Shokoufeh Sakhi is currently a Political Science Ph.D. candidate (ABD) at York University, Canada. Her research is centered on the possibility of a political resistance that does not devolve into that which it resists, addressing the problem of the increasing reduction of the late modern subject into a being directed toward personal material survival and the corresponding loss of capacity to effectively resist the totalizing system of capitalist modernity, comprehended as a tendency to produce those ‘individuals’ as pliable elements not merely of but also for that system. Her investigation is focused on theorization of a distinction between ‘ethical’ and ‘survival’ subjectivities as a means of elucidating resistance and capitulation. She has contributed to literary and philosophical debates—in Farsi and English—on the subject of prison and resistance, among others, by written word, under her name and the pseudo-name, Shokoufeh Mobini; she has also participated in a number of academic and non-academic conferences. Her latest presentation, entitled “The Arrival of a New Regime: Torture and the Aesthetics of Resistance”, is to be delivered at the “Conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies” in Toronto.
Ms. Sakhi participated in and contributed to “The Tree That Remembers”, a documentary film on experience of Iranian political prisoners in the first decade after the 1979 revolution, directed by Massoud Raouf and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The film premiered in Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in 2002.
She arrived to Canada as a political refugee in 1992, two years after her release from Evin prison in Tehran. She was a student leftist political activist during and after the 1979 revolution: she was arrested in 1982 and spent eight years in several political prisons in Tehran and its suburban cities.
Sypnosis: A Taste of Mortaddela
Forgetting and Remembering the Summer of 1988
Does the distance of some twenty years clarify reflection, obscure sequences of events, illuminate meanings, render names and dates suspect? Yes. Do any of these effect the essence of the matter? Not in the least. What then is this experience of memories and how can I communicate it to you? Muddled by the daily rememberings and forgettings of the intervening years, momentous events and minute details jostle one another with the familiarity of nocturnal repetition, with the poignancy of the return or death of a lost friend, with the stubbornness of a constant heart. With all this and so much more, it may be best to begin this remembering of the summer of nineteen-eighty-eight with ….
I remember a day in July….
The door opens; a guard’s head appears: "hejab", she orders and closes the door. One of us starts distributing chadors.
In the telling, as close as memory allows to the actual events, truth is contained in the poignant remembrance of the face of a cell-mate being taken away to be shot or hung, the solidarity against the prison regime expressed in a stern and determined face, the feeling of the march taken by the men and women through the streets of Tehran in compliance to the powers that had crushed them. In these moments of naked encounter with life and death, with an unforeseeable future, lays our meanings, the core of our humanity, and, its failure.
How much of this experience is known to you, my younger friends? How much of this have we been able to communicate to you? How much of this have you been digging out of us, your older friends? Are we friends?
Video in English with Farsi voice over
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Lousnak • Elahe Machouf • Red Names • Shirin • Ms.sun • Looli • Hossein Afsahi • Saeed Yousef • Danielle Ouanes
Hassan Pooya • Soudabeh Ardavan • Setareh Abbasi • Shohreh Kia • Mahbubeh • Payam Akhavan • Shahrzad Mojab
Béatrice Vaugrante • Masoud Raouf • Mostafa Henaway • Stephan Kazemi • Saiid Ismati • Zari Daknema • Antigone
Marie Boti • Felicitas Treue • Bahram Ghadimi • Shokoufe Sakhi • Iraj Mesdaghi • Reza Gahfari • Ezat Mossallanejed