I explained to him that I had an interview with a guest, and that there were other journalists upstairs already. He wouldn’t budge, and spoke to me with his eyes averted, as though I were a prostitute. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? It’s Hamas, for God’s sake, I said, and there are fifteen other people in that room. What do you think is going to happen? A spontaneous orgy? He looked away in disgust. The minutes ticked away while we waited for the hotel manager to resolve the situation.
In and of itself, the experience was wholly ordinary—being humiliated in the course of working as a female reporter eventually became unremarkable to me, like the layer of pollution that would settle on the skin by the day’s end. Had I gone to my aunt and uncle’s, my bitter retelling of the squabble would have elicited perhaps one minute of discussion. But I went to Ally McBeal night instead, ringing the doorbell softly, certain they had started already.
My friend swung the door open, a hanger in hand. Azizam, where have you been? At the sight of that dangling hanger, something fluttered with joy in my stomach. He knew me well, knew that I would have taken off my roopoosh and head scarf in the elevator. I held it out to him with two fingers and a wrinkled nose. Two minutes later I was happily ensconced in the buttery leather of their couch, warming a glass of red wine between my hands. A familiar scent wafted out from the kitchen. Ooooh, tacos.
We put off the show for another hour, as I recounted the mishap. It led us into a conversation, reflective and engaged, on how the culture of the revolution had seeped into the behavior of individuals. They let me ramble on for a bit, pulling disparate thoughts together, airing ideas. After a quarter of an hour, my indignation evaporated, and I saw that it was for precisely this I had come. Not for the familiarity of American television and tacos, but to speak with people who, like me, needed and wanted to talk about Iran, and in English.
For my relatives and friends, the aspects of Iranian reality that I found fascinating—fatigue with Islam, political cynicism, flouting authority—were routine. They knew the regime wasn’t held together by a devotion to revolutionary Islam, but a clique of corrupt clerics driven by messianic ideology and greed. The failure of the revolution, the bankruptcy of its ideology, was the backdrop of daily life, manifested in state newspapers left in unread piles at the newsstand, official newscasts no one watched. For those who lived these realities, they were foregone conclusions, too obvious to discuss.
But for me, new to all of this, spinning in outrage, there was nothing I needed more than to talk it all through, to release the anger in English, so that it did not stay welled up inside me. It was part of a building awareness that I had stepped into this Iran partly as an Iranian, reading the grinds of coffee cups, burning esfand to ward away the evil eye, but also as an American, constricted by the absence of horizons (of so many sorts), genuinely shocked by the grim ordinariness of violence and lies.
Three years later, when friends or relatives would visit, I would see my then self reflected in them, agog at the grotesque propaganda that I had, by that time, come also to take for granted. And there was something else too, besides the need to narrate this journey in both languages. Inside the cocoon of their apartment, the very act of speaking English invoked a sense of freedom. It was the language in which I had fought many battles, but it was also the language of an alternate existence in which I had never felt fear. It was unpolluted by the brutality of the things I heard and spoke about in Farsi, like arrests of activists and the killings of dissidents. Of course I wrote about them in English, but exported across the border of another language, their horror was somehow muted.
Before I moved to Tehran, all of my relationships that were conducted in Farsi were either with family members who had known me since I was small, or with Iranians who also spoke English, and didn’t mind if I sprinkled my Farsi liberally with English words and expressions, or vice versa. You speak kitchen Farsi, a friend told me dismissively. He was right. Gossiping with family and whining to my parents had required no special fluency, and left me ill-equipped to hold abstract conversations with the highly literate.
Here, the fusion of Farsi and English that we spoke in California was deemed vulgar and pretentious, an affectation associated with Iranians who left the country for six months and forever after used lots of English words to remind everyone they had been abroad. Oghdeyih people, with a complex about not being worldly or Western enough. I resolved to immediately banish all English terms from my Farsi, and in the process realized that without English, I, as I knew myself, ceased to exist.
If more than a few days went by without a single conversation in English, my spirits shriveled. Internal dialogue had become a bad habit. Stop making faces Azadeh, Khaleh Farzi admonished, smoothing my forehead with her cool fingers, you’ll give yourself wrinkles. I disliked myself in Farsi. I couldn’t debate philosophy, flirt with any originality, recount jokes properly, or spar in a formal interview. Unable to paint my personality with words, I came across blank, an empty white canvas.
The poverty of my Farsi definitively revealed my immaculate Iranian character to be a sham. Politically, though, I felt tainted by having an American side. A reactionary anti-Americanism reigned in the Arab circles I still moved in, as I worked around the region. One was expected to distance oneself as much as possible from the Zionist infidels, and being excessively American was the social equivalent of having a harelip.
People who were right-handed could learn to write with the left, I thought, so why should I not be able to recast my personality in Farsi? Only by being free and effortless in both languages, I decided, could I discover in which direction my true nature leaned. From the moment I arrived at this conclusion, I dedicated my existence to a sole purpose: learning Farsi properly. This desperation fueled many sleepless nights spent with a Farsi-English dictionary and a stack of newspapers, with cigarettes, and lavashak, Persian fruit roll-up, strewn about.
Assessing my existential Iranian versus Americanness was also a parlor game for distant relatives. It was a favorite of Mehri Khanoum, a relative from Pedar Joon’s hometown of Mashad, who used our house as a hotel during trips to Tehran. This obese, distant cousin was a saccharine-coated authoritarian and commandeered the kitchen from the housekeeper, Khadijeh Khanoum, during her visits. She considered it inappropriate for one member of the family to consume a different meal from what everyone else was eating. What was wrong with collective fare? Clearly, the demand of a spoiled American, I overheard her whispering in indignant tones. After a five-second delay, I realized she meant me.
At lunch she would proudly place a steaming platter of something or other drenched in oil on the table, and wait expectantly for everyone to coo over how wonderful it was. When I reached for the watermelon that we were only meant to have before lunch, she shook her head, and heaped a pyramid of glistening rice on her plate. I’m sure it’s delicious, I said politely, but I’ll go into a coma eating all that rice, and I have an interview later.
She gave me a withering look, and crossed her ample arms over her chest. Have it your way, Ms. Los Angeles. But your husband will never enjoy eating with you, if you keep this up. In northern California, where I’m from, Mehri Khanoum, there is a service called takeout, which I’m sure my husband will be proficient at using. Saying that made me feel slightly better, but then I felt even more irritated for being provoked into discussion of an imaginary spouse.
After that, she began pilfering my energy bars from the hidden drawer in the kitchen, in what was a serious escalation of conflict. I considered sticking all the fruit knives in an onion, as retaliation, but then poor Pedar Joon would also have to eat onion-perfumed melon. Instead, I emailed my father in California to grumble about this egregious relative, with whom I could not believe we shared genetic matter. He, enemy of Persian etiquette, called up the house and told her to stop stealing what he sensitively called my “special foods,” as though I were a diabetic.
From that day on, we didn’t say very much to each other, apart f
rom a cold good morning. The day she left, loading an ice-chest full of snacks for the trip back to Mashad (five hours, though she was packing food for a week), she perked her face into a smile, for the benefit of Pedar Joon, who was standing nearby, and asked me when I would be visiting them. This was tarof, the Persian practice of saying elaborate things you don’t fully mean to keep up the pretense of enjoying sparkling, warm social relations with everyone.
Definitely soon, I said, I hear there’re tons of prostitutes around the shrine. I’m dying to do a story on religious pilgrimage and prostitution. She got into the car with a huff and a puff, and I could almost hear her complain to her husband as they drove away, Thank God we didn’t raise our children in Los Angeles.
Now I can look back, and see Mehri’s food terrorism for what it was, a last-stop defense against the decline of tradition; the set mealtimes, and shared meals, were a ritual that symbolized a whole way of life that honored and gave her influence as a matron. My insistence on eating separately was a way of staking my own bit of power in a system that reminded me incessantly (“Don’t you want to get married? . . . What is this always work work work? . . . Your expectations are too high. . . . There can be no alliances without allowances!”) that as an unmarried young woman, I was a partial failure, without status. But at the time, it didn’t seem nearly so obvious. Instead, my tremulous Iranian within shook, and I experienced such criticism as a crushing assessment of me as other, as American.
CHAPTER FOUR
My Country Is Sick
Our tears are sweet, our laughter venomous,
We’re pleased when sad, and sad when pleased
We have broken every stalk, like a wind in the garden
We have picked clean the vine’s candelabra,
And if we found a tree, still standing, defiantly,
We cut its branches, we pulled it up by the roots.
—SIMIN BEHBEHANI
Since low-grade depression was a national epidemic, most Iranians who were not opium addicts or alcoholics had some expertise in spiritual restoratives. A generation ago, people turned to religious gatherings and prayer rituals for serenity, but in modern-day Iran, it had become commonplace to keep Islam at arm’s length. Unintentionally, the Islamic Republic had redirected the spirituality of a wide swath of Iranians toward the esoteric and the mystical.
One afternoon, I stopped by a friend’s house to get the address of a homeopathic healer, famed for his herbal remedies. Tandiss, a young woman about my own age, paused as she cleared away the crumbs from a plate of pistachio-dense, flower-infused baklava we had just polished off with our tea. “Do you want to meditate?” she asked me, hovering near the table. “Not really, but you go ahead,” I said, fingering the soft cotton of her saffron-colored, Indian tunic.
Tandiss and her mother were just back from India, where they had gone to visit the ashram of a Hindu guru/mystic named Sai Baba, in a place called Shirdi outside Bombay. Each time I saw Sai Baba literature or a photo on someone else’s mantelpiece, I clapped my hands together and exclaimed at the coincidence (“You follow Sai Baba, too?!”), until I discovered that Eastern spirituality was a widespread trend among the middle class as well as the educated elite.
The doorbell rang, and I raced to answer it, before it rang again and interrupted the meditating Tandiss. It was my cousin, picking me up for lunch. “Shhhhh,” I hissed, opening the door. “Tandiss is with the guru.” He tiptoed in, giving me a dirty look. Kami also followed Sai Baba and didn’t appreciate being teased about “Guruji.” He too had visited the ashram outside Bombay (“Even heads of state were kissing his feet”) and returned with stories of Sai Baba’s miraculous feats. Apparently, with nothing more than his touch, gaze, and blazing internal holiness, Sai Baba had: turned dirt into gold dust, healed lepers, moved a piece of paper across the table, cured blindness, banished tuberculosis from lungs, and rid a village of cholera. Mocking my cousins’ faith in Guruji’s miracles, I reminded myself, was insensitive. They respected Sai Baba, and respect was an important cornerstone of faith.
It was impossible to respect the Islamic Republic, and for many Iranians, contempt for the system tainted their traditional esteem for Islam. Everyone agreed that official Islam was a perversion, but this rational recognition didn’t preclude them from emotionally wanting to distance themselves from things clerical and Islamic altogether.
People relished making their distaste for Islam—the tool of their subjugation—and its self-proclaimed custodians—their oppressors—known. When I lived downtown with my grandfather, our alley was right off a busy street, and I took public taxis frequently. Even at unrushed midday, when the taxis were half full, drivers took a special pleasure in ignoring clerics standing in turbans and robes trying valiantly to hail a cab. They were pariahs, an untouchable class. Clerical robes had come to symbolize one thing: corruption.
Eastern spirituality, with its internally directed, pacifist sensibility, was the ideal antidote to the militant, invasive brand of Shiite Islam imposed by the regime. And that is the story of how Iranian housewives, unadventurous by nature, began turning East, rather than toward Mecca, to nurture their belief in a higher power.
Since the sixteenth century, the era of the Safavids, the dynasty that instituted Shiism as the state religion of then Persia, the clergy have wielded significant influence over internal affairs. Though they never formally took charge until the revolution, their intimate relations with pious, powerful merchants, bazaaris, and moral authority at Friday prayers made them a major political force for centuries. Consecutive governments had been careful to accommodate the mullahs, or at least disguise their efforts to curtail clerical authority.
Resistance to injustice is the central theme of Shiite Islam, and during times of political unrest or oppression, clerics traditionally raised their voices against the imperial or local oppressor of the moment. In times of chaos, when emotions flared and events spiraled, few could calm or incite masses of Iranians like the mullahs, who spoke in the familiar tones of, and on behalf of, ordinary people.
Though there was a long tradition of mocking the clergy for gluttony and sloth, they were at heart venerated by traditional Iranians. Even my grandmother in California, sitting upon the ruins of a family dispersed and dispossessed by a clerical revolution, had refused to curse Khomeini, who like it or not was still an ayatollah. Loath to destabilize his government by alienating the mosque, the Shah of Iran, like his father and predecessor Reza Shah, had been reluctant to modernize and secularize Iran at the same time, as Mustafa Kamal Ataturk had done in nearby Turkey.
Raised on this history at home, and again at university, I chronically underestimated the decline of religiosity evident all around me in Tehran. Every branch on both sides of my family is ardently secular, and if the revolution taught us anything, it was not to assume that two-thirds of Iranian society felt and thought as we did.
Eventually, though, I came to see how two decades of mismanagement by mullahs had perhaps definitively squashed the clerics’ historical prestige. Most societies that have flirted with Islamic politics, where religious parties win votes in elections, have not had the chance to watch their Islamist crush play itself out. A full and lasting conversion to secularism could only be reached after clerics were permitted to rise to power—as in Iran and Afghanistan—and make a gigantic mess of things. History had shown that this, ultimately, was the only way to test and discard the religious model.
Though Iranians alternately loathed and pitied themselves for their ill-fated revolution, they had at least come full circle. A secular government, a full separation between mosque and state, they were able to conclude, was the only answer. This conviction could be traced informally through voting records. Politicians who talked about a more accountable, less ideological government roundly won elections. But it was such a palpable truth, so implicit and freely discussed, that it scarcely required documentation. I absorbed it fully on my first visit to Qom, the power capital of the mullahs, the
seat from where Khomeini ruled Iran.
Qom, a somber, dusty city 120 km south of Tehran, is the Vatican of the Islamic theocracy. Most Iranians—who derisively called it a “mullah factory”—did not bother to visit, and thought of it only as the place where sohan, a buttery brittle of pistachios and saffron, originates. As a child, I thought the name of the city meant “gham,” the Farsi word for gloom, and heard it discussed as the epicenter of clerical evil, the Death Star from which the mullahs plotted their takeover of Iran.
When I told Khaleh Farzi I was going there with Scott, the Time magazine correspondent, to talk to dissident clerics who opposed the Islamic regime, her face pinched with worry. Hamid, she’s going to Qom, she called out to my uncle. What if they steal her? Promise you’ll head back before sunset!
I pulled my inkiest, roomiest roopoosh out of the back of the closet for ironing, and wondered whether I was sick, looking forward to a trip that should instill a normal person with dread. I wasn’t, I decided. It was actually a very positive sign. It meant I preferred the distraction of work (fat clerics and all) to staying home all day feeling sorry for myself. The pace of a weekly magazine meant the last three days of our production week were a flurry of activity, and the first two or three of the next week a dead zone, too early to predict or begin chasing the next issue’s news. Inevitably, these days at home meant lying on the couch with a bowl of cherries watching Oprah on satellite television, then feeling great remorse for such indolence, when I could have been interviewing freedom-fighting student activists or visiting my father’s high school or learning how to make baklava, or some other edifying activity.
So often, my days off didn’t measure up to the lofty, soul-enriching life I had expected to live in Iran, and this was depressing enough that it made me stop taking days off altogether. If a story demanded four interviews, I did ten. I typed up my handwritten notes, printed them out, and filed them with pretty page markers. Then I made a thimble of Turkish coffee, sat down to read the papers, and made a list (typed with bullet points) of more story ideas. Work had no equal as a balm to anxiety. I even took my laptop to family lunches, where relatives looked at me pityingly and remarked that American journalism was really a form of indentured servitude. Then they asked for the hundredth time why I didn’t become a broadcast journalist (better for finding a husband), as though newspapers were pastures for unattractive reporters who didn’t make the grade aesthetically for television.
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