Nazanin is grateful, but is she grateful enough? I don’t know but the trolls will tell us
To Britain, where a woman who hasn’t said a word for six years is apparently talking too much. Are you a man who’s got a massive view about how a hostage should behave after a lengthy incarceration? Are you 90% throbbing forehead vein? Do you like your prison victims pliant, and super-obsequious about having spent pretty much their young daughter’s entire life as the cell guest of a theocracy? If so, we really, really want to hear from you! And I have a feeling we’re going to! Can you possibly stow your two-litre caramel latte in the cup holder, handbrake turn on to the hard shoulder, punch in the phone-in digits, and then give a masterclass in how unthreatened you are by the decadent western spectacle of a woman speaking her mind.
Encouragingly, because some British people like to put their mouth where their arse is, the above call to arms has been answered. By mid-morning today, #sendherback was trending on Twitter (further bolstered by those so horrified by the hashtag they felt the need to repeat it). Down the phone lines and across the internets, many people are simply not happy with Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s failure to react to her belated release like she’s just won Miss World in 1957. You know the playbook: deeply indebted tears at a flow volume that won’t disrupt the mascara; silence broken only by a pledge to work with children and animals. British children and British animals, just to be on the safe side.
And yet, having spent a lot of time at her press conference yesterday thanking a large number of individuals and organisations who played a part in her eventual release, Nazanin did mention the fact it took just the five successive foreign secretaries before something repeatedly promised to her actually happened. And it is this that seems to have caused a huge number of four-wheel-drive prams to be emptied of all toys.
Of course, you get a few wishywashy ignoramuses disagreeing. “If trying our best took six years,” reasoned Jeremy Hunt, “then we must be honest and say the problem should have been solved earlier.” Sorry, Jeremy, but what on earth do you know about the situation?! Wait. Hang on – my producer’s telling me Jeremy was literally one of those five foreign secretaries. OK … well … thanks for dialling in. But we’ll have to cut you off now because I’ve got a 56-year-old man from Aldershot on the line, who once told a BT customer service representative that she was as bad as Hitler, and is now marvelling at the absolute cheek of Nazanin. I’ve got a guy who thinks masks were fascism strongly suspecting the ayatollah had a point about this bird. I’m kidding, of course. But one does sometimes wonder if this whole generational cohort is becoming coddled. Nobody tells them to shut up and buck up.
Nobody tells them to get some perspective and ring off. It’s just possible we’re raising a generation of entitled middle-aged men who think their every needy opinion has to be listened to.
As far as genuine real-life examples go, I saw one individual who characterised Nazanin’s wry difference of opinion with Richard Ratcliffe about the merits of the Foreign Office response as “disrespect[ing] her husband”. Over on Nick Ferrari’s show on LBC, a chap called Jason seemed outraged that Nazanin “didn’t come across as a sort of victim”, adding “it would have been nice for her to say thank you”. (She did, at length – but perhaps it was too much for Jason to actually watch the thing.) Ferrari appeared to partially agree, remarking: “There might have been a degree more gratitude.”
Aha! There it is. Gratitude. I’m never sure whether it means “being thankful” or “not being uppity”. However, I can tell you it heralds some important Venn diagram news: the people sticking it to Nazanin for not being “grateful” enough are the same people who boo footballers for taking the knee. Yup, just like the old knee-taking, it all comes down to gratitude – the UK’s sole remaining virtue after the others were sold off to oligarchs and Middle East sovereign wealth funds.
And you know, I hugely admire people who have whittled down their entire emotional range to a single, extremely compact sentiment: the idea that people should be grateful. Other people, obviously – not them. After all, how can they be grateful when there are ungrateful people out there? Stands to reason. They’re so ungrateful about a world that contains ingratitude that they have to ring a phone-in and lose their shit about it. Look what you made them do.
Indeed, this whole line of criticism reminds me of a particular genre of Daily Mail column, of which I’m a keen student. Consider Stephen Glover asking rhetorically: “Couldn’t Afua Hirsch summon a smidgen of gratitude?” Or Amanda Platell deploring
Stormzy’s mention of Grenfell at the Brits one year, asking: “Can’t you show a scintilla of gratitude, Stormzy?” The argument is always that “this country” has given people like Stormzy a good life and they should shut up complaining.
And yet, why should it be only – how to put this delicately? – people like Stormzy who should show gratitude? Why can’t it be, say, newspaper columnists? To pluck an example from the air, Amanda Platell – not born here, incidentally – spends the rest of her columns complaining strongly and occasionally erroneously and distastefully about people and events in the UK. Meanwhile, Stormzy – born here, incidentally – doesn’t seem to get to have similarly strong and occasionally erroneous and distasteful views about people and events in the UK. Why? If nothing else, a newspaper columnist telling people to be grateful is like a fisherman telling people to be vegetarian. We’re literally in the complaining game, Amanda! Stop cocking up the business model!
I can’t help feeling something similarly ironicidal is happening with Nazanin, where a woman is already having her freedom of speech policed by people who think they’re absolute defenders of it. I mean, not to state the fist-gnawingly obvious here, but isn’t the whole point about liberating someone from the clutches of some backward theocracy that you don’t immediately then go and tell her to know her place? Isn’t the point that you tell her to say whatever the hell she likes, how she likes, and don’t wet your big boy pants about it? You don’t have to agree with her. But you don’t get to tell her what to say, much less to say nothing at all. And if the home counties hardliners don’t like it, maybe they could #GoAndLiveInIran?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist