The Etownian >> Features
Hakakian brings diverse art, personality to SCAD
Thursday April 29 2010
NorthropRoya Hakakian stands in Leffler on Tuesday answering questions after her presentation.
Chief among these is Hakakian — a Jewish Iranian writer-journalist who descended upon Elizabethtown College this week to visit with students and deliver the Scholarship Day keynote address.
Throughout her career, Hakakian has displayed a seemingly limitless artistic diversity. She has worn the cloak of a journalist, a documentary filmmaker, a poet and a nonfiction writer, among other things. To mere mortals, this appears to be an almost impossibly varied career. But, as Hakakian nonchalantly put it, “It’s all the same to me.”
According to Hakakian, folks need to appreciate all forms of art before they can truly convey their passion in their medium of choice.
“In order to write well, you must understand painting,” Hakakian said as an example.
Hakakian explained that all art shares common threads. The “fundamental pillars” are the same for every art form. People need only to understand and flesh out these basics, and they can fully express themselves through any medium.
The first of these elements is “having a sense of conviction — a sense of truth,” as Hakakian put it. Artists must know where their honesty stems from in order to express themselves clearly.
The second foundation of art comes out of this principle. People must know how they define themselves in the world to truly know their convictions so that they may genuinely express their passions.
Also, all art must be simple and accessible. Art is meant for the masses.
Most importantly, “[All art] is about storytelling,” Hakakian said.
With these rules in hand, any person with the proper skill set can create any sort of art. The only true requirement is dedication.
And Hakakian brought her sense of passion with full force to Leffler Chapel on Tuesday morning. She stood before the whole of Elizabethtown College as our Scholarship Day keynote speaker.
Hakakian began her talk by discussing globalization. She recalled that her room in the “cosmopolitan heart” of Elizabethtown had sheets made in China and that she was wearing a jacket made in Kuwait.
“The women who sewed this jacket aren’t counted as full citizens in their country yet,” Hakakian said.
She used this image to show that we are all citizens of the world simply because the products we consume originate all over the globe. America is no longer as isolated as it once perceived itself to be in the early 20th century. In that time, America used its distance from the rest of the world to remain separated from international affairs.
However, with the advent of globalization and the Internet, America simply cannot ignore the problems of the world anymore. Hakakian explained, “We cannot claim ignorance anymore. You can no longer ignore the suffering of your fellow human beings.”
After this, Hakakian went on to describe her youth in Tehran, Iran.
Hakakian, whose first name means “dream,” was born in Tehran in 1966. She was raised in a middle class intellectual family in the heart of Iran’s capital. She grew up as a part of one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East.
Hakakian’s childhood was marred with murmurs of the coming Islamic Revolution. She described how her artistic elder brother, Albert, had to be sent to America after the satirical magazine for which he illustrated was shut down by the pre-revolution monarchy.
Despite these rumblings of oppression, Hakakian lived a full and happy childhood. She was in 8th grade when the Iranian people revolted in 1979, throwing out their 2,500-year-old monarchy and instating Ayatollah Khomeini as the leader of a new Iranian Republic.
Hakakian described the Islamic Fundamentalist takeover through a re-education program to which she and the rest of her schoolmates were subjected shortly after the revolution. She related how a very religious schoolmaster referred to girls’ hairlines as “the edge of the apocalypse.” Because of radically conservative beliefs like this, Hakakian and other women in post-revolutionary Iran were forced to wear black shawls to hide their faces.
With this new regime in power, a period of even heavier repression began for the Iranian people, especially the Jewish population.
Fearing the worst, Hakakian’s family escaped to Vienna, Austria in 1985, when she was just 19.
Upon coming to America, Hakakian earned her undergraduate degree in psychology from Brooklyn College and eventually her masters of social work from Hunter College. Both of these campuses are part of the City University of New York.
Currently, Hakakian lives in Connecticut. She still works outside her home, but she admits that her two young sons take up 90 percent of her social life.
She has also remained busy professionally. She submitted a manuscript for a “monster of a book” to her editor only a week before appearing at Elizabethtown.
According to Hakakian, the book is about the assassination of four Iranians in Berlin in 1992. Those killed were members of a Kurdish party in opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini.
The book begins from the moment the assassination takes place and follows the investigation, the trial that stems from it and the trial’s highly influential verdict. Hakakian describes the verdict of this trial as one of the most important in contemporary European history. Despite all this, the story is essentially unknown in America.
Hakakian got the idea for the book after meeting a man who was sitting at the very table where the four Iranian politicians were murdered.
She had a hard time getting the book published in the U.S. because most publishers wanted a story with a more prominent American connection. However, a small publisher finally picked it up, and it is now in the preliminary editing phase.
When asked why she writes nonfiction, Hakakian replied that the real world is more interesting than anything fiction writers can think up. All we need to do is properly understand and closely observe the world around us — and the best stories will emerge.
The Etownian >> Features