Colonial time in tension: Decolonizing temporal imaginaries

Colonial time in tension

The concept of colonial time being used in our argument is not reducible solely to European (post)-colonial experience and moves beyond Thompsonian and Foucaultian understandings. The term refers to the fractured process by which governing powers/elites attempt to colonize the past, present, and future by imposing temporal regimes through things like task orientation regulation (wage work), public monuments, media censorship, and prison systems. Colonial time is adaptable and context dependent (Brook, 2009). It exhibits a flow, a movement that is continually being co-constituted and redefined by tensions (Cooper, 1997), social and material contexts, as well as hierarchies of gender, ethnic, class, spiritual, and sexual difference (Mamdani, 1996). Nonetheless there is a centrality in our understanding of colonizing time – past, present, and future – based on the attempt to manipulate and project a mediated temporal imaginary. As EP Thompson (1967) observes, states operating within capitalist systems commodify time and remove it from social relations in an effort to prevent alternative modes of social-economic task organization and to ensure orderly industrial production and free market exchange. In contrast, Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘time-sense’, like Thompson (1967), also fails to accurately account for the agency of individuals to construct/hybridize time. Foucault (1977) posits that once regimes of time are imposed by states they soon become internalized and self-imposed – time becomes colonized by the self. ¹ Yet because time is culturally defined and socially patterned, there exists spaces of tension, between resistance and accommodation, where mediated time is not absolute and does not internalize, but appears to be decolonized – autonomously existing, flourishing, and hybridizing within systems of violent physical and temporal coercion (Fabian, 1987; Pickering, 2004). ² As we will demonstrate, an important hitherto unacknowledged example of colonial time and its non-internalized uncontrollable subversion is the case study of post-revolution Iran’s attempt to colonize time, and mediate/control the past, present, and future through prisons and imprisonment. Despite the violent coercion of the state and its prison apparatus, we argue that prisoner memoirs and narratives reveal uncontrollable sites of tension and articulation of decolonized temporal imaginaries.

Before examining colonial time in post-revolution Iran and prisoner memoirs, this article will explore the contours of how temporality is colonized and the tensions inherent to this fractured process. Richard Wilks (1994) conceptualization of visual culture in the governance of temporality in Belize and Kathleen Pickering’s (2004) exploration of Lakota time are instructive examples that demonstrate how time can exist non-internalized, hybridized, and within/despite contexts of temporal colonization. Wilks (1994: 96) denotes that before the introduction of television, Belize operated on colonial time – defined by the merger of time, distance, and difference – that objectified the concept of tradition and thus reproduced notions of modernity through the binary of civilized and uncivilized. However, the introduction of television in the 1960s, the creation of ‘illegal’ local stations, and a growing rural dependence on broadcasting, nurtured a non-colonial Belizian TV time that was ‘out of control’ for the ‘political and cultural elite’ (Wilks, 1994: 98). This has resulted in the conservative nationalist forces, which first celebrated mass media, to now rebuke television as de-unifying the Belizian national identity and promoting Americanization. As Wilks (1994: 99–100) demonstrates, instead of reproducing colonial time and notions of modernity vis-à-vis unattainable distance between metropole-colony, television allows Belizian’s to create culture in new ways and reject linear teleologys of modernity. It is precisely this tension within colonial time which is important to consider for the purpose of our argument. While television was initially deployed by the cultural and political elite to buttress an anti-colonial national consciousness (Wilks, 1994: 101–102), it ultimately had unintended consequences – TV time came to challenge and replace colonial time. We argue that in the context of post-revolution Iran a similar tension exists within the state’s prison apparatus. Instead of aiding in the imposition of a mediated colonial time, it failed to become internalized within prisoners whom articulated alternative temporal imaginaries.

Kathleen Pickering (2004) further provides an example of how local conceptions of time and its constructions function uncontrollably. The Lakota in the United States (U.S) have their own non-Western understanding of time that is socially rooted and defies ‘binary assumptions of internalized domination by or active resistance to the clock’ (Pickering, 2004: 86). This alternative Lakota time sense is predicated on how individuals existing within a community choose to enrich themselves each day through leisurely personal and social relations (Pickering, 2004: 94–96). Central to this decolonized Lakota time sense is an intertwining relationship between wage work and ‘off the clock’ economic and social tasks. Pickering (2004: 87) locates the struggle over time within material and social-cultural contexts where temporal regimes attempt to impose a regulated form of task orientation. Settler United States policies targeting the Lakota have the effect of attempting to control time, reproducing colonial time and attempted orderly control over indigenous bodies. Welfare reform for example, required that individuals work 30 hours a week in order to receive state benefits (Pickering, 2004: 94). Yet this had uncontrollable consequences as the Lakota neither actively resisted nor internalized time as regulated by U.S officials and policy – they revised the wage work regulation by participating when it suited their own interests, social pursuits and decolonized time sense (Pickering, 2004: 88). ³ For Pickering (2004: 86–87, 92–94) this persistence is an anthropological proof that regimes of time do not necessarily internalize, contrary to Foucaultian formulations, and how time sense is socially patterned within local socio-cultural, spiritual, political-economic, and epistemological contexts. Following Pickering (2004), we read Iranian prisoner memoirs and narratives against the dichotomy of resistance or accommodation. They are examples of the existence of non-internalized decolonized temporal imaginaries within an authoritarian state, baring the tensions of colonial time. The Prisoner, not unlike the Lakota, is able to live time differently –autonomously, uncontrollably, self-actualizingly, non-linearly and non-teleologically – outside of the ‘masters gaze’, all the while living and dying within state structures of violence.

Fundamentally, states themselves act as imaginary communities (Anderson, 1991) that rely on the transmission and reproduction of cultural values, histories, and temporalities, to preserve colonial time and ordered governance. Like the present and future, the past is also a fractured site of colonization (Mamdani, 1996). Memory therefore is not only individually intimate but also ‘borne by living societies … open to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting’ (Nora, 1989). Nora (1989: 7) pinpoints the utility of memory as a behavioural mechanism in its ‘transmission and conservation of collectively remembered values, whether through churches or schools, the family, or the state … that prepared a smooth passage from the past to the future … whether for reaction, progress, or revolution’. It reinforces among individuals a hegemonic identity, culture, value set, and history consisting of an authoritative subject of knowledge, moving forward in linear time, achieving teleological progress towards present conditions of modernity (or its absence). It is materialist, open to normative articulations of time, but it does not account for alternative spiritualties or epistemologies. Temporal governance and the production of knowledge(s) are central to colonial time ((Miyoshi, 1993 and Osterhammel, 2014). These colonial temporal structures require regulatory standardization – informed by astronomical, chronological, and mathematical methodologies within linear history – to create a secure chronology (Osterhammel, 2014: 67). This spatial and temporal precision, it is argued, allows for the inclusion of internal differentiation, discontinuity, repetition, and the non-simultaneous but overlapping of processes, within historical narratives (Winter, 2007). Yet what remains critically unaccounted for is the inherent tensions within colonial times attempt to negate alternative and hybridized temporal imaginaries.

Furthermore a recent turn towards queering temporality by feminist scholars has shown how within structures of colonial time, time can still be lived or performed non-linearly, as a ‘bodily point of erotic difference’ (Barad, 2014; Freeman, 2007). This interpretation of time as a queer phenomenon, as the ‘felt bodily experience of erotic difference’ (Barad, 2014; Freeman, 2007), has provided a re-imagining of how we live time and how we might live it differently. There has also been a renewed concern over storytelling, or those ceremonies of belief, in which ‘brings the imagination and reality together’, rationalizing the ‘irrational mystery at the centre’ of life (Chamberlin, 2004). The practice of believing in our stories simultaneously both connects and separates while silencing and exemplifying – it gives meaning and values to the places we call home, describing our place in the universe, origins, identity, allegiances to others, and the divine. These stories are therefore ‘contradictory covenants’, defining the contours of the ‘subjective submission to community’ (Chamberlin, 2004). Paul Celan illustrates this performativity when stating that ‘there is no difference between a handshake and a poem’ (Lévinas and Melville, 1978). Here too there is a bodily strangeness and possibility in reconfiguring temporality, space, relationships to land and each other, through narrative. The scientific value of these stories is irrelevant, but rather they exist in a world of ‘probably’ and ‘probably not’ (Khan, qtd in Dauphinee, 2015), ⁴ containing a power to shape and transform subjectivities. It is this power of language, which is also paradoxically confining (Standish, 1992) and liberating, that allows for an embrace of strangeness and rejection of linear temporality, questioning; where I belong, the categories of them and us, and the relationship between past, present, and future. These challenges to the tensions of colonial time have provided a space for further investigation into alternative non-internalized decolonial temporal imaginaries (Bluedorn and Standifer, 2006). ⁵

But in what context might Iran, a site of ‘Eastern’ imperial politics with no direct history of European colonization, be considered a colonized space where temporal imaginaries are mediated and alternatives violently silenced? Iran is an example par excellence of an authoritarian state that operationalizes colonial time. By selectively mediating the past – specifically the violence of the consolidation of the post-revolutionary regime – and introducing progressive linear teleologys in order to colonize time, the post-revolutionary regime has violently reproduced and limited temporal imaginaries. Such dictatorial states are the colonizers of their own peoples imaginations as they use the ‘silences of history’ (Trouillot, 1995) to transmit mediated memories of the collective. By taking advantage of the linearity of time dictatorial states create a past that is unseen-able and a future that is unthinkable (Bloch, 2014). ⁶ Therefore, they limit the imagination of people conditioned by a particular social reality, reproducing a colonized history and temporality. One of the central instruments used by the Iranian regime to colonize the past, present, and future of Iranians is through prison and imprisonment.

The introduction of European style modernization to judicial system under Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979) in Iran made permanent prisons a bureaucratic necessity (Abrahamian, 1999). Nineteenth-century Iran, as observed by Abrahamian (1999), under the Qajar dynasty (1797–1925) was a Shiite society with a monarchical tradition as it allowed the Shah to rule autocratically and state-led punishment was exacted with no legal–judicial procedure and by inflicting physical harm or death. The reform to this system under the Pahlavi dynasty introduced new sets of legal procedures aligned with the trappings of a new ‘modern’ Iranian state (Abrahamian, 1999). The introduction of ‘modern’ prisons gave full access to minute details of prisoners’ lives and created a new site to control their past, present, and future. After the revolution of 1979, Pahlavi autocracy was replaced by Khomeini’s theocracy, however, the prison system remained the same. Although the Islamic Republic has built itself upon the ideology of independence and rupture from western ‘modern’ influence, it still provoked the same sets of colonizing practices to preserve its control over public and private, past and present, time and imagination. Torture, forced confessions, and public executions, a trend that started in the Pahlavi era has been perfected by the Islamic regime and used as an ‘ideological warfare’ to colonize ‘the hearts and minds’ of Iranians, consequently imposing imaginative limitations and possibilities (Abrahamian, 1999: 3). Iranian subjectivity under the Islamic regime has been shaped through the ignored and unacknowledged violence that haunts both the public and private spheres and exists trans-generationally; this is why there is significant continuity in the struggles between Leftist activists against the regime in the 1980s and the contemporary ‘Green’ democratic movement. This new temporal regime of colonial time imposed by the horror of torture and imprisonment has actively attempted to colonize the past, present, and future of Iranians, making grieving (past/present) and imagining (future) impossible. But has it successfully achieved its aim; do there exist any tensions?

The challenges to this imaginative limitation comes from sites of tensions, such as prisons, where colonial time is not internalized but resisted, accommodated, and hybridized. The spaces of tension such as prison confronts the unseen past within a collective memory in order to decolonize the imagination and enact other (im)possibilities. Therefore, memoirs and narratives of political prisoners or state-led violence survivors become important in revealing these sites of tension and articulation of decolonized temporal imaginaries. The lived experience/memories of survivors of trauma are examples of how liner time is not desirable or possible. Through flash backs of violence and witnessing, the only way to imagine a possibility beyond what it is now is to revisit the past and to imagine an alternative for the present/future. However, this is not to claim that prisoner memoirs bare any authentic truth, otherwise unknown to social sciences, as the value of these memoirs is beyond their standpoint epistemologies (Dauphinee, 2015). ⁷ Memoirs of political prisoners and their narratives of hope and political imagination – when written, read, or shared – allows for movement beyond temporal linearity, decolonizing colonial time. It is possible to read a narrative and a memoir to imagine another history not limited by progression, mediation, and teleology. Prisoner memoirs and narratives bare a tension that exists within not only the state’s prison apparatus but in colonial time. By failing/resisting to internalize a mediated colonial time, these memoirs offer an articulation of alternative temporal imaginaries where the boundaries of past, present, and future can be challenged.

Within the context of post-revolutionary Iran, imagining different possibilities and alternatives become possible when we move beyond linear understandings of time towards a fluid temporal imaginary that is spatially grounded. When we talk about time in a linear way, we interpret our relationship with the past and present through a teleological framework. As Mark Freeman (qtd in Molly Andrews, 2014) poses,

clock time is but one concept of time, and it does well to organize and order those features of the world characterized by linearity, by the inexorable forwardness of (certain) natural processes … it cannot and does not do justice to those features of the human realm that go beyond linearity, that involve movement not only from the past to present but from present to past, ever again.

Towards a decolonized imaginary

We revisit our pasts on a daily basis, to think about how and why our lives have become what they are in the present. What if we hadn’t taken the path that we are on and what if we haven’t done the things that we have done before, or lived differently – what would the present look like? Might everything have been different or unrecognizable? We imagine our lives with other possibilities, moving beyond past, present, and future, moving through future, past, and present, traversing temporal linearity. This provides us with the possibility for moving beyond imaginative limitations – or in other words, to decolonize time. To imagine is to think about the past, to ground oneself in the present while thinking about a possible future that might have come into being, or those futures which never were. To imagine is to be able to think about an alternative path, one without the wounds that we have experienced, and to be free of the linearity of colonial time – how might past, present, and future, be different? For Mary Warnock (qtd in Andrews, 2014) imagination is that which ‘enables us to perceive things as pointing beyond themselves, or having [a] sense’ of alternative possibilities, radical futurity, and responsibility for entanglements. There are many things in our lives that could be imagined differently; however, this imagination is not necessarily about regret. It is not so much about moving from the present to the past in order to undo or rectify, but rather is an ethical–political exercise in hope (Derrida, 2007) that one might discover new decolonized temporal imaginaries. This language of possibility, revisiting open wounds of the past with the hope of imagining another future, is a key feature of memoir pedagogy, listening, and sharing political narratives.

If we consider that its imagination that offers both the possibility of history and of a tomorrow we need to expand and decolonize our conception of time beyond teleological linearity. Colonial time presupposes stages of (non)-modernity which not only entraps our imaginations in the so called post-colonial era – limiting the possibility of movement and healing/revisiting open wounds of the past – but it also deprives our imagination of the possibilities of inheritance, futurity, and alternative temporalities (Garuba, 2007 and Dirlik, 2007). It does this by limiting the boundaries of inheritance and responsibility to the past, thereby reproducing a mediated temporal imagination that cannot move beyond teleological linearity. Thus, decolonizing time becomes quintessential not just in how we think about our past but also in how we imagine possibilities in the past, present, and future. Decolonizing time, then, is the prerequisite for decolonizing and reconfiguring the imagination. In the following section we introduce prisoner memoirs to illustrate how time can be experienced non-linearly and non-teleologically, where the boundaries of past, present, and future are disrupted and the dominant normative notions of colonial time cease to have authority/meaning. Therefore, despite the violent coercion of the state and its prison apparatus, we argue that prisoner memoirs and narratives can reveal sites of tension and articulation of decolonized temporal imaginaries. We suggest that when we write, share, or listen to narratives we become time travellers, traversing and rejecting temporal restraints imposed by the legacy of a colonial order. Revisiting the open wounds of the past through this mode of time travelling evokes an inescapable responsibility towards those pasts, presents, and futures which have ceased to exist or have not yet arrived (Derrida, 1994). In this moments of sharing, as Dauphinee (2015) argues, we move beyond ‘the requirement to produce closure through the solidification of a stable narrative history’ that duels within the framework of colonial time and space, and are able to articulate decolonized temporal imaginaries. It is precisely this tension and subversion of colonial time which is enacted by prisoners in post-revolutionary Iran.

Prisoner memoirs: (Re)-imagining silences through political narratives

Roya often retreated to the corner of her cell, from the agony of her memory of torture, which for her was not a memory but a living reality her mind perpetuated … Her retreat to the corner of her cell was a walking into, rather that out of, torture. She lived her torture in a span of time that stretched and tied her past nor present. She could not live a different moment in the present, for her mind was reliving her torturous time in Gohar Dasht, while the past was still felt as an experience of the here and now, an experience of the present. (Talebi, 2011)

In the ghosts of Revolution, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi (2011), who has experienced being a prisoner both in the Shah’s and in the Islamic Regime, narrates her own and fellow prisoners’ sufferings and survivals. In so doing, she details about the concept of time in prison and how suddenly linear time would not make sense anymore for prisoners whose past, present, and future could not be teleologically separated and categorized. In the chapter she dedicated to Roya, a fellow prisoner who has been tortured numerous times at the hands of Sister Bakhtiary, Talebi (2011: 64) mentions that unlike the dominant conception of time, which perceived as ‘fixed in a rigid frame with linear direction’, for Roya the present has become past and past has become present. In those moments, trauma breaks temporal rigidities and contradicts the colonial perceptions of time – past, present, and future – and space which according to Talebi (2011) ‘rely so heavily on precision, clear distinctions, and dichotomies’. The world of a political prisoner moves away from those distinction as all these enacted boundaries become blurry and imagining an alternative reality becomes the only way out of this ‘upside down world’ where none of the ontological temporal assumptions make sense anymore. Survivors of trauma come to the realization that the dominant normative notions of socio-political structures, the self, and time – in which we hold dear – are all very precarious frameworks. Underlying ‘common’ beliefs when questioned, open the imagination to new temporal modalities and a reconfiguring of entanglements. Like Roya, who realizes a past is no past when there are wounds that have not been healed; nothing can only remain in the past if the pain still lingers in the individual and social bodies of a society. For Roya the space also has lost its meaning,

in reliving Sister Bakhtiary’s punishment, the past appeared in the present, and the present become the past; places […] were mixed up. With the sense of lost time, neither past nor future existed. Roya lived in a present that was not really a present, (El Bouih, 2008) ⁹

Talebi claims that the prisoners who encounter a betrayal from the structures of the states become trapped in a limbo, with no future and no past. A prisoner without a past is a prisoner of a colonized present (El Bouih, 2008: 65). The only way out of being materially and ideationally imprisoned by the present is through revisiting the past, present, and future by decolonizing imaginations from the colonial normative presuppositions. As Talebi mentions, failing to be fluid in time and revisit the past could result in being trapped in a time with no imagination, no past and no memory. According to Talebi:

without a past, one has no sense of history; without a space for remembrance, forgetting does not take place, for the past becomes a subject of possible forgetting only if it separated from the present by being transformed into a memory that can be recollected, remembered, and hence in some way forgotten. A frozen present, like that in which Roya was imprisoned, blocked the possibility of imagination and precludes the possibility of differentiating between reality and illusion. (El Bouih, 2008: 66)

It is through the practice of ‘time travelling’ – experienced when we write, read, listen, and share narratives – that reveals the possibilities for interrogating the linearity of time. As Andrews (2014: 3) suggests, ‘the human psyche moves fluidly between time frames as a narrative … bringing forward experiences of the past into the present’ which exists as a ‘corner stone of identity’. Yet this presents a paradox as

without recollection it is difficult to have sense of who we are in the present much less to configure a future for ourselves [therefore] we are forever revisiting our past, in light of changing circumstances of the present and in so doing, our vision for the future is reconstituted. (Andrews, 2014: 3)

Conclusion

In this paper we have attempted to offer a point of accessibility into the fragmentations and tensions within colonial time in an effort to show the inherent possibilities that exist for alternative temporal imaginaries which move beyond linear and teleological chronology. There is a multiplicity of experiences – between resistance and accommodation – that show how non-internalized alternatives to colonial time exist within structures of violence. This is precisely because colonial time is tension; a fragmentary process by which individuals do not simply internalize as Foucault would argue, but rather shape, adapt, and (re)-create, despite hegemonic pressures. We do not argue that this is the only way or that all political narratives are generalizable. Yet there is a pronounced potentiality within this tension to read prisoner memoirs to confront subjugated voices and colonial time in post-revolution Iran. This amounts to a decolonization of time as well as the enacted boundaries and fictive separations of the entanglements between past, present, future, the self, and the other within state structures of violence. Identifying these blurry boundaries allows us to traverse gaps of separation, enabling us to listen to the voices and look at the scenes which have been structurally silenced and invisibilized. We have tried to show this through reading prison memoirs in contemporary Iran as examples of how these political narratives – against direct bodily and ideational state violence – allow us to imagine non-internalized, non-linear, and non-teleological temporality. In these moments of decolonized imagination and alternative temporalities where ‘fingers were transformed into pens [and] the sides of chests into pages’ (El-Bouih, 2008: 11) we are left with an inherited responsibility to listen, share, act, and imagine unconstrained by the violent limits of colonial time.