At the Small Press Expo held recently in Bethesda, Maryland, there was a moment of quiet intensity that revealed a lot about current issues over free speech, liberalism, and the war in Iran. To set the stage: the Small Press Expo (SPX) bills itself as “The Premier Event for Graphic Novels, the Comic Arts, and Cartooning.” For a couple days every September, hundreds of independent comics book artists take over a hotel and sell their books, do media interviews, and hold panel discussions.
One such panel, “Iran: Voices from the Ground,” was led by editors Tom Hart and Liz Frances, both of whom have published anthologies featuring young Iranian comic book artists. The moderator was Zareen Choudhury, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker.
The showstopper, however, was Iranian cartoonist Shaghayegh Moazzami, who was there promoting her small comic Haunted: Diary of a Young Iranian Women. Moazzami was born in Iran and then came to Canada as young woman. Haunted depicts the life of a young Iranian woman who is taunted and humiliated by Iran’s morality police, many of whom are women. Even as our heroine is dealing with the death of her father, an older Iranian woman follows her around Tehran insulting her with a vulgar sexual slur over and over. “It’s like dripping water from a faucet when you are trying to sleep,” Moazzami said about the taunting. “It just goes on and on.” Where are Western feminists protesting this?
After her presentation, Moazzami told me that she created the nasty moral police character “as a symbol of all of the women in Iran who are doing that.” She also said she has to ”explain herself” to people still living in Iran.
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