A Brief Account on Farhad Meisami’s Resistance
If the power of the powerless is fueled with their collectivity, will power, and hope, then, among them, one can symbolically stand for “all.” A translator, researcher, and sociopolitical activist, Dr. Farhad Meisami, has been kept in detention for four years in the dungeons of the horrendous and medieval regime of Iran, the Islamic Republic, has started his hunger strike in protest to the severe conditions of women, political prisoners, and in demand for the end of violent execution of the protestors. He knows very well that this hunger strike does not necessarily result in the immediate realization of his liberty-seeking demands, yet he is trying to instrumentalize the latest “subject” at his disposal for this liberty-seeking performance, meaning his body; one’s body is thus no more an “object” in all this, but actually, a wholesome “subject.” The image of Dr. Frahad Meisami’s unclothed body, reduced to bones, as if a Picasso painting amidst the Spanish civil war, is transmitted to millions of pairs of eyes and, from there, through the delicate network of visual nerves, finds its way to the sensory and neuronal system of the brains. Such image is not an “instrument” but rather a wholesome “subject.” If we adopt an ontological view to this awe-inspiring performance, we will realize how profound and effective is the message he conveys to the entire world as both a subject and the last barrack for demanding liberty, in a way that it would need no further commentary or account; Dr. Farhad Meisami is in a highly unmatched battle, facing a blind behemoth willing to devour the subject and the wide range of its significations and acts all at once and digest it into oblivion in its mindless black holes. This is how, in my view, Farhad Meisami possesses a curious understanding of both realms of the symbolic and real. That is why he tries to establish/register, within a symbolic context, the real beyond the realm of the arbitrated significations, by using his own body, with all its determinabilities and definabilities. Thus, he holds a consistent understanding of the last-standing pinnacle of resistance through the last effective subject, that is, “corporeality.” The juxtaposition of mind and body, and their oneness at the most critical moment can turn a human into a mythic figure; he who now possesses an “ideal” corpus, can trans-figurate into an image of the semi-divine so much so that even the total annihilation of the body cannot result in the obliteration or elimination of the “subject,” since the subject has surpassed to a locus beyond and above his corporeal body and now multiplied on an indeterminate scale. He is surely well-aware of the power and capability of absence being just as equal to presence. His sole subject, the momentary oneness of mind and coming to awareness has transformed into such a performance of the power of the powerless, that it has already thrown a shiver at the spine of this Neanderthal Islamic regime. We should not forget that, in such circumstances, a liberty-seeking individual makes most of “all options” or whatever at hand to resist becoming a formless object bereft of all meaning. Now, we are encountered with a metaphorical Auschwitz that has encircled a huge population between its tall and gloomy concentration-camp-styled walls; Meisami is demonstrating before the whole world that, under the rule of the Islamic regime, Iran is but a massive death camp. Here, in a rather bizarre way, Farhad Meisami is stepping back from his personal identity, turning himself, as it were, into a part of the “collective consciousness,” “shared destiny,” and “joint agony” in the caged geography of Iran. This self-effacing abolition can be regarded as the metamorphosis of the individual into a collective being, or the collective identity becoming one with the metaphorical corporeality. It’s hard not think of Adorno’s saying that “after Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric,” and, in the same light, one can say that it is utterly crude to speak of beauty when, still, in 21st century, such camps are in operation and man-burning furnaces in burn.
