Emily Johns: Drawing Paradise on the ‘Axis of Evil’
The Persian word (pairidaeza), from which our word paradise comes, means a walled garden.
In May 2006 I travelled to Iran on a Fellowship of Reconciliation peace delegation during a period of international tension over Iran’s nuclear programme. I was awarded a drawing bursary to document the experience. The delegation itinerary was very intense, meeting with NGOs, community groups, academics, politicians, young people, and clerics, and also travelling through the country to visit antiquities and cultural sites. My drawings were, by neccessity, as speedy as our travelling. I then produced a body of images dealing with the complex relationships between Iran, oil and Britain. The work weaves together the larger international dynamics, the mutual cultural influences, and the more intimate personal connections of Iranian-British relations. In February 2013 I returned to Iran to continue the project to draw and talk to ordinary people about the effects of international sanctions.
The delegation itineraries were very intense, meeting with NGOs, community groups, academics, politicians, young people and clerics, and also travelling through the country to visit antiquities and cultural sites. My drawings were, by neccessity, as speedy as our travelling.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the ‘War on Terror’ was declared by the US and Britain and with the announcement of which countries were on the ‘Axis of Evil’ it was apparent that foreign policy would involve attacks or aggressive diplomacy against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, N. Korea. I felt that since we have been given so much advance notice of the atrocities that our government was willing to commit we have a duty to be well prepared to prevent these wars. It seemed that I, as a visual artist, could contribute to deflecting the propaganda preparation that is neccessary to turn a people and a country into enemies and ‘legitimate targets’.
The ‘war artist’ documents the process of war, and comments on the aftermath of war. This project is ‘pre-war art’—an equivalent process for a conflict that I hope may never take place. It deals with the themes that a war artist might deal with, but in a period of tension rather than after the outbreak of hostilities. My approach has been from the perspective of British relations with Persia and the intertwining of histories.
Culturally, ‘Persia’ has been a potent influence on the British imagination—on poetry, on theatre, on story-telling, and on ceramics. Economically and politically, Iran has played an increasingly important role in British and Western imaginations as an oil producer, a militant Islamic state, and a suspected potential nuclear proliferator.
Drawing Paradise on the ‘Axis of Evil’ is an attempt to use imaginative engagement to provoke a more rounded debate, by transcending labels such as ‘the axis of evil’ and to ground public debate in human realities. The Iran that is so widely feared is also a land that has produced, and continues to produce, gardens of paradise and poetry.
In 1890, the Qajar Shah of Iran, Nasir al-Din Shah granted a tobacco concession to a British company headed by Major Gerald Talbot. In exchange for a large loan to the Shah, the firm was granted a monopoly on producing, selling and exporting tobacco crop in exchange for a loan. Tobacco was popular in Iran, and the tobacco industry employed large numbers of people. The concession provoked a mass movement of protest, and led Grand Ayatollah Mirza Shirazi to issue his famous fatwa against using tobacco. Tobacco merchants ceased trading, and the two-month boycott was observed universally—even by the Shah’s harem. The Shah was forced to rescind the concession. Major Talbot and the forces he represented were squeezed back into the bottle that the Shah had opened.
Nasir al-Din Shah needed more money because he had spent so much on several holidays to Europe. On one of these trips he became enamoured with the Russian ballet and on his return home got his harem to wear tutus. Only I imagined that the harem joined in the tobacco boycott as a response to the tutus. His harem here has quite a mix of court clothes taken from paintings.
There were political reverberations between Europe and Iran and a zeitgeist of action at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1906, six years before the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front of the Kings horse, Mrs Jahangeer stood in front of the Shah’s carriage to demand gender equality and the adoption of the Constitution.
1936 Reza Shah Pahlavi banned the wearing of the veil as part of his modernisation programme. Women were beaten and veils were forceably removed by the police. Many women were house-bound by a sense of nakedness until 1941 when the ban was lifted.
After the revolution in 1979 wearing the veil was made compulsory with similar punishments for disobeying.
On this date oil was struck at Masjid-i-Sulaiman (‘The Mosque of Solomon’) in western Iran by the fore-runner to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later to become ‘British Petroleum’ or BP. This was the first oil well to be established in Iran. Oil is bursting from the well at the Mosque of Solomon, piercing the flying carpet of King Solomon, puncturing the fabric of Iranian society.
Mohammed Mossadegh was elected Prime Minister of Iran by the Majlis or Parliament on 28 April 1951 after leading the effort to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. With the help of the CIA, MI6 managed to bring about a coup that deposed Mossadegh in August 1953, and imposed a military dictatorship headed by the Shah of Iran. (See ‘The Coup’ later in this catalogue.) If oil is a natural force, accompanied by spirits, Mossadegh was one such nature spirit or genie—forced into a bottle by the US-UK intervention.
After the Iranian Revolution in January 1979, Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran (on 4 November 1979). Although US intelligence officials inside the Embassy rapidly shredded confidential papers as the buildings were being occupied, many of these documents were painstakingly reconstructed by the students, and later published, documenting continuing US interference in the country.
The word ‘paradise’ comes from the Old Persian word pairidaeza meaning ‘a walled-in compound’ or garden. The classic ‘paradise garden’ contains a rectangular pool of water, with strictly-aligned rows of trees and flowerbeds, and a grid of canals. Thousands of such gardens exist today in Iran, full of pomegranate trees, birdsong and butterflies. This picture was inspired by a meeting with survivors of chemical weapons attacks during the Iran-Iraq War. Some of them who had had their eyes destroyed by mustard gas must have been gardeners who now can no longer gaze on paradise. One survivor I met now organizes solidarity events with Hiroshima survivors who plunged into the river to cool their burns on 6 August 1945. In this picture, the gardener stands in a canal to cool his chemical burns.
Rivers, woods and seas have their own spirits. Oil has its own spirit, that has been pent up underground, leaking sometimes through the surface of the earth. As with the genies of The One
Thousand and One Nights, the spirit of oil can be liberated and controlled by the human will, but its
restless force threatens to break free of human intentions with devastating consequences. The
danger runs alongside the melancholy waste of this mighty spirit, producing throwaway products and
burning oil with reckless abandon. Oil companies store samples of crude oil from different wells in collecting tubes, for analysis.
The image of the rose and the nightingale, the lover and the beloved, is a theme of Persian poetry and art. In Sufi Islam, it is a mystical image representing the search for the divine. The oil of Iran is the desired, the sought-after, poisoning the seekers. It has been a long and complex love affair.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi writes that until 1994, the chief film censor in Iran was a blind cleric. He required assistants to describe to him the contents of the films he was examining. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran has had a world-famous film industry, producing poetic and striking films working within—and sometimes outside—the censorship system.
On 3 July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655, a commercial flight inside a commercial air corridor, was shot down by one of the US Navy’s most technologically-advanced cruisers, the USS Vincennes. All 290 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including 66 children. Few of the bodies recovered were complete. The US government never admitted wrongdoing and never apologised for the destruction of Flight 655. The men of the Vincennes were all awarded combat-action ribbons. Commander Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator on board the Vincennes, received the US Navy’s Commendation Medal for ‘heroic achievement’; his ‘ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire’ having enabled him to ‘quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure.’ Captain Rogers and Lieutenant Commander Lustig were later awarded the Legion of Merit for their performance on 3 July 1988.
These ancient underground canals bring water from the mountains to irrigate the desert, provide drinking water and cool houses. They run under towns and cities connecting populations. I am also thinking of dissemination of ideas through a media scene where publications are banned and pop up again rather like the game of ‘bash the crab’ on seaside piers. There is a fluid intellectual world beneath the desert.
This is a mythical bird that is sought by an expedition of birds in Farid ud-Din Attar 12th century Conference of the Birds. Its existence is discovered by a feather falling to the ground in China. In sufi poetry the Simorgh is a metaphor for God. In this picture it has landed in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. Between 1980 and 1988 more than a million people were killed.
43,000 people were killed in the earthquake that destroyed the ancient city of Bam on Boxing Day 2003. Some of the survivors (including Shahrbanou Mazandarani, a woman of 97 rescued alive after eight days in ruins) had sustained themselves underground by reciting poetry from memory.
The human race is a single being
Created from one jewel
If one member is struck
All must feel the blow
Only someone who cares for the pain of others
Can truly be called human
—Saadi, circa 1200AD
The ‘Gateway of All Nations’ is the entrance into the ancient city of Persepolis, built 2,500 years ago. All the subject nations of the Persian Empire, from the Greeks to the Ethiopians, would come to Persepolis to offer tribute to the King of Kings at the New Year celebrations at Spring equinox. In the nineteenth century, representatives of Western nations chiselled their names into the gateway, as if claiming territory. Western nations exported nuclear technology to Iran, and now threaten Iran with nuclear attack for developing this nuclear technology. Physicians for Social Responsibility have estimated that nuclear attacks on the Esfahan nuclear reprocessing facility and on the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant would lead to the deaths of 2.6 million people within 48 hours. Behind the Gateway, a nuclear mushroom cloud is rising—a possible future for our civilizations.