Mnouchkine’s paranoia expresses anxiety over the foreignness and dissonance of sīyāh bāzī once it is removed from its original context and simulated by the Nasr Theatre troupe’s performance when transposed from Tehran to Paris. This incongruity, in a different way, is expressed in the transition of sīyāh bāzī from a theatre practice into a cinematic trope, as thematized by Khakipour’s twin epigraphic citations of the form in both her films. Sīyāh bāzī’s new circulation in Iran after the invention of cinema did not contradict but rather extended its history of mobility. As Bahrām Bāyzāī suggested in a foundational and frequently cited text on the history of Iranian theatre, sīyāh bāzī’s origins lie in the scattering of indigenous peoples in the Indian subcontinent (kowlī) throughout the Iranian plateau before and after Islam (Reference Bāyzāī2000:184). In the Shahnameh, the poet Firdawsī (940–1019/1025 CE) describes a related anecdote: the Sasanian king Bahram Gur asked the Indian King for singers and dancers, and “received 4,000 gypsies in response” (in Mathee and Baron Reference Mathee and Baron2000). As Rudi Mathee and Beth Baron (Reference Mathee and Baron2000) point out, in Persian literature Indian kowlī men are commonly presented as professional musicians and kowlī women as entertainers. Despite his insistence on the correlation, Bāyzāī does not explain why the South Asian kowlī, to whom the author traces the figure of the sīyāh, needed to exaggerate his already dark skin with black smoke or ash to create comedic effect, or why the inherent comedy of blackness should appear self‐evident.

Part II: Filmic Sīyāh Bāzī

Cinema extends a history of making images portable. From site‐specific frescoes to book illuminations and Renaissance oil paintings, this history is also one of shifting scale and perspective (Elsaesser Reference Elsaesser2016). At first glance, the transubstantiation of sīyāh bāzī appears to articulate a teleology of ever‐increasing mobility: from vagrant but stationary theatre performed on portable wooden stages (rūhawzī, or takht‐i hawzī; on the plank)Footnote ¹⁰ during the Safavid era, to its entry into theatre halls (tamāshawkhānah) as entr’acts ( pīsh pardah) during the Qajar period (Nasīrīyān Reference Nasīrīyān1978), to its induction into local kafah (café) culture under the Pahlavi regime in the 1930s, to its inscription onto celluloid in 1950s fīlmfārsī, to stylized television programming in the 1970s and ’80s, and then to the digital images of the 21st century. Black‐and‐white footage of Hasan Sīyāh opens both The Joymakers and Shadi. The rūhawzī scene in which Ardavan Mofid entertains a group of children syncs to the sound of film coiling through projector reels, as if to indicate a temporal shift in the documentary — digital back to analog. Vertical scratches slightly disfigure the preserved film stock, further eliciting a temporal density in Hasan Sīyāh that is conveyed through poor resolution and opaque images. Like the digital glitch effect, damaged celluloid draws attention to its obsolescent materiality and mirrors the precarious, unscripted, and undocumented artifactuality of sīyāh bāzī — a sense of “agedness” that exceeds historicization or historical specificity and reflects its myriad spurious origin stories. Degraded stock also allegorizes the dense impurity at the heart of visuality. Crisp images cannot guarantee the object’s integrity; neither can one count on a logical hierarchy to characterize scales of resolution.

Figure 5.

Film still from a clip of the prerevolutionary film Hasan Sīyāh (1972), which opens Maryam Khakipour’s The Joymakers (2004). (Screenshot courtesy of Parisa Vaziri)

The embedded footage alludes specifically to two earlier moments in sīyāh bāzī’s transmedial genealogy: its performances on backyard wooden stages and in the Iranian commercial cinema known as fīlmfārsī. These two moments’ truths become mutually entangled through the synchronized reel track. Even while noting this potent transmission from rūhawzī to film, commentators rarely draw out any theoretical implications, treating the movement from context‐specific sīyāh bāzī to film as a mere chronological event — ignoring how the shift recursively affects the meaning of the practice and creates epistemological tension.Footnote ¹¹ This neglect can only partly be explained by the derogatory view of fīlmfārsī, which has resulted in its being erased from Anglophone Iranian film scholarship, despite fīlmfārsī’s significance in Iran’s 20th‐century domestic film industry in relation to the nation’s statistically marginal but internationally championed art cinema.Footnote ¹² Rather, the unthought transmediality of sīyāh bāzī seems to do with the inheritance of a literary approach to studying media that privileges narrative and content over cinema’s formal capacities. By transforming the borders and conditions of its reception, the movement of sīyāh bāzī onto cinema and later television screens demands a rethinking of the critical role played by the interaction between performers and changing audiences for the production of its meaning, as well as sīyāh bāzī’s relationship to American blackface minstrelsy, whose medium and structures of circulation it now shares.

Figure 6.

Close up of Ardavan Mofid acting as the sıyāh in Hasan Sıyāh. (Screenshot courtesy of Parisa Vaziri)

Sīyāh bāzī’s humor exhumes a peculiar intimacy and power dissymmetry between the blackface figure and the audience. “All the audience members see themselves in the sīyāh,” one actor reports to the viewers of The Joymakers, after an onstage scene in which he, playing the sīyāh, climbs onto a throne with his back to the audience, shakes his hips, sits, and makes arbitrary commands. “No wonder whoever comes up here never wants to come back down,” he announces in creaking Persian. It is only because the sīyāh represents the lowest possible stratum of society that his pleonastic and outrageous insolence (bī‐hayāyī), often centering around sexual taboos, elicits humor. When asked to address Gulsāna (a woman, played by Shadi), the sīyāh loudly calls her khul nana (idiot mama). Glottal scrapes contribute to the absurdity produced by confused consonants. Low social rank and improper Persian, suggests anthropologist William O. Beeman, explain why children, “the most restricted members of society” (Beeman Reference Beeman, Bonine and Keddie1981a:524) particularly relish sīyāh bāzī performance. Beatific young faces temper the violence of sīyāh bāzī’s laughter in the Osanlu clip. In the rural celebrations Beeman attended during the 1970s, two or three men worked full‐time to keep the children who were in the first rows of spectators from inching too close to the performers (Reference Beeman1981b:375).

As a stock character foil to the penurious, dyspeptic, and falsely pious haji — who stuffs a pillow under his shirt to symbolize greed (Gharībpūr Reference Gharībpūr2005), the sīyāh is not only affable, but adorable: “Contrasting with his dark and sombre face is a luminous heart” (Haery Reference Haery1982:72). And yet to celebrate his charm without examining its source is to do so in bad faith. His actions lack consequences because the sīyāh is, like a lovable pet, beyond social rank and therefore innocent of the anathematizing judgments of the social world for which his presence offers respite. The “immersion into blackness,” writes Lewis Gordon, is “the desire to be protected from human beings” (Reference Gordon1995:118). The disavowed source of the sīyāh’s wretched station is conveyed through his blackness, but his blackness is dynamic and multisensory — not only epidermal, but visceral, verbal, aural, gestural, affective. Indeed, his cosmetic and cosmic blackness does not belong to, on, or in the body, but draws the body toward its outermost limits, to a space that is both beyond the body and beyond the world. Broken black speech, a pervasive feature of racial caricatures, renders black as unassimilable. Aphetic language, nonsequiturs, solecisms, and malapropisms ensure the “joke” of black communicative rationality (Warren Reference Warren2018).Footnote ¹³ Unable to pronounce Persian syllables properly, the sīyāh missounds “s” for the letter shīn (sh), and the sound “l” for re (r) (Gharībpūr Reference Gharībpūr2005); “[he] breaches all of the rules and principles of words, grammar and pronunciation in the Farsi [sic] language,” transforming innocent phrases into ribald commentary, and metamorphosing the audience’s “smiles into loud laughter” (Isaloo Reference Isaloo2017:74). Black subversion of communication is thus the condition of ludic pleasure in sīyāh bāzī, but also requires intimate knowledge of the Persian language and its idiomatic structures as inherent to its success. (In the absence of access to this basic element of sīyāh bāzī’s comedy, Mnouchkine encounters profound discomfort.)

If language is the basis upon which reality materializes as meaningful and organized for its speakers, mutilated grammar lampoons the security of propriety and proper delivery. No wonder that theorists of laughter, in the absence of any physiological justification, see it as the exhalation of accumulated tension and an index of the fundamentally schismatic nature of humanness (Baudelaire [1868] Reference Baudelaire2015). Anthropologists understand the prevalence of sīyāh bāzī at occasions of high tension, such as weddings, as a necessary relief from pressured social performances predicated on codified and internalized hierarchies (Beeman Reference Beeman1981b). But because sensual registers converge in cinema, this ruined speech and general vehicle of comedy is layered by other mechanisms — frame movement, angle, depth of field. More specifically, perspective and point‐of‐view shots highlight and further disfigure meaning even as the source of perspective effaces its own constitution. In both televised broadcasting of sīyāh bāzī in the 1970s and the cinematic forms that appeared earlier in fīlmfārsī, point‐of‐view shots shuttle back and forth between a perspective from which the sīyāh is seen, and one from which the audience can be seen looking and enjoying his performance, suggesting a dislocation and revitalization of the comedic object that renews emphasis on projection — the audience’s implication in the production of humor.

Figure 7.

Children laughing at the sīyāh bāzī spectacle in Hasan sīyāh. (Screenshot courtesy of Parisa Vaziri)

As if replicating its epigraphic citation — Hasan Sīyāh’s sīyāh bāzī — The Joymakers adapts this stratagem of pairing and proliferating viewpoints. In the clip of Hasan Sīyāh, shots alternate between the spectacle of Ardavan Mofid’s havoc and children who watch and laugh along the sides of the pool. In the spectacle, Mofid, the sīyāh, refuses through gesture and circumvention to comply with a café owner’s orders to leave his makeshift restaurant. In defiance, the sīyāh pours and rubs a bowl of white milky fluid on a café customer’s head. A medium close‐up of a group of giggling children who mime his actions then substitutes and supplements the spectacle. The camera’s shifting points of view “complete” the sense of sīyāh bāzī — whose most important dimension lies less in the intradiegetic plane of events between actors than in the relation of desire actualized through the audience‐sīyāh dynamic. The Hasan Sīyāh clip is “embedded” in The Joymakers. Later in the film, candid interview sequences intercut overhead shots of sīyāh bāzī in action on the Nasr Theatre stage and shots of individual audience members — this time, adults — roaring with laughter.

By virtue of its formal possibilities, filmic sīyāh bāzī describes a shift in the ontology of sīyāh bāzī. In the rehearsal at the Théâtre du Soleil, a seemingly untranslatable moment unleashes a semiotic antiblackness that surfaces as tension, confused but explosive affect, rather than as lucid meaning. Mnouchkine never once explicitly suggests a problem with the very essence of sīyāh bāzī. Perhaps, from her position, she cannot suggest, or even truly see the source of what moves her to frustration. Like the theatre rehearsal in Paris, filmic sīyāh bāzī exposes an inner dimension of sīyāh bāzī that is revealed, on the one hand, by the very mobility of the medium of film and the possibilities of dissemination it enables. On the other hand, the inclusion of the spectacle within the film suggests that the sīyāh now performs for two connected audiences — two viewers: the diegetic spectator and the extradiegetic spectator who watches the spectators watching. In the theatre rehearsal, cultural friction sparks an untapped insight into an internal “offness.” In film, doubled spectatorship embeds reflexivity within a new medium. But just as Mnouchkine’s inarticulable malaise goes nowhere and changes nothing, film’s embedded reflexivity does not necessarily lead to new realizations.

Film also returns sīyāh bāzī to the original essence that commentators so boldly insist makes sīyāh bāzī unlike other forms of blackface minstrelsy: the paramount audience‐performer dynamic is a modular, political relation. Hence, the prevalence of the aside in sīyāh bāzī, in which characters momentarily but frequently step outside of their roles (Nasīrīyān Reference Nasīrīyān1978:24). This articulation heightens the exceptionalism that commentators of sīyāh bāzī consistently prize at the expense of attempts to understand the centrality of blackness to sīyāh bāzī’s valued politicism. Exceptionalism disregards the universally political function of blackface minstrelsy in the emergence of global public spheres. In bringing together multiple, discordant frames of reference through mangled speech, sīyāh bāzī activates schismogenesis, laughter; and by revealing the human to be fundamentally nonidentical to itself, blackface breaks with the illusion of one real world. By virtue of form, filmic sīyāh bāzī centralizes and thematizes this previously latent discordance of the frame.

Scholarship on blackface minstrelsy has long noted the political character of this tradition and connected it to the growth of American democratic culture, a vernacular form of producing national identity that “[slashes] back at the pretensions and politesse of authority” (Lhamon Reference Lhamon1998:44). W.T. Lhamon describes the “moiling” proletarian attraction to blackface as a method of defiance and alchemical community‐building — “Abstracting themselves as blacks,” immigrant groups came together under the semaphore of blackness in 19th‐century North America (44). Eventual entrepreneurial control over youth‐driven grassroots minstrelsy evaporated its inherent political critique of the merchant class in the US just as Pahlavi‐era censorship muted the politicism of sīyāh bāzī as it moved from itinerant improvisation to the screen. Unlike the Safavid and Qajar kings who patronized minstrelsy, understanding clowning (dalghak) as a source, if not the only source, of communication between the populace and the royal court (Anṣārī Reference Anṣārī2008; Nūrbakhsh Reference Nūrbakhsh1976; Martin Reference Martin2007), Reza Shah’s authoritarian censorship dissolved the critiques embedded in sīyāh bāzī. Identification and dissociation can coexist (Lhamon Reference Lhamon1998; Jones Reference Jones2014), and a vehicle of liberation can function simultaneously as a tool of racial subjection (Hartman Reference Hartman1997), just as marginalized groups’ participation in blackface does not prove its innocuousness (Valle Reference Valle2019). The resonances between regional traditions exceeds analogy. The more diachronically and comparatively oriented iterations of scholarship situates blackface minstrelsy within a historical tradition that includes Elizabethan theatre, English folk festivals, Dutch farce, and the ubiquitously influential commedia dell’arte (Rehin Reference Rehin1975). The reemergent Mediterranean common ground of sīyāh bāzī and the more familiar North American blackface minstrelsy is thus worth closer consideration and attests to the cross‐civilizational exchanges of the 1500s (Subrahmanyam Reference Subrahmanyam1997). Robert Hornback suggests Old World theatrical mockery of black dialect “emerged first on the Iberian Peninsula before extending to England by the end of the sixteenth century” (Reference Hornback2018:143), echoing scholarship that suggests that the tradition of blackface comedy moved East to West, and not the other way around. It is not inconceivable to imagine Persian sīyāh bāzī as the source of Western forms of blackface minstrelsy, including its maligned American version that Persian commentators hold at a far distance.Footnote ¹⁴

So long as one does not take seriously the political exceptionalism that Iranian commentators emphasize, the antique and medieval contacts between sīyāh bāzī, commedia dell’arte, and European and North American minstrelsy may seem like a pile of merely amusing, unverifiable historical details. And yet, the apocryphal historical origins and chronological narratives presented by Iranian commentators all share a common morphology that it is worth attending to: the culmination of sīyāh bāzī during the Safavid period. This ubiquitous observation suggests a synchronic development, a common force propelling sīyāh bāzī into its most “complete” (kāmil) shape (Anṣārī Reference Anṣārī2008:44), and the simultaneous eruption of the performative tradition known as Muharram (including ta’ziyeh theatre) into an officiated public ritual. In a work that chronicles dramatic shifts in state‐society relations under Shah Abbas I (1571–1629 CE), Babak Rahimi identifies the inception of an early modern public sphere and the “crystallization of distinct social spaces” in 17th‐century Safavid Iran (Reference Rahimi2012:13). For Rahimi, increasing Safavid sponsorship of Shi’a mourning rituals like Muharram and the proliferation of ceremonial sites created a distinctly Persian “theatre state,” which both affirmed a permanent religio‐national identity and authority transcending individual life as it produced possibilities for carnivalization and misrule. The growth of festive additions to the Muharram mourning rituals (fireworks, spectacularized and orchestrated self‐flagellation — not featured in documentations of earlier iterations) corresponded to Safavid economic growth, symbolically enshrined by Isfahan’s 1598 designation as the new capital of Iran, Isfahan nisf‐i jahān (Isfahan, Half of the World).

In commentary, sīyāh bāzī is often taken to be synonymous with performative traditions that are also thought to have developed alongside rawzah khānī (garden recitations), which are narrations of the life, deeds, and suffering of Shi’ite martyrs (Nīkfām Reference Nīkfām2005; Isaloo Reference Isaloo2017). In his work on the Muharram rituals, Peter Chelkowski saw ta’ziyeh as an outgrowth of more stationary garden traditions of religious recitation and the mobile commemorations reliving the events of Karbala on wheeled platforms, horses, and camels and through living tableaux of martyrs — a sort of “compromise between the moving procession and the stationary recitation […] staged at street intersections and squares” (Reference Chelkowski1979:4). Indeed, nonreligious and religious theatre developed simultaneously in Safavid Iran (Haery Reference Haery1982:17). If the Safavid project entailed nothing less than the spiritual consolidation of Persian national identity, as classical scholarship devoted to the period suggests (Arjomand Reference Arjomand1984; Savory Reference Savory1980) and as more recent scholarship on its construction of political theatricality affirms (Rahimi Reference Rahimi2012), then sīyāh bāzī, like the Muharram rituals, evolved in the crucible of Persianization. There is then, a deeply sedimented intimacy between the sīyāh figure — “the spokesman of the people” — and Persianness itself. If comedy “helps us test or figure out what it means to say ‘us,’” then its foundational status in the development of civil society is unsurprising (Berlant and Ngai Reference Berlant and Ngai2017:235). Sīyāh bāzī yields a collective pronoun and gestures toward forms of intersubjectivity whose genesis depends on a prosthetic and excluded blackness that bears the terror of the “we” and manifests as its condition of possibility and expression. A robust and contemporary version of this intimacy seeps through the coercive pathos of The Joymakers, and is finally affirmed by Shadi.

The emotive text affects Mnouchkine, who confesses to being “moved” by the joymakers’ losses: “I asked myself,” (after seeing Khakipour’s film), “what would I want a friend to do for me?” Yet, her recriminatory reaction to the Nasr troupe’s dress rehearsal in Paris shows that translation erodes the object’s integrity; she recommends better subtitles. But language cannot reconcile nonlinguistic loss. Her visceral response (“Je ne comprends rien!”) releases an intuition of violence; this interruption is also allegorical. Violence materializes wherever sīyāh bāzī has traveled. Hamid Naficy writes of the “dissonance” produced when in the 1980s Southern California Iranians in exile began producing television programs and commercials featuring the sīyāh as Hājī Fīrūz in the month before the Persian New Year (Reference Naficy1993:183). Such dissonance shows that this intimacy between blackness and the political produces pleasure in proportion to displeasure, anxiety, or rage. In blackface, the conflation of terror and enjoyment is never absolute, predictable, or fully legible. The black mask generates a void that stands in for the death of the singular, and births or ventriloquizes a collective existence.

Figure 8.

The sīyāh (right) rehearsing at Théâtre du Soleil, 2006. (Photo by Behnam Monadizadeh)

Miraculously, despite the preperformance drama, the Nasr troupe eventually performs their sīyāh bāzī sketches to warm audience reception at the Théâtre du Soleil. In the final scenes of Shadi, Mnouchkine’s anxiety about the troupe’s performance is assuaged by this success. Brief sequences of the troupe performing onstage alternate with shots of a packed French audience who aggressively applaud. (The sequence frames individual actors sulking offstage between acts: Shadi has learned about Abbas’s multiple sexual affairs back in Tehran; as if in revenge of her departure, he has taken their son away from Shadi’s mother and to his own mother’s house.)

The performance culminates in a standing ovation and a beaming Mnouchkine. Blackface comedy — but especially, or perhaps only, somebody else’s — shatters the fear attached to modern remonstrations of political correctness and liberates the French audience’s raucous laughter. Resurfaced decades‐old photographs of politicians guised in blackface in the US and elsewhere elicit contemporary scandal, and however mildly and transiently, affirm the profanity of blackface in postwar Western liberal democracies. “Polite, politically correct society” disclaims, but also privatizes blackface, transposing it from the proscenium to the exclusionary and orgiastic spaces of secret societies and fraternity parties (Cole Reference Cole and Johnson2012:225). Its deceptive disappearance from public space is continuously interrupted and invaded by the archaic in the form of infinitely reproducible still and moving, material and psychic, cultural, theological, and mythological imagery. Frantz Fanon, drawing on psychoanalytic language, aptly called this the imago of the “nègre” — untimely, anoriginary; historicism fails its truth (Fanon [1952] Reference Fanon2008; Marriott Reference Marriott2013).

In his comparative study of sīyāh bāzī, L’al Bakhsh (2016) suggests that the variety of hat shapes (crown [tāj], cone [kulā būqī ], skullcap [ fīnah], and fez) exemplify the sīyāh’s malleability and his evolution throughout Iranian history, a figure unfolding from a mythical symbol. Writing on blackface minstrelsy as the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and of minstrelsy for the animation industry more generally, Nicholas Sammond argues against the “originary fantasy” that positions one temporal iteration of blackface as more “genuine” than another; its cultural durability is demonstrated by adaptability, the “fantastic nature of imagined blackness” (Reference Sammond2015:23). One might add to this a caution about the kind of “disciplinary decadence” (Gordon Reference Gordon2014) that falls into the fantasy or escapism of historicism — more colloquially, that misses the forest for the trees. For as I have suggested, the very feature Iranian scholars assume makes sīyāh bāzī exceptional — its politicism — is shared ubiquitously by other, more legibly virulent iterations. “By definition,” writes George Rehin against the insularity of scholarship on blackface, “there is nothing to compare to a unique phenomenon” (Reference Rehin1975:685). Where scholarship on blackface has moved toward the transnational, assumptions about a Euro‐American origin take the 19th century as a starting point and follow the signs of a dispersal premised a priori on colonialism and globalization. By contrast, the obscure longevity of sīyāh bāzī undermines the commonplace West‐East, North‐South, and even South‐South itinerary of racial tropes, evoking a far more tortuous, arcane lineage. “Each of [the sīyāh’s] movements is occult (nahuftah)” (Nasīrīyān Reference Nasīrīyān1978:23). The ontic political senses of sīyāh bāzī dissolve in translation or by the whims of regime, but the more general politicism of blackface connects to the very structure of its comedic form. The humor released in colliding registers of meaning have implications for forms of being (you, us, them, world): “We wish that the jokes would be such that we could all laugh together,” Saeid Shanbehzadeh, a musician from Būshihr, says in an interview on Black Iranians’ reactions to and experience of sīyāh bāzī (Iran International 2019). In producing and fracturing univocity, blackface comedy ciphers an intransigent world order whose anatomy shifts shape, appears and disappears according to how one looks, where one stands, and what makes one laugh.

Figure 9.

Film still from Maryam Khakipour’s Shadi (2008). The audience at the Théâtre du Soleil watches the sīyāh bāzā performance intently. (Screenshot courtesy of Parisa Vaziri)