Exiled in Time and Space: Ali-Akbar Golpa and his Fellow Artists during the Years of Silence

At the wake of the 1978-9 Revolution in Iran, the newly established Islamic Republic – among other measures affecting the lives of the Iranians – barred all female solo singers and a great number of active male performers from performing on the public stage. In recent years, although one could notice a remarkable but scattered social reaction to the issue of the female voice ban, other highly skilled and prominent musicians and singers - male or female - who did not go on a geographical exile, experienced decades of indifference and loneliness, and were forgotten by entire portions of the population and the newer generations. Among them, Ali-Akbar Golpayegani ‘Golpa’ is a noticeable figure; a powerful and genius vocalist who from his youth was trained by the greatest masters of Persian music and reached the climax of his career and popularity before being abruptly put into a forced silence. This paper is a “thick description” of a home video from a private gathering in Tehran in 1996 attended by some of the most prominent musicians, poets and actors of Iran, including ‘Golpa’. Adapting a semiotic approach to their behaviour in the video I am particularly interested in the ways in which the ‘public pasts’ and ‘private presents’ of these musicians communicate, and the role that intimacy, collectivity, imagination, ritual and nostalgia play in connecting the two spheres of public and private. I argue that the music played in this gathering dislocates the concepts of time and space, bringing the past to the present and the public to the private. The participants of this home video are, therefore, exiled in a time and space that is firmly rooted in the past and highly connected to their previous status and lives. This paper aims at answering two major questions: 1) how did these prominent musicians survive after their forced marginalization, and brutal and sudden exclusion from the public space; and 2) why were they so extensively neglected in relevant studies and academic researches.