This is part of master thesis at HEAD.

A glance

From an early age, I knew I was good at telling stories. I would have liked to be a novelist if I had not decided a visual artist, although this is not my reason for conducting academic research through the lens of fiction.

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It was not an easy decision to write a novel as a method of academic research. However, the narrative was inside me, it spilled out as soon as I started writing. I found myself surrounded by stories. I was a beginner at creative writing, and still am. Nevertheless, I believe I could not have conveyed the depth of meaning and information that I did in the novel, if I had written a thesis that was purely academic. It was a highly ambitious choice, and a very challenging process to develop a novel in such a short period, especially for a novice like myself. 

Hyper-reality

I was born two years after the Islamic revolution in 1979. It was unique in many respects, including the breakthrough in propaganda. It was centered on narrative. In this way, I can consider myself a child of narration. The Revolution, as the new government called themselves, built up a new system of cause and effect, creating their own narrative in order to justify their actions. Narratives made and defined the post-revolutionary world. Various tools were needed to create them. The Government used every avenue of communication available for this purpose: television, cinema, photography, fiction/story, newspapers, music, anthem/Song, poem, painting, graphics, theater and the Shia Mythology system sat on top of all these.

The revolution intended to rewrite Iranian history to suit itself. All aspects of our lives had to be reconstructed for a single reason: lack of “Meaning”. The Meaning had been lost. They made a new system to either re“signify” or re”view” every single phenomenon all over again before publishing. All these led to a substantial “exhilaration” emerging. Whatever I heard and saw overflowed with that, at school, on T.V. and in the well known Friday Prayers which were always a vague, unnerving experience that I disliked as a child. 

This exhilaration diminished everything to a bipolar world which was either black or white. That was used in order to provoke a feeling which I call sublimity, encountering a strength beyond that of mankind’s power. Sublimity connected phenomena so that we felt sheltered, protected by this simplified manner of judging our surroundings. The mechanism of signifying phenomena created an invisible chain which would present all of life’s events as related. This established an infrangible solidarity between the Iranian people.

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