It all started with a roach. Every cartoonist in Iran knows the day will come, but no one could’ve believed that it would start this way . . . 

Find out how Neyestani became a cartoonist in an interview with The Comics Journal.

Then watch Neyestani draw, and listen to him tell the story behind “Metamorphosis,” in the film below. (In Persian, with English subtitles.) 

(Watch on YouTube)

Listen to pronunciations of the Persian terms in this story, read aloud by Mandana Naviafar.

(Listen on SoundCloud)

Iran is far from the only place where there are controversies over children’s literature! Watch an American Library Association video featuring the “Top Ten” most challenged books in the US. 

Next, listen to a panel on National Public Radio discuss “What people miss in the conversation about banned books.” The panelists point out that comics are often among the most frequently banned books in U.S. schools. (We suggest starting around 12:55.)   

Finally, hear from writers in an ABC News article: Authors of color speak out against efforts to ban books on race.  

Iranian writer Amir Ahmadi Arian

Scholar Amir Arian provides some historical context for this work in the introduction to Iranian literature on WWB Campus:

In 2006, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president. Under his direction, the Ministry of Cultural Guidance soon reversed the relatively tolerant policies of the Khatami years and put in place a brutal censorship regime. Once again, a generation of writers, those who had come up under Khatami, simply stopped writing or migrated elsewhere. However, by this point, thanks to the reformist movement, censorship rules had been irreversibly eased. Despite the heightened risk under Ahmadinejad, cartoonists and humorists returned to the press after a long absence and boldly took on politicians as well as the values of Iranian society, making themselves vulnerable to public outrage or persecution. Mana Neyestani’s “An Iranian Metamorphosis,” in this collection, is an extreme example of how this increased room for maneuvering put the artists’ and journalists’ lives at risk.

Read the Czech-German novella that inspired Neyestani’s Metamorphosis, or watch a Spanish film of that story. 

(Watch on YouTube)

Tabriz university, where protests against Neyestani’s cartoon first began. By Meisam, 2006. CC 3.0 license.

Shoghie, Neyestani’s Azeri cellmate, explains that “Only one cartoon or one newspaper is not the issue. The problem is the history of ignorance” and prejudice against Azeris.

An article from a non-partisan Washington think tank contains some factual errors but makes the same point, suggesting that protests against the cartoon reflected a larger issue: “resentment in Iranian Azerbaijan about the region’s economic and social difficulties.”

The article goes on to note that Persian attitudes towards Azeris are “well captured in the phrase ‘Torki khar’ (Turkish donkey), used by Persians in reference to Azeris, whom they regard as the ‘muscle’ of the Iranian economy to be dominated by Persian ‘brains.'”

You can read the entire article: “Iranian Azeris: A Giant Minority” on the Institute’s website. However, please note that there are serious errors! For example, the article calls Neyestani an “ethnic Azeri cartoonist.”

Iranian novelist and essayist Salar Abdoh, whose work also appears in this unit, writes of Azeris in Iran:

Perhaps out of every three Persians I know, at least one is somehow related to an Azeri, man or woman. The Azeri/Persian relationship is complicated, seeing that save for the last dynasty, most of the royal lines going back a very long time have been Azeri Turkish. Therefore, it is not as cut and dried as that between Persians and other ethnicities. Also the economic might of Azeris in Iran sets them apart. They occupy high levels of power in government and business and therefore are a deeply integral part of the structure of the country.

You can read more about “Iran’s Ethnic Azeris And The Language Question” in an article from the Radio Free Europe (a U.S. government-funded media organization).

“The Islamic Republic says that the Azeris are happy in the Iranian state,” but is that actually true? Learn why fully answering this question is so difficult, and find out more about the perceived “threat” of Azeri nationalism, in an article from the Middle East Institute.

Mana Neyestani on Voice of America TV, 2010. Public domain.

Why was Neyestani personally targeted? In the early aughts, entire newspapers were shuttered in Iran, but by the mid-aughts, the BBC found that the government was focusing instead on “individual journalists and executives . . .” You can find out more about the media landscape in Iran during the era of this story in this article from the Council on Foreign Relations. (The article starts with a discussion of the mass protests and repressions following the 2009 election.)

After he is put in prison, Neyestani’s interrogator asks him to “write about the Iranian cartoonists that you know”—that is, to report on other cartoonists. In the next panel, at the bottom of page 18, Neyestani seems to be sitting at a dinner table with his colleagues—a reference to the famous Leonardo da Vinci painting The Last Supper, of Jesus eating with his disciples, one of whom has betrayed him to the Roman authorities. 

Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper. Public domain. For more on the painting, visit the Web Gallery of Art.

In his own story, Neyestani tries not to be a “Judas,” writing only unimportant information about the other cartoonists.

New to learning about Iran? Read the country’s profile from encyclopedia.com (scroll down for more information about modern Iranian history).

Alleyway in Hamoomchaal, by Kamyar Adl. License: CC BY 2.0.

• Read another graphic story of Neyestani’s, also translated by Ghazal Mosadeq, A Short Guide to Being the Perfect Political Refugee, which begins, “On a normal day . . . “
• Then, watch a short video of his most famous political cartoons, set to music (some disturbing images)
• Check out this interview with Neyestani, in which an interviewer asks him, “What kind of pictures put you at risk?” (Note: This interview was conducted in 2010, shortly after Neyestani left Iran. The interviewer has a political perspective that comes across in the piece.)
• Then, look through Neyestani’s work for the organization Cartooning for Peace
• Finally, visit a Pinterest page featuring Neyestani’s work and photos. 

Neyestani’s translator Ghazal Mosadeq is herself an author. Read her short story Ney Boulevard, about Iranian immigrants in Paris.

Habibe Jafarian, journalist and author of “How to Be a Woman in Tehran.”

Read Habibe Jafarian’s memoir of growing up as book-loving girl in Iran’s most religious city: For the Love of the Books. 

Shahrnush Parsipur. Photo by Mahgameh Parvaneh, 2010. Public domain.

• Read an interview with journalist Pouyan Khoshhal, who, like Neyestani, was thrown in Iranian prison over a single word.
• Then, read the memoir-essay “Prison Echoes” by Shahrnush Parsipur, one of Iran’s most celebrated—and censored—woman novelists (translated by Sara Khalili)  
• Finally, get a Washington Post reporter’s perspective on his own recent imprisonment in Iran, which he says is “more complicated than good versus evil.”

Evin House of Detention, 2008. By Ehsan Iran. CC 2.0 license.

Read another “Kafkaesque” story about Evin Prison: Photo of Smiling Political Prisoners in Iran’s Evin Prison Lands One in Prison Known For Harsh Conditions. 

Then, hear from the prisoners’ families who “set up a protest camp outside the prison,” in this New York Times article.

Neyestani’s cellmate complains about a “history of ignorance” about Azeris. Learn about Azeri culture and “the two Azerbaijans,” one an independent republic, the other in Iran, in this dated but still helpful article: Azerbaijan.

Then, read a BBC Persian article about the protest and the Iranian government’s response, which included tear gas.

Finally, listen to a song by Davod Azad, a popular Azeri musician.

Neyestani began as a political cartoonist, but as Iran’s government became more oppressive, he switched over to children’s cartoons because they seemed “less risky . . . Boy, can I be wrong!”

Eighty years ago, Russian writers living under the murderous leader Stalin tried this strategy, too. Watch a video of poet and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky’s children’s book What Is Good and What is Bad? 

According to the book, it is good to “keep no secrets,” avoid walking in thunderstorms, and brush your teeth. (Watch on YouTube)

Then, find out what happened to Mayakovsky and the other Russian poets and artists who, like Neyestani, “turned to writing for children” in this Guardian article. 

Neyestani’s cellmate Shoghie tells him: “We have no personal problems with you or other journalists but on the way towards the ideal there’s a good chance some people get crushed under the train of vicissitudes. ”

In post-Soviet Russia, people described their lives with the same metaphor. Read an oral history of a man who spent his teenage years in the Gulag, one of millions of innocent people “thrown from the moving train.”

To find out more about what happened between General Custer and the Sioux leader Crazy Horse (which was very different from what happened between Neyestani and his cellmate Shogie!) watch this long-form BBC documentary.

Major-General George A. Custer. By Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 1877. Public domain.

In the memoir, a colleague advises Neyestani to “hide any alcohol.” Alcohol is officially banned by the clergy in Iran, but people still find ways to obtain it, and alcoholism remains an issue.

Read a New York Times article about alcoholism and drinking culture in Iran.

Czech-German writer Franz Kafka, 1932. Public domain.

Neyestani connects “An Iranian Metamorphosis” to an earlier story, the Czech-German writer Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Most people who’ve read Kafka’s story in English remember it being about a man who transforms into a cockroach. But was it really? Unravel the mystery in this article from openculture.com.

• Mana Neyestani’s A Short Guide to Being a Perfect Political Refugee, about the dehumanizing bureaucracy he experienced after leaving Iran.
• Prison Memoirs, by Wang Dan, a student leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in China
• Interview with Wu Wenjian, featuring another Tiananmen Square protester who was later imprisoned
• Kafka’s Metamorphosis or The Trial (A gallery of covers)
• Peter Kuper’s graphic novel adaptations of Kafka’s works, including his collection Kafkaesque.

*For Teaching Idea 1

On WWB Campus:

• From Russia, The Only True Guide to Russia. Belying the tongue-in-cheek claim in its title, this cartoon collection includes fantastical stories of remote-controlled bears, Kremlin-created frost, and more.
• From Japan, the magical realist story Once Upon a Swing.
• Also, from Japan, The Memory and The Farside, short stories that both depict narrators who “break the fourth wall,” revealing themselves as actors in the events they are describing.

Elsewhere: Blending fact and fantasy:

• Art Spiegelman’s Maus: narrating true events from Spiegelman’s father’s experiences during the Holocaust, these works of graphic nonfiction depict all the characters as literal animals: Jews as mice, Christians as pigs, etc.
• Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and other works.

Elsewhere: Breaking the fourth wall:

• Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
• Cervantes’ Don Quixote
• William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
• Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando.

*For Teaching Idea 2

On WWB Campus:

• The Wondrous Deer of the Eternal Hunt, a Russian oral history about a man imprisoned in Stalin’s camps as a teenager. He is asked how he survived and replies, “I was very well loved as a child.”
• The Gringo Champion, a novel excerpt from Mexico, in which scenes of young love and friendship are interposed with scenes of violence at the hands of “la migra.”

Elsewhere: 

• Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, by Valeria Luiselli, about migrant children in U.S. detention centers
• If Beale Street Could Talk, a novel by James Baldwin about a falsely imprisoned African American man (and a 2018 film) 

   

• Journey into the Whirlwind, a memoir of Stalin’s camps by Eugenia Ginsburg, a prisoner whose affection for her fellow prisoners kept her alive.
• Fallin‘, a 2009 song by Alicia Keyes. 

*For Teaching Idea 3