Aliyya Swaby Photo
If the necessity to “think outside the box” could ever have a physical manifestation, it would be the golden shipping container called the “Portal” currently hosting visitors to the New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas.
Inside this particular box, stationed on the New Haven Green, participants are “transported” to Havana, just as they were to Tehran in February at a similar installation outside the Yale University Art Gallery on Chapel Street.
Ordinary mortals, along with the Fareed Zakarias of the world among other anchors and celebrities, have walked into this box, only to emerge 20 minutes later similarly smitten, transformed by the transport. And there is a consensus: “I met another human being on the other side.”
(Let us, for now, not ask the obvious question, which is: “What in the world did they think they would find on the other side?” Let us also not ponder the provincialism, if not the implied bigotry, inherent in the notion of such a declaration).
The portal has been hailed for creating an opportunity for “unmediated conversation.” These hailers are clearly not familiar with the ubiquity of the Orwellian Big Brother whose gaze is upon all, even and especially private, spaces. The Castros and the clerics in Tehran have remained in power for decades precisely because, in part, no “unmediated” boxes exist in their respective countries.
At the core of this flawed enterprise is the notion that under equal, skeletal circumstances – two bare shipping containers, one in the U.S., another in some godforsaken city like Havana or Tehran — two people, two life-sized ones at that, can freely have a “people-to-people” conversation. Therein lies the artfully disguised falsehood: The illusion that two physically-equal life-sized renditions are also two equal life-sized citizens in the non-corporeal, civilian realm.
While an American in New Haven is an individual citizen having all the rights that go with such a privilege, a Cuban or an Iranian is not. A people-to-people conversation with a Swiss, Swede, Londoner and New Havener would be mathematically and sociologically accurate. But in the case of the Cuban or Iranian, once inside the botched box, the New Havener wrongly endows the counterpart with all that the other does not, in fact, have.
Precisely because the box removes the oppressive exterior, it generates all the prerequisites of a hoax.
Let us also not ponder how this experiment glaringly substantiates, yet again, the consistent failure of Western journalism in covering places like Cuba and Iran. In the numerous interviews that Amar Bakhshi (pictured), the creator of the portal, has had on leading networks, the giddy anchors unanimously failed at exercising their craft. At CNN, ABC, NPR, BBC, none asked Bakhshi whether the premise of his “equal conditions” is not entirely compromised by the fact that nowhere in Havana or Tehran is there a portal to the U.S. that is not under surveillance.
Inside the identical box, the New Havener sees an Iranian woman, not the half-citizen that she is under the Iranian constitution. He sees a Cuban man, not the one who would, in his real life outside of the box, leap with joy for a bottle of nail polish or a bar of soap.
The box does, indeed, help the New Havener shed his or her possible negative bias about an Iranian or a Cuban, only to replace it with a similarly-flawed positive bias, but a bias all the same.
Roya Hakakian is the author of, most recently, Assassins of the Turquoise Palace.
Oh please, there's plenty of surveillance in our own "godforsaken city." The author has missed or misrepresented the point, which is to meet as human individuals, independent of those political or economic circumstance, "equal, life-sized" in the human realm. And when they view us, they see an American person, not a gas-guzzling representative of a violent empire. Seems worthwhile.