In the thick of marking term papers, I seek shelter in the Apocalypse ...

Those who commit to animal rights or live with domestic animals in relationships beyond the traditional pet-owner power dynamic often face accusations of abnormality, sometimes even madness, from friends and peers influencd by the anthropocentrism of social and religious institutions.

As someone affected by this stigma, I found Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009) quite compelling. This eco-feminist novel features Janina Duszejko, an elderly woman living in the Polish countryside with a keen interest in William Blake. She is an outspoken advocate for animal rights who faces sexism and ageism within her community because of her political and spiritual commitment to non-human animals. In this profound and gripping murder mystery, Janina ultimately takes matters into her own hands!

Stray (2020, Elizabeth Lo) is a superb documentary that follows the precarious lives of three dogs — Zeytin, Nazar, and the puppy Kartal — in the streets of Istanbul.

It is a rigorous examination of human-animal relations in a city that used to oppress, but which is learning to appreciate, its stray animals. Most of the film unfolds from the perspective of the dogs. The camera is a mere observer and, in the absence of a human narrator, it is the animals who shape our film experience through their subjective experience of the world.

The most poignant aspect of the film is its portrayal of interspecies survival in the face of injustice. Zeytin, Nazar, and Kartal seek shelter with a group of orphaned children, all of them Syrian refugees in Turkey, and they end up sharing the little food and resources they can find in an environment hostile to the displaced and the dispossessed, human or non-human animal. They barely survive, but they share their vulnerabilities, and co-exist as “companion species.”

I have been searching for magic realist works of Iranian fiction for a while. The genre, I believe, is the radical lens on modernity we need the most today.

And I happened to read a FINE example in this short story collection by Morteza Barzegar today: "Rāndeh Shodeh" (1396).

Let me know if you have any good suggestions!

Today, I led a sobering, stimulating, and challenging discussion of Forough Farrokhzad’s documentary short “The House is Black” (1963). The session was “sobering” as we watched the stark reality of life for the patients of a Tabriz leper colony as they resiliently struggled with isolation, povery, and stigmatization. It was “stimulating” for, while appreciating Forough’s poignant and poetic vision, we also deconstructed her voice-over narration to critique her ableism as she spoke for, and on behalf of, the alienated subjects of her film. Finally, the discussion was “challenging” because, as we watched and studied the film, we had to confront our problematic standards of beauty and attitude to our fellow citizens with disability in contemporary Iran.

Unlearning is a long, and painful, process. And I’m proud of my students for engaging with the film with courage and creativity.