How an exiled playwright diagnosed the persistence of gendered violence across Iran’s revolutionary divide
Introduction: The Physician Who Diagnosed Violence Through Drama
When I first encountered the plays of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, I was struck by how this physician-turned-playwright used his clinical gaze to diagnose something more profound than physical ailments—the way violence inscribes itself on human bodies. Sa’edi (1936-1985) trained as a doctor before becoming one of Iran’s most significant dramatists, only to be forced into exile after the 1979 Revolution. What makes his work so compelling is his ability to read gendered bodies—especially women’s bodies—as sites where abstract nationalist ideologies become painfully concrete.
In this post, I explore how Sa’edi’s unique perspective—combining medical training, ethnographic immersion, and eventually exile consciousness—allowed him to develop what I call “concrete utopian diagnostics.” This approach reveals how bodies at Iran’s margins simultaneously bear the wounds of nationalist violence while preserving alternative possibilities that escape complete determination.
The Medical Gaze Meets Political Theater
Sa’edi’s background as a physician wasn’t incidental to his dramatic work—it was foundational. Just as doctors are trained to read symptoms as indicators of underlying conditions, Sa’edi read bodily performances as manifestations of deeper social and political violence.
His immersion in both rural Azerbaijan (where he grew up) and southern coastal communities (where he conducted ethnographic research) provided him intimate knowledge of lives at Iran’s geographical and cultural margins. These peripheral regions became, in his dramatic works, laboratories where the effects of nationalist violence could be observed with particular clarity.
Pre-Revolutionary Works: Bodies Under Modernization Violence
In Sa’edi’s pre-revolutionary works from the 1960s-70s, he maps how the Shah’s modernization programs violently materialized on bodies at Iran’s margins. Three works in particular reveal his evolving approach:
“The Mourners of Bayal” (1964): Ritual Bodies as Counter-Archives
Plot: In this collection of interconnected stories set in the fictional Azerbaijani village of Bayal, Sa’edi depicts a community struggling with the intrusive forces of modernization. The narrative opens with government census-takers arriving to count and classify the villagers, disrupting their traditional way of life. When a villager named Mohammad dies suddenly, traditional mourning rituals unfold against this backdrop of bureaucratic invasion. The women of Bayal engage in elaborate mourning practices—wailing, chest-beating, and reciting lamentations that retell not just personal grief but collective historical traumas. Meanwhile, the government announces plans to build a road connecting Bayal to urban centers, symbolizing the physical manifestation of the state’s intrusion. As the mourning intensifies, tensions between traditional communal practices and modern state interventions reach a breaking point, revealing how bodies become battlegrounds for competing versions of national identity.
Sa’edi shows how female mourning practices become sites of resistance. When government census-takers arrive to enumerate and classify the population, the villagers intuitively recognize this as an extension of state violence. Against this bureaucratic intrusion, women’s mourning rituals preserve what I call “counter-memory”—forms of historical knowledge systematically excluded from official nationalist narratives.
The female mourners utilize what I term “tactical femininity”—strategic deployment of culturally sanctioned feminine roles (in this case, ritual grieving) to create protected spaces for expressing collective trauma that would otherwise invite violent repression.
“Dandil” (1966): Bodies in Desperate Negotiation
Plot: Set in an impoverished settlement on the outskirts of an unnamed city, “Dandil” portrays a desperate community living in the shadow of an American military base. The narrative follows characters like Mamaly, Panjak, Khanomi, and Zaynāl, who survive by attempting to extract money from the military personnel—particularly a white American officer who visits periodically. The community pins their hopes on Tamara, a young woman whose beauty they believe will entice the white American officer to pay handsomely. The residents dress her up, coach her on how to appear desirable to Western eyes, and parade her before the officer. Their desperation is palpable as they rehearse and perform versions of themselves they believe will appeal to the white American gaze. The officer, representing both imperial power and Western ideals of progress, toys with their expectations—making promises but ultimately leaving without paying, repeatedly disappointing yet never fully destroying their desperate hope. The settlement exists in a state of perpetual anticipation and crushing disappointment, with bodies increasingly marked by addiction, illness, and self-destruction.
The women here have fewer established cultural practices to tactically deploy than the mourners in Bayal, but they still develop strategic performances of desirability and calculated manipulations of men’s economic fantasies. Sa’edi masterfully portrays how the white male gaze operates as an instrument of imperial violence—the white American officer’s evaluating eyes commodify Tamara’s body while simultaneously measuring the entire community against Western standards they can never meet. The officer’s whiteness is crucial to Sa’edi’s critique, as it encapsulates how racial hierarchy intertwines with economic exploitation and gender violence in the Shah’s modernization project.
These bodies bear the visible wounds of socioeconomic violence while revealing the contradictions of Iran’s modernization project—how certain bodies remain excluded from its promised benefits while being violently exploited for its advancement.
“Ahl-e Hava” (1966): Possession as Embodied Counter-Knowledge
Plot: “Ahl-e Hava” (The Wind-Stricken) weaves together multiple narratives centered on zār possession ceremonies in Iran’s southern coastal regions. In one thread, a young woman named Shirin is believed to be possessed by an African zār spirit. This causes her erratic behavior and physical distress. Her family consults a mamabāzi (female ritual specialist) who diagnoses her condition and prepares an elaborate healing ceremony.
Meanwhile, an older fisherman returns from working at a state-sponsored port development project, experiencing nightmares and restlessness diagnosed as possession by a Baluchi zār. The narrative alternates between these and other possession cases, depicting the intricate rituals involving specific music, incense, animal sacrifices, and trance states led by the mamabāzis.
These ceremonies attract the hostile attention of government officials. They see them as backward superstitions. Local religious authorities also show hostility. They consider the ceremonies un-Islamic. A particularly powerful mamabāzi named Soghra becomes the focal point for this conflict. She defies pressure to abandon her practices. Throughout the text, Sa’edi meticulously documents the different types of zār spirits. These spirits are believed to originate from diverse geographical regions—Africa, Arabia, Baluchistan. He shows how these possession beliefs map onto historical patterns of trade, migration, and enslavement in the Persian Gulf.
These ceremonies, led by female ritual specialists called mamabāzis, represent sophisticated systems of knowledge that challenge both the violence of modernist rationality and orthodox Islamic frameworks.
The possessed bodies in these narratives preserve centuries of transcultural exchange across maritime frontiers, embodying histories of movement and connection that defy the violent enforcement of bounded national identities. The mamabāzis exemplify tactical femininity in its most developed form—leveraging culturally sanctioned roles as healers to maintain alternative epistemologies despite intensifying violence aimed at erasing such “backward” practices.
The Exile Perspective: Seeing Violence Across Revolutionary Divides
Sa’edi’s forced departure to Paris in 1982 was both personal trauma and methodological advantage. His exile position gave him what Edward Said called “contrapuntal awareness”—a double perspective allowing him to perceive patterns of violence across seemingly opposed political contexts.
Sa’edi experienced violent persecution under both the Shah’s SAVAK and the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary guards. This suffering gave Sa’edi unique insight. These apparently antagonistic systems deployed remarkably similar techniques of bodily violence. This was particularly evident regarding women’s bodies.
“Othello in Wonderland” (1986): Staging Gendered Violence
Plot: “Othello in Wonderland” unfolds in a dilapidated theater in Tehran. In this setting, a theater group attempts to rehearse Shakespeare’s Othello. The play opens with actors anxiously awaiting permission from authorities to perform. The Director arrives with partial approval but a mounting list of absurdist conditions. Female performers must be completely covered. Desdemona and Emilia are forced to wear robes and headscarves. This makes emotional expression nearly impossible. The text undergoes continual censorship: references to love, jealousy, and adultery must be euphemistically rewritten.
The rehearsal faces repeated interruptions. An escalating parade of officials enters, including morality police, revolutionary guards, clergy, and finally a Minister of Culture. Each one adds new restrictions. The actor playing Othello becomes the center of heated debate about his racial representation. Officials insist his blackness must specifically resemble Bilal, the Ethiopian companion of the Prophet Mohammad. It shouldn’t reflect any “Western” interpretation of Blackness.
The climax centers on the play’s ending. Censors learn that Othello plans to kill Desdemona. They insist that if she’s guilty of adultery, she should be stoned instead. If she is innocent, she should be declared a martyr. As the actors desperately try to preserve some artistic integrity within these constraints, Othello suddenly lunges at the Minister. This is a moment of rebellion. The lights fade on this ambiguous gesture of resistance.
In this brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Sa’edi creates a “comparative laboratory.” It reveals structural parallels between pre- and post-revolutionary systems of bodily violence. The play depicts a theater company attempting to rehearse Othello while navigating a labyrinth of absurdist censorship demands.
Female performers must obey Islamic covering. Physical contact between characters must be eliminated. Othello’s racial identity is subject to ridiculous authentication requirements. Sa’edi’s satire is effective due to his “strategic amphibiousness.” He deliberately keeps it ambiguous whether the censors represent SAVAK’s secular violence or the Islamic Republic’s religious violence.
The actresses playing Desdemona and other female characters exemplify tactical femininity under intensified threat of violence. The s to preserve artistic integrity beneath this conformity.
“Pardeh-daran-e Ayineh Afruz” (1984): Ritual as Trans-Revolutionary Critique
Plot: “Pardeh-daran-e Ayineh Afruz” (Mirror-kindling Attendants) is structured as a traditional pardeh-khani performance about the Iran-Iraq War. Two storytellers announce their intention to show “behind the curtain” of war propaganda. The narrative interweaves two families with sixteen-year-old sons. Jamal’s father forces him to enlist because he fears government reprisal for non-compliance. His mother desperately attempts to prevent Jamal’s deployment. Ismail, by contrast, volunteers out of religious zeal, leaving his parents conflicted between pride and terror. The play alternates between scenes of anxious waiting at home and frontline horrors. Ritual poems that satirize war glorification are interspersed throughout.
A particularly biting sequence features a student hired to impersonate the “Imam Zaman”(Imam of Time) and distribute “syrup of martyrdom” to soldiers, who confesses his fraud when captured by enemy forces. The central tragedy unfolds when dismembered bodies return from the front, with families horrifically forced to identify and claim scattered body parts—hands, feet, skulls—often receiving the wrong remains. This macabre situation escalates to graves being exhumed and limbs being sold in wheelbarrows. Throughout, mothers become central figures of grief, their lamentations echoing ancient mourning traditions while expressing contemporary horrors. The play concludes with a “Giant Child” figure crying for peace amid sounds of continuing bombardment and mourning, the question “When will this end?” left hauntingly unanswered.
In this play about the Iran-Iraq War, Sa’edi employs traditional pardeh-khani (storytelling with painted screens) to create a counter-narrative to official war propaganda. The storytellers layer centuries-old Shi’a mourning traditions over contemporary war trauma. They create what performance scholar Babak Rahimi calls “ephemeral but persistent sites of memory.”
The play’s ritual performers locate transformative potential within the very ceremonial forms that state violence attempts to appropriate. Sa’edi explains these practices without simply rejecting or celebrating religious ritual. He shows they contain what philosopher Ernst Bloch called “not-yet” capacities. These are embryonic possibilities that exceed violent nationalist determination.
Structural Continuities: What Violence Persists Across Revolutionary Divides?
Sa’edi’s comparative framework reveals five key continuities in how seemingly opposed political regimes violently disciplined gendered bodies:
1. The Paradox of Female Visibility
Both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic violently positioned women’s bodies as primary sites where national authenticity must be secured—just in opposite ways. The Shah’s government violently mandated Western-style visibility as a sign of progress; the Islamic Republic violently mandated covering as a sign of authentic return. Despite these surface contradictions, both systems violently instrumentalized women’s bodies as visual evidence of ideological legitimacy.
2. The Continuity of Violent Surveillance
Sa’edi documents how techniques of violent surveillance targeting female sexuality function consistently across revolutionary divides. From the bureaucratic violence of census-takers to the religious violence of theater censors, women’s bodies remain subject to intensified scrutiny regardless of the justifying ideology.
3. The Violence of Authenticity Politics
Both regimes violently deployed gendered bodies as markers of national legitimacy, merely inverting which embodied practices qualified as “authentically Iranian” and which were violently condemned as “foreign contamination.” The obsession with Othello’s proper skin color in “Othello in Wonderland” brilliantly satirizes how bodily appearance becomes subject to violent authentication in service of nationalist narratives.
4. The Continuity of Epistemological Violence
Sa’edi shows how both systems similarly inflicted violence on forms of knowledge embedded in women’s bodies and practices. The mamabāzis’ healing knowledge was violently dismissed as “superstition” by Pahlavi modernizers; the actresses’ theatrical knowledge was violently subordinated to religious authorities’ definitions of appropriate representation.
5. The Persistence of Resistance to Violence
Perhaps most importantly, Sa’edi identifies how tactical responses to violence persist across different regulatory regimes. From mourning rituals to theatrical performance to possession ceremonies, marginalized women develop increasingly sophisticated tactics for carving out spaces of agency within seemingly rigid violent structures.
Contemporary Resonance: Sa’edi’s Diagnostics of Violence Today
Forty years after Sa’edi’s death, his diagnostic methodology for tracking violence remains remarkably relevant. Recent work by scholars like Shahram Khosravi, Afsaneh Najmabadi, and Janet Afary confirms and extends his core insights into nationalist violence.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement is not a sudden eruption. It is the latest development in a continuous evolution of tactical femininity among Iranian women facing violence. Women have made subtle adjustments to the mandatory hijab since the 1980s. The “My Stealthy Freedom” campaign emerged in 2014. This was followed by the Girls of Revolution Street protests in 2017-18. Women have consistently developed increasingly sophisticated tactics for navigating intensifying violent regulation.
These movements are distinguished by what Sa’edi identified decades ago. They do not simply reject violent conditions. Instead, they actively create alternative possibilities through everyday practice. The very bodies most intensively subjected to nationalist violence become sites where the most sophisticated forms of resistance emerge.
What Sa’edi’s Work Teaches Us About Violence
Sa’edi’s greatest contribution may be his methodological innovation—combining medical precision, ethnographic immersion, and political analysis to read bodies not as passive surfaces of violence but as active sites where multiple forms of violence, knowledge, and resistance intersect.
His “concrete utopian diagnostics” offers three key resources for analyzing contemporary bodily violence:
- An interdisciplinary approach combining medical, ethnographic, and political perspectives on violence
- A comparative framework that identifies continuities of violence beneath apparent ruptures
- A balanced perspective that acknowledges both the wounds inflicted by nationalist violence and the possibilities that emerge through tactical resistance to that violence
In an era when nationalist projects worldwide increasingly inflict violence on gendered and sexualized bodies, Sa’edi’s methodology remains essential. It helps to understand how these violent projects materialize on actual bodies. It also shows how those same bodies preserve possibilities that escape complete violent determination.
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