; I don’t think I would ever have her strength, yet she didn’t at the beginning, Gilead changed her.
Just like the brave young women in Iran who are fighting for their basic human rights and are either being executed or sentenced to life imprisonment for minor acts such as not wearing the hijab or un-veiling in public, or running a charity that informs and educates young women of their legal rights before they lock themselves into a marriage where the husband has all the rights.
Another vital fact to focus on is to truly believe and cherish how important it is for us women to support each other, to truly see each other and our struggles. Probably another damaging aspect of a patriarchal society is to raise women as competitors not sisters because sisterhood hold so much power. When you set women against one another, you don’t need to do much, just sit back and watch how willingly they tear each other apart for the smallest grain of attention or privilege. But bring them together and they can rock the whole world into a better, safer and more compassionate place.
As Margaret Atwood says often, Gilead can happen anywhere and at any time, we need to be more vigilant, to stay politically active within our communities, to care and to look after each other by listening more and lecturing less.
Can’t wait for the new season to start!