A Gaze through the Veil:

In June 1993, sixty Hezbollahis attacked a publishing house, a spokesperson for thegovernment body the MCIG declared “We cannot stop them, but we also do notapprove of their attitude and behaviour, but our publications should behave in a wayas to not offend the sentiments of the Hezbollahis.” (Callamard, 2006, p.8) In thisstatement we can see that the government is not against the use of threats and violencethat the Hezbollahis use. By not acting out against this violence a fear is created insociety, hence artists and writers succumb to a form of self-censorship to avoid theseaggravated assaults. This culture of self-censorship has become a major problem inIran. Artists have begun to stop dealing with certain issues in their work due to therestrictions which are forced upon them. This action stops any diversity being createdwithin a community as there are not many artists that will stand out and deal withissues that will bring them aggravation and harm from the government or theHezbollahis.The novelist Shahrnush Parsipur is one such person, she has rebelled against theauthorities for a number of years. Parsipur is one of the most acclaimed novelists inIran, she has been imprisoned, threatened, tortured and a victim to a number of attackson her publishing house and property for her short stories. Her book Women withoutMen was published in 1989 and subsequently banned by the authorities. The bookcomprises five short stories about five women who have fled from their sufferings.Parsipur writes “in a feminist, mythological terminology, she describes the culturaland religious social pressure facing women, which often leaves them with no otherresort than to go mad or commit suicide.” (Schmitz, 2005, p.95) This book was seenas an insult to the Iranian society and Islam and the Guardians and Khomeini bannedit, Parsipur was imprisoned and eventually forced into exile.In Shirin Neshat’s most recent work which she also titled Women without Men, shehas based her five video works on each of the stories in Parsipur’s novel. The first ofthese works is Mahdokht, based on the first short story in the novel. In this filmNeshat uses a three screen installation and the film shows the life of a woman calledMahdokht; Neshat “exposes the viewer simultaneously to the three temporal strata ofMahdokht’s life as it races through her mind”. We see her as a child, as a womenverging on madness trying to knit clothes for all the needy children in the country, adrifting corpse, a fallen angel and then a victim of suicide. (Stammer, 2006) By using