MANIA AKBARI – THE DISTILLATION OF REALITY
There is on occasion an opportunity for a conversation that
challenges you to the core, a situation that unsettles you as much
as it enlightens your imagination, and this was one such occasion.
Beginning with us all sitting opposite one another, as though we were
about to play a hand of poker, ‘they’, Akbari’s young translator and
Mania Akbari herself, begin talking feverishly, finally introducing
me into the conversation. Having arriving without a set of questions,
unplanned even, I declare a more casual uncharted approach to the
interview. Whereby I introduce an idea, a notion, and she be allowed
to take the lead; to speak unfettered, to deliver something of herself.
Akbari digested the idea of leading the interview, and without fear or
fancy, talked of her youth and her children in Tehran. Her childhood
she declared, ‘was determined by politics, death and academia’.
Taking us from the living room in London to her home
in Tehran in the early 1970’s, she is quite beguiling, poetic
even. As there appears to be a wonderful spirit about
her, that leads us from her suppressed childhood, to the
fundamental events that would alter her life; in order,
as a child, she consciously ‘walked the line’, choosing
creative pursuits, when her father declares she should
become as much of an academic as he and her mother
had done. Her father a PhD physics student, her mother
a chemistry graduate. In her home books were described
as her only friend; and academic literature was the central
axis by which all of their lives should turn. For Akbari, the
foundations by which she was introduced to reality, were
too restrictive. Her life was being determined by her father,
even before she had had an opportunity to consider her
options, and she describes it as an impossible situation. A
young women in Tehran in the 1970’s, Akbari was acting
up against a backdrop of political upheaval, with the end
of the Shah in 1979, and the re-introduction of Ayatollah
Khomeini. Substituting what had become an ‘autocratic’
regime under the royal family, for a ‘theocratic’ constitution
under the Ayatollah, and for the young Akbari, Iran felt
like it was under house arrest. Nothing was allowed, as
reality was dogged by Islamic laws, as innumerable rules
and regulations hemmed Akbari and her childhood friends
in. Academia appeared to be the only refuge in a country
closed off from the rest of the world as religion was, under
such circumstances, paralysing to say the least.