Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  At the prescient age of thirteen, I realized our Madonna arguments signaled far more serious confrontations to come. Maman’s contempt for Madonna seemed like sheer hypocrisy to me. Was this the same woman who thought it regressive and awful that Iranian culture valued women through their marital status, and rated their respectability according to the success or failure of their marriage? The woman who denounced a culture that considered divorced women criminals? She believed it was only modern to consider women fully equal to men, independent beings with a sacred right to everything men were entitled. Somehow, it became clear through her designation of Madonna as whore, that she also thought it fully consistent to believe premarital sex (for women) was wrong, and that women who practiced it were morally compromised. The men she forgave, offering an explanation worthy of an Iranian villager: “They can’t help themselves.” Women, it seemed, were physiologically better equipped for deprivation. Often our fights would end with me collapsing in tears, her bitterly condemning my unquestioning acceptance of “this decadent culture’s corrupt ways,” and my usual finale: “It’s all your fault for raising me here; what did you expect?”

  In Maman’s view, America was responsible for most that had gone wrong in the world. Een gavhah, these cows, was her synonym for Americans. She’d established her criticisms early on, and repeated them so often that to this day they are seared on my brain: “Americans have no social skills. . . . They prefer their pets to people. . . . Shopping and sex, sex and shopping; that’s all Americans think about. . . . They’ve figured out how corrupt they are, and rather than fix themselves, they want to force their sick culture on the rest of the world.” Since she mostly wheeled out these attitudes to justify why I couldn’t be friends with Adam-the-long-haired-guitarist or why I couldn’t go to the movies twice in one week, or why I couldn’t wear short skirts, I wondered whether they were sincere, or tactical.

  Her restrictions were futile, and only turned me into a highly skilled liar with a suspiciously heavy backpack. Every morning she would drop me off at a friend’s house, ostensibly so we could walk to school together. Once inside I traded the Maman-approved outfit for something tighter, smeared some cherry gloss on my lips, and headed off to class. Knowing I could secretly evade her restrictions helped me endure the sermons, but sometimes the injustice of her moralizing would provoke me, and I would fling jingoistic clichés designed to infuriate her: “Love it or leave it. . . . These colors don’t run. . . . No one’s keeping you here.” At hearing these words come out of my mouth she’d hurl a piece of fruit at me, dissolve into angry tears, and suddenly the fact that I was torturing my poor, exiled single mother filled me with terrible grief, and I would apologize profusely, begging forgiveness in the formal, filial Farsi I knew she craved to hear. In the style of a traditional Iranian mother, she would pretend, for five days, that I did not exist; thaw on the sixth; and by the seventh have forgotten the episode entirely, privately convinced that my rude friends, who didn’t even say salaam to her when they came over, were responsible for ruining my manners.

  When we encountered other second-generation Iranians at Persian parties, I was struck by how much less conflicted they seemed over their dueling cultural identities. I decided my own neurotic messiness in this area was the fault of my divorced parents. The only thing they agreed on was the safety record of the Volvo, and how they should both drive one until I finished junior high. But when it came to anything that mattered, for instance how I should be raised, they didn’t even bother to carve out an agreement, so vast was the gulf that separated their beliefs. My father was an atheist (Marx said God was dead) who called the Prophet Mohammad a pedophile for marrying a nine-year-old girl. He thought the defining characteristics of Iranian culture—fatalism, political paranoia, social obligations, an enthusiasm for guilt—were responsible for the failures of modern Iran. He wouldn’t even condescend to use the term “Iranian culture,” preferring to refer, to this day, to “that stinking culture”; he refused to return to Iran, even for his mother’s funeral, and wouldn’t help me with my Persian homework, a language, he pronounced direly “you will never use.” When I announced my decision to move to Iran, his greatest fear, I think, was that something sufficiently awful would happen to me that it would require his going back. That he had married Maman, a hyper-ideologue, a reactionary as high-strung as they come, was baffling; little wonder they divorced when I was an infant. Daddy was the benevolent father personified; he couldn’t have cared less about curfews, dating, a fifth ear piercing, or whether my hair was purple or not.

  There were few times during my adolescence that he intervened, but Maman’s attempt to make mosque attendees out of her and me was one of them. Iranians, by and large, are subtle about their piety, and identify more closely with Persian tradition than with Islam. Faith is a personal matter, commanding of respect, but it does not infuse our culture in the totalizing way I have witnessed in certain Arab countries, among many Sunni Muslims. Westernized, educated Iranians are fully secular—they eat pork, don’t pray, ignore Ramadan—and so it had never occurred to the exile community to start up a mosque. Hiking groups, discos, political soirees, definitely, but a mosque would have been in bad taste; the revolution had made Islam the domain of the fundamentalists. But Maman was one day struck by worry that I’d grow up ignorant of Islam, and decided some formal religious training was in order. Every four years she seemed to choose a new religious avenue to explore, convinced our lives were lacking in spirituality, and since we had already done Buddhism and Hinduism, and briefly toyed with Mormonism, it was Islam’s turn.

  That was the summer she enrolled us in a Sunni mosque. It was called the San Jose Islamic Association, but it was really an enclave of super-pious, Sunni Pakistanis who had dedicated their experience in America to avoiding their experience in America. A shabby pink Victorian housed both the mosque and the Islamic Association; bearded men led the sermon, and the women in the back, dressed in salwar kameez, dashed off at the final “allah akbar” to heat up the naan. The sermons were boring, and the Pakistanis were cliquey, but the afternoon morality class was the worst.

  Brother Rajabali (or somesuch pious name), a dark, spindly man whose unenviable job it was to make the harsh Sunni morality applicable to our lives in California, had dedicated the afternoon’s lesson to sex, and how its only purpose was procreation. Maman nodded gravely, the Bosnian girls scribbled notes to one another, and I sat wondering whether all Sunnis were so narrow-minded. Eventually, I convinced a coalition of relatives the mosque was run by fundamentalist, radical Sunnis who were trying to brainwash me. My grandmother interceded, afraid I would be turned away from Islam forever, and we never set foot again into the sad old Victorian with its angry believers. They still send us their monthly newsletter, full of ads for halal meat grocers we never frequent.

  The civil war in our house—heralded by the Madonna fight and the weekly doses of Brother Rajabali—erupted unexpectedly on a fall afternoon, during a placid walk around the neighborhood. By that time I was well into high school, and envious of friends who had co-conspirator mothers, always ready to help them primp for first dates, delighted to follow the twists and turns of their teenage romances. I deeply hoped that Maman and I were ready to transcend the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy we had been driven to by the ceaseless arguments of my early teenage years. As we walked, she turned and with the kindest smile said to me, “Azadeh jan, I want you to know that if you ever decide to become, ahem, close with your boyfriend, I’m here for you, and want to know about it. Not to lecture you, but because I want to be your friend and advise you. There are so many important things you might not be thinking about, and I’m in a position to help.” Maman was devoutly into meditation, yoga, and all the other spiritual hobbies in California that teach a person, even a displaced Iranian, how to sound far more open-minded, sensitive, and tolerant than they actually are.

  A wise voice inside my head told me to be skeptical, but I was so enchanted at the prospect of
having a modern mother—already envisioning us stopping at Planned Parenthood together on the way to the mall—that with breathtaking stupidity I told her the truth. Immediately red splotches appeared all over her face, and she began crying, in huge, gulping sobs, emitting a string of incoherent denials and interrogations: “Khak bar saram [may dirt fall on my head!]. . . . Vay, vay . . . You’re too young, why did we ever come to this mamlekat-e-kharabshodeh [ruined country]. . . . When?? ... For how long?” I had been duped, and would pay for it dearly. “What is wrong with you?” I yelled. “You tricked me! How can you do this, after asking yourself? You promised to help.” The sun sank, and we were still walking. The tears came fast and furious as we did lap after lap around streets that looked the same. That week, Maman re-enrolled in therapy, banned my boyfriend from the house, and vilified him with a propaganda campaign worthy of the darkest dictatorship. The episode cemented a conclusion I had long been approaching: Being Iranian amounted to psychological torture. It meant bringing a friend home from school, to find an old woman (there was perpetually a great-aunt or third cousin in town) with a flowered bonnet on her head kneeling in prayer, or sifting through a vast pile of dried herbs like a prehistoric gatherer. It demanded a rejection of the only lifestyle I knew and wanted and offered only vague promises of community inclusion in exchange. And so I decided then and there that Iranianness and I must part.

  This break came at a convenient time, just as I was old enough to realize with the sensibility of a young adult, rather than the fuzzy intuition of a child, what a burden it was to be Iranian in America. The hostage crisis had forever stained our image in the American psyche, and slowly I saw how this shaped so much of what we did and strove for as immigrants. We could never take for granted that ordinary Americans—people Maman would encounter at PTA meetings, or at work—would know that the very fact of our living in the U.S. differentiated us from the type of Iranians who held U.S. diplomats at gunpoint for 444 days. Each time I told someone I was Iranian, I would search their face for a sign that they understood this.

  Iranians coped with this oppressive legacy in various ways. Some, like parts of my family, willed it away by losing any trace of a Persian accent, and becoming so professionally successful that they entered a stratum of American society sophisticated enough to understand and appreciate their presence and contribution. Some, nearly a million in fact, sought strength in numbers and founded a colony in Los Angeles. They seemed unfazed by their growing reputation for vulgarity and obsession with image; better to be associated with a penchant for BMWs than revolutionary Islam, they figured.

  The Iranians who fled the revolution, and those who were already in the United States when it happened, included the country’s best and brightest. That they succeeded in their adopted home is not such a surprise. But the image of that Islam-intoxicated, wild-eyed hostage taker was still a shadow that dogged all of us. Whether we were monarchists or not, whether we took some responsibility for what happened in Iran or blamed others, the shame of the revolution placed enormous pressure to be successful, but discreet about being Iranian. As though to make up for this image’s awfulness we had to be ever more exceptional, achieve more, acquire more degrees, more wealth, make more discoveries—to become indispensable. All this effort was needed to clear up our nationality’s good name; being average, obviously, would not cut it. Redemption became our burden.

  These were the preoccupations of my parents’ generation of exiles, and it left little energy for ministering to the second generation’s delicate cultural transition. We were on our own, as our parents struggled with their nostalgia and political anger. As a teenager I felt there was nowhere to turn, and I often felt invisible, alone with my two irreconcilable halves. Sometimes it felt like we didn’t even exist, even though I had proof we did (there were Iranian grocery stores, after all, with too much feta cheese and baklava for our own little circle). We weren’t reflected anywhere—not on television, not on radio; we didn’t even have our own ethnic slur (the ones for Arabs didn’t count), let alone a spoof on The Simpsons. It was too overwhelming to dwell in a home wracked with inter-cultural turmoil, within a larger community wrapped up in the awkwardness of arrival, to attempt to bridge my two identities.

  At the University of California, Santa Cruz, indeed in probably most universities in California in 1998, there was nothing more pressing to do than amplify your ethnic identity. I groaned under the weight of this discovery; how absurd, that all these silly liberal instructors wanted to take me by the hand and lead me back to the world I had turned my back on. All this heightening of consciousness was fascinating to me, but in a detached, impersonal way. To start with, there was no space for Iranians within the multicultural dialogue everyone seemed so bent on having. We were too new, and didn’t have a place yet. And then there was the question of race, in the American sense. Was I brown? All the Iranians I knew seemed to consider themselves Europeans with a tan. Was I an immigrant? My family had always insisted we weren’t really immigrants as such, but rather a special tribe who had been temporarily displaced. Iranian women like Khaleh Farzi lived in daily fear of being mistaken for a Mexican—a pedestrian immigrant rather than a tragic émigré. All my life I had wanted to grow my hair long, but Khaleh Farzi always protested and bullied me into cutting it short, a bob just above my chin. “Swingy and chic, not straggly and long, like a Mexican,” she would say.

  Despite California’s demographics, my high school was mostly white and Asian—the children of Silicon Valley yuppies—and it wasn’t until college that I encountered a broader canvas of peers. I was a writing tutor for affirmative action students, back when affirmative action still existed in California, and spent most of my afternoons on a sunny, wooden deck overlooking the Pacific, teaching Mexican kids from Los Angeles how to write a five-paragraph essay. My most faithful student was named Andy Ramirez, who had called himself Mexican all his life, and couldn’t understand why everyone now insisted on calling him Chicano. He was sweet, cynical, and hard-working, and after two years we got him to the point where a ten-page paper no longer gave him panic attacks. Andy passed through my life only briefly, but he helped change its course. I taught him grammar, and he taught me how to put my life into perspective. As out of place as I’d always felt growing up, I had no appreciation for the degree of inclusion I had taken for granted. Eating organic vegetables, going to the opera, socializing with my mother’s academic friends, all the aspects of my life that had become second nature, I now realized, were what made this environment familiar. Andy and I would walk through campus, and I could see how the vast majority of social encounters—with other students, with professors, with the hippies who ran the coffeehouse—made him cringe. There was hardly any social situation that could make me uncomfortable—there was hardly any social situation that could not make Andy uncomfortable. For the first time ever it occurred to me I’d actually been buffered against the degree of alienation it was possible to feel as a newcomer in America.

  As I watched Andy grow into himself, and develop the intellectual confidence to raise his hand in class, I also began to envy him. He was surrounded by brilliant Chicano professors who encouraged and understood him; who plied him with illuminating books that spoke directly to his experience. He saw his anger and confusion mirrored in poetry, and spent hours unraveling it with thoughtful graduate students who had traveled the same path. In time, awareness and pride replaced ambivalence and shame; in the academic lingo of the place, he had unlocked his internalized resentment of his identity. I saw this evolution not only in Andy but in many of the other students of color who educated themselves about their communities and their past, and found strength and support in the process. The notion of finding power in your otherness, once I got over the pretentiousness of using those sorts of terms, was incredibly compelling. So was the explosive possibility that I could be confident about who I was, the idea that being Iranian didn’t have to be about silly emotional culture clashes with my mother, but a sense of
self anchored in history.

  Andy’s academic route to self-discovery offered a fruitful example. Maybe there was something to be gained by studying history dispassionately, without the flushed distortions of family memory and cultural tropes. Within two years I was totally immersed in the Middle East, thrilled to find writers who wrote eloquently about the relationship between East and West, fascinated to discover that the Iranian Revolution had historical roots and wasn’t a conflagration designed primarily to upset my family’s social caste. In the process of all this academic probing, Iran was demystified—it became a subject I could learn about on my own, a civilization that I could approach from whatever direction I chose. It stopped being only the emotional place and set of rigid norms Maman could use to pull at my heartstrings and play on my guilt. As I discovered contemporary Iranian poetry, some of which I could read on my own, I began to feel, for the first time in my life, that Iranianness was not an obstacle to my independence. For the first time I stopped resisting it. It scared Maman a little, I think . . . that her hold over me was no longer exclusively in her hands. That my loyalty and attachment to things Iranian could exist outside the sphere of our house and our conflicted mother-daughter relationship.

  Once I discovered the joys of my own private Iranianness, I was reluctant to dilute it with anything reminiscent of the years of adolescent conflict. Growing up Iranian in America had been arduous and awkward. We had little consciousness of assimilation, because we were in denial of our permanence in America. My mother always made this perfectly clear. We are not immigrants. Immigrants come on boats. We came on planes. We were émigrés, exiles, mentally still in between. In such an atmosphere, I had never felt American at all, and so I dispensed altogether with the idea of being a hyphenated American. When people asked me where I was from, I smiled tightly and said, “Iran.” Full stop. Shoulders pulled back. Defensive. Knowing perfectly well that the answer was misleading, but too exhilarated by the fresh feelings of pride and coherence to care. In my own mind, I was just plain Iranian; even though the second I opened my mouth, my sentences bubbled with those unconscious “likes,” and anyone could tell that California figured in the story. An unintended consequence of this was that I actually began believing it. Soon I came to assume, with reckless confidence, that since I was Iranian, I would feel at home in the one place I was meant to belong—Iran.