Self-Identity and Freedom

Self-Identity and Freedom

Usually, people take more than a lifetime to discover their true self. However, when presented with a situation that cages them, the desire to rebel and the need for self-discovery reaches an all-time high. The articles under consideration for this literary review are Maggie Nelson’s ‘Great to Watch’, Azar Nafisi’s ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books’ and “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday” (2002) by Martha Stout. Azar Nafisi was born in Iran, where she was expelled from the University of Tehran in 1981 for going against the Khomeini’s mandate that stipulated that all women were required to wear veils. Maggie Nelson is a poet, literary critic and essayist who was born and bred in the USA. She has a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has taught at the Wesleyan University, Pratt Institute and the New School. Her essays and works explore a new direction in the arts that is without doubt, disruptive. Martha Stout was a clinical psychologist for 30 years and served on the clinical faculty of the Harvard Medical School through the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She has taught on the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and the psychology faculty of Wellesley College. This paper will examine the following theses as highlighted by the authors: the struggle against totalitarianism is not isolated from everyday human experiences, but it is deeply rooted in it. Secondly, the role played by violence in the media is key to how society and the individual reacts to its showcasing in everyday life and whether or not the individual will see morality or its immorality. Finally, the freedom to express oneself is the key to self-actualization.

Freedom to express oneself without fear of reprimand or punishment is key to self-actualization and self-knowledge. Azar Nafisi’s students can come together and interact in a setting that is neither restrictive in the physical sense nor the ideological sense. Azar says that her living room (the meeting place) “had vagrant pieces of furniture from different times and places were thrown together, partly out of financial necessity, and partly because of my eclectic taste. Oddly, these disparate ingredients created asymmetry that the other, more deliberately furnished rooms in the apartment lacked.” (Azar, pp 280) Besides, the windows have no curtains, unlike a standard Muslim window, according to Azar’s mother. The apparent lack of rigidity in how this room was arranged certainly creates a feeling of spontaneity in the student. It does not limit the student to any particular confines, neither of thought or the physical. Her students not only readily shed off their veils, scarves and robes at her door and burst into color and in sharp contrast to the mundane and boring colors of the prescribed dress-code, but also “gain an outline and shape, becoming their inimitable self.” (Azar pp279). Their different personalities are hitherto hidden to the harsh world outside but come to life like a flower blooming in spring. Azar says that even people like Yassi, who was shy naturally still had certain things that excited her and made her lose her inhibitions. While Manna is withdrawn and private, she still beautiful poetry out of things ordinarily cast aside. Martha Stout likens psychological trauma to being in a state of solitary confinement. She says that it is like “being locked in a house, but rather involves solitary, unlockable confinement inside the limits of one’s mind. The person who suffers from a severe trauma disorder must decide between surviving in a barely sub-lethal misery of numbness and frustration, and taking a chance that may well bring her a better life.” (Stout, pg415) The dilemma presents a chance to free oneself from the existing shackles, albeit mental. The impending freedom holds promises of a better boundless and limitless existence that would bring out the aspects of people’s personalities that are hidden as a response to the repressive environment one finds oneself in. Ultimately, it brings out the best in people. All one has to do is to take the risk.

The struggle against totalitarianism is waged on the level of everyday human experiences. The two cannot be separated. The needless repression is felt in everyday life, and so any resistance to the faulty system is by active opposition to the very basic societal rules and enforced norms. Azar Nafisi’s experiences while teaching at the university is a testament to the harsh environment people practising their vocation are subjected to. She enquires of herself why she left: “The ever-increasing indifference among the remaining faculty and students? The daily struggle against arbitrary rules and restrictions?” (Azar pp282) The environment is not conducive for anyone. The incidence where one of her students came to class late because the guards had identified an anomaly with her bag and wanted to send her back home as a way of reprimanding her shows the woes students go through. This is typical life of a woman in the Islamic republic- one who is not supposed to run up any stairs however late she is, talk to or mix with the opposite sex, let even a stray strand of hair be seen or laugh in the hallway. Azar loves teaching, but she left her role at the university since “teaching at the university was like going through a torturous ritual each day.” (Azar pp281) Consequently, living in the Islamic Republic is like living in a house with walls made of cardboard. When it pours (and it pours anytime) the barriers you have around you are reduced to nothing. In the worst-case scenarios, it can become part of the pain. She decides to quit as a resistance to the oppressive system, its rules and enforcers. This struggle can be likened to overcoming past traumas. “In reaction to relatively trivial stresses, the person traumatized long ago may truly feel that danger is imminent again, be assailed full-force by the emotions, bodily sensations, and perhaps even the images, sounds, smells that once accompanied great threat” as argued by Martha Stout (pg. 416). It becomes a daily struggle for the patient’s brain to be able to forget past traumas and distinguish the past from the present. The mind, in this case, is like a broken warning device and in dire need of repair.

Furthermore, the role played by violence in the media is key to how the individual responds to violence as evident in society. Maggie Nelson in the ‘Art of Cruelty’ argues that “violence is not just a social fact but a cultural phenomenon and that is evident in its saturation of all forms of media, from video games to YouTube” (Maggie, pg. 297) and is not just limited to the two. It also spreads its tentacles to reality Tv shows such as ‘The Running Man’. The populace loves this showcasing of violence, and seem to revel in even more gruesome content as highlighted in the suicide death of Louis Conradt Jr in the popular show ‘To Catch a Predator’. Just like Azar Nafisi, Maggie Nelson also finds violence in as she describes it- “a place we might never think to look- the high arts.” (Maggie, pg. 297) This portrayal of violence brings several questions to mind since it is without a doubt that art is a media that helps to create the texture, shape our existence and outlook as a society and at the individual level. Azar Nafisi, on the other hand, alludes to the violence in the story ‘A thousand and One Nights’ and how it portrays three kinds of women. How they are portrayed is derived to the kind of response they give to the kind of violence meted upon them by the king. “There are the ones who betray the king and then are killed (in this case the queen) and the voiceless virgins who are slain before they get a chance to betray the king. They surrender their virginity and lives to the violence without any resistance.” (Azar, pg. 282) Coming to the fore is their lack of a voice and media with which to put up a fight. In this work, it illustrated how handy the press could be in breaking a cycle of violence in the society, which is in stark contrast to Maggie Nelson’s showing. Scheherazade’s method of engagement is by the subjective mental states, whereby she fashions her existence and the universe around her through imagination and reflection. Her response – and by extension, the author- to the violence around her is not by wholly relying on the media around her but the product of her innate thoughts. The freedom of thought is key to this process of re-conditioning and applying to mean to the stimuli around us. Exposure of violence in the media does not always set in motion, in the populace, a process of snapping out of it since it is entirely dependent on the individual’s response to the forces around him/her.

In conclusion, the experiences illustrated in these articles clearly articulates the vitality of freedom. Be it freedom of the mind, freedom of speech or freedom of the physical body. The account has to be free of past traumas for one to be in a state of happiness. For one to be able to carve his/her self-identity, he/she needs to be in an environment that is less restrictive, a setting where one will be free to take part in the activities that appeal to him/her. It is through these engagements and the resulting potential to push oneself to the limits that one will get to know oneself. Also highlighted are the daily struggles the mind goes through every day to free itself from the repressiveness around it. Whether the repressiveness is due to the existing form of governance or purely stemming from the past experiences of the individual, it always is a nail-biting process. It is pointed out that it is never an exercise in futility, and with the right support mechanisms, resilience and grit success is usually achievable. Azar finds fulfillment in her literary work away from the university. Lastly, it points out the significant role played by the media in the success or failure of these individual struggles of finding one’s own identity. The purpose of media cannot be overlooked in this noble quest. It remains to be seen how the individual will respond to the various stimuli coming into his/her sense. This is fundamental.