The Handmaid's Tale: From Cuba To Iran, A Dystopian Landscape

“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

That’s how it all happens. Freedom from the regime. That’s the justification. There are others, but those have been refuted. Like nuclear capability that would threaten Israel’s right to exist. This also means rights are never really equal.

This book, published in 1985, must be the Bible of our times. By us, I mean mostly women. We must then be vigilant. Dystopias exist. They just haven’t been marked on the map. We know now that changing the name of a place is easy. Expansion is now only a question of military might. Nobody can ask questions. There are consequences, we are told.

In Atwood’s novel, Gilead is a country that was formerly the United States, where women are treated as host bodies as a fertility crisis begins to dictate politics. Fertile women are kept in captivity and must serve the mandate to produce children. They are raped and denied basic dignity. They must not talk. There will be consequences, they are told. Women are to take care of the family if they are wives. They can’t read. They can’t make decisions. Any “immoral behaviour” will not be tolerated. Atwood didn’t have to imagine it all. There was a cult called the ‘People of Hope’ that was started in 1975 by a New York stockbroker and ordained Catholic priest named Robert Gallic, that viewed at women as handmaidens of god who were to be subservient to their husbands. Then there was Canadian MP Dave Nickerson, who cited Canada’s fertility rate dropping to an all-time low and said families should have more children.

In this book, the handmaids of Gilead organise themselves despite the brutal regime.

We live in similar dystopias.

In 2023, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee honoured Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” activists and awarded the coveted prize to the well-known and currently imprisoned women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi. Women are capable. They don’t want to be rescued.

One must always write disclaimers these days. I am not an apologist for the regime in Iran. Nor do I condone this war. Not that I matter, but still, my tiny voice must find its place.

The war is streaming live. Some truths, a lot of propaganda, a lot of fake news. It is easy then to rejoice over the killings in the name of liberation. It is also easy to defend the regime that brutally crushed the protests in Iran. Black smoke, gutted buildings and sirens going off are the new normal. All spectacular images. Like 9/11 when the Twin Towers were struck.

Not much is making sense anymore. Least of all, this war on Iran in the name of regime change to ‘liberate’ women under an oppressive regime. The war, whose first act led to the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Now, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is citing Jina Mahsa Amini and her killing in Iran and the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” to justify his attack on Iran using ‘women’s rights’ to legitimise war, while the war on Gaza continues and women and children keep becoming casualties. Selective wars are too obvious.

The legitimate aspirations to autonomy and self-deter­mination of Iranian women have been set aside. Agency denied.

All scripts for regime changes are pre-determined and similar. The “military attack-cum-regime change” pattern based on “gender disorder” is not new. In 1898, Cuba was depicted as a “damsel in distress” by major US newspapers and the Monroe Doctrine was chalked out to justify the US claim to the Americas, which was yet another case of using women’s iconography to make war.

Former US First Lady Laura Bush had declared in 2001 that the “fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” in the case of Afghanistan. We know what panned out in Afghanistan later.

There are many such examples. There is now another war on the horizon. A friendly takeover of Cuba.

Political agendas hide conveniently behind the slogans of freedom, human rights, saving women and in desperation, we want to believe them. We want to continue hoping. But takeovers are not rescue efforts.

Militarised men do not bring freedom or equal rights. That is what past experience has shown women. Liberation cannot begin with bombs. Feminism cannot be part of the war machine. When militarised projects co-opt the language of feminism, developed through long struggles for rights, they damage movements led by women.

One should remember that during his 2016 presidential campaign, US President Donald Trump said, “You have to ban” abortion. As president, he appointed Supreme Court justices who later formed the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling in which the US Supreme Court recognised a constitutional right protecting a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. In 2022, the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization marked the removal of the constitutional right to abortion.

These are facts one must remember. There are many others. But readers know where to look. Who liberates whom is then the question? Who gives freedom to and freedom from?

I must quote from The Handmaid’s Tale again.

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

Hear the echoes then. And don’t let Gilead become a reality. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Chinki Sinha is editor, outlook Magazine