u

As if you were carrying the dew for her, wait. Speak to her as a flute would to a frightened violin string, as if you knew what tomorrow would bring. Wait, and polish the night for her ring by ring.

Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian – even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been ‘ghosted’ – or made to seem invisible – by culture itself. It would be putting it mildly to say that the lesbian represents a threat to patriarchal protocol: Western civilization has for centuries been haunted by a fear of ‘women without men’ – of women indifferent or resistant to male desire. Precisely because she challenges the moral, sexual, and psychic authority of men so thoroughly, the 'Amazon’ has always provoked anxiety and hatred. As the lesbian philosopher Monique Wittig has put it, 'The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role 'woman’. It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man.’ Under the circumstances it’s perhaps no wonder that so many men (and some women) have sought to see the lesbian 'disappeared.’

I think I’ve seen the most strong women in that side of the world. In Iran, in Egypt, in Lebanon, in countries that people – women – are so oppressed and under so much pressure. Even in Iran, some regions, like Kurdistan, that even men are putting more pressure on women there. Women are just like machines. Like, they are so strong and free. And I think it’s a very contradictory story that I was feeling freer as a woman in Iran than outside because I think […] it’s like you’re free in a big prison, but sometimes I feel like on the other side of the world we are just in prison in a free world. […] Theatre, art, is not something intellectual, it’s more essential, it’s about living, it’s the fire that is burning in the heart of people, which no one can ever take that from them. And I’m very proud that under all these dictatorships that we’ve had since 700 years ago in Iran it’s like an Olympic fire that generations after generations just try to keep it alive to be able to pass it to next generations, and all the forces are trying to turn it off, turn this fire off, but this fire is so deep and strong, and of course women are a very big part of it because […] women […] are taking all this pressure and they’re becoming butterflies. They’re taking all these horrible, negative things and making them into beautiful gardens.

To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way.