As I was writing my essay and watching the BET Honors awards simultaneously, I thought a lot about the concept of a picture and the implications a picture can have on a historical narrative. I attended some parts of high school in the United States and other parts of it in Iran. While I was here, I was presented a narrative of history that centered around the idea of the American as the hero of the story, the British as our wonderful allies (to a certain degree), and certain parts of the Middle East as very savage like. All of these narratives that circulated through our history books and even in some of our English classes were supplemented with pictures and images as if something is almost unreal until you see it with your own two eyes. When I moved to Iran I was enrolled in a history class where everything I had learned in the U.S. was contrasted. The Americans were painted as savage and war- like, the Brits were devil- like people, and sections of the Middle East which included Iran were the intellectuals, the inventors of math and the sciences. I started to wonder what was real and what was not. I couldn’t understand how both of these narratives could be true at the same time until I realized how subjective truth was. I mean yeah, there are certain truths like how killing is bad, or do onto others as you would like done to you that are accepted by almost every society and therefore function as objective universal truths, but for the most part I realized truth is arbitrary. The truth that the Iranian government was able to create was partly due to the fact that they chose to include and exclude certain things, people, and places from their images. The U.S. functioned similarly and rested on the notion that if we don’t see it, it’s almost like it never existed. So then I wondered, how can you be seen? How can a people who are not a part of the dominant ruling class ever be “seen” and I realized the only way is through a revolution. In evaluating almost every revolution, one realizes that it was instigated by an individual that struggled to be seen- a clear example is the Arab Spring which was initiated by h Mohammad Bouazizi, a fruit seller who was tired of “not being seen” and mistreated by the government.
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2015
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