by Sarah Murray
For my father the answer was easy—his beloved Dorset countryside. Yet while born in Dorset, I’ve had homes in many places—Scotland, Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Africa, London, and now New York, home to the United Nations and the city that welcomes the world’s citizens. Most I’ve loved with enough passion to qualify them as a home for my “organic matter.” So which should I choose? At this point, I’m not sure. But I’m off to find out.
1
The Lament
A TEAR JAR IN IRAN
As I step out of the car, I’m struggling to adjust the head scarf I’ll be wearing for the next two weeks. Gravel crunches beneath my feet and my breath turns to white vapor in the sharp air of a bright January morning. It’s my first day in Iran and Maryam, my guide, is taking me around some of Tehran’s museums and palaces. Sprawling out from the foot of the Alborz Mountains, the city feels a little like Eastern Europe before the fall of the Soviet Empire. The colors are muted, the cars are beaten up, and faceless concrete blocks have appropriated sites once occupied by elegant mansions. But in a nineteenth-century Qajar dynasty villa, the Glass and Ceramic Museum offers a flavor of the old Tehran. Its delicate brickwork façade blends traces of European rococo with the courtly geometric details of a Persian palace.
Inside are artifacts from distant civilizations—the Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sassanians. Maryam, who has a degree in art history and a passion for Persian culture, knows the collection well. Born in Tehran, she speaks immaculate English with an accent picked up from television and from the many American tourists she’s accompanied on trips around her country. Like many younger Iranian women, she interprets the Islamic dress code loosely where she knows she can, covering herself modestly in the required knee-length manteau, pants, and head scarf. But rather than swathing herself in the dull black or brown worn by most Iranians, she usually dresses in her favorite color—turquoise—and wears a large pair of wraparound sunglasses.
When it comes to Persian art, it’s the unexpected details Maryam loves. As I gaze at a set of decorated plates, she explains that the almond-shaped eyes of the figures depicted on them are the legacy of a wave of Mongol invaders who barged in from the east on horseback in the thirteenth century, razing towns and villages to the ground, killing even the dogs in the slaughter. It was one of Iran’s most violent periods of history, yet Persian artists continued depicting the eyes of their invaders long after they’d left, creating a new tradition from the detritus of violence and upheaval.
Amid the cabinets of exquisite glasses, bowls, and plates, something catches my eye. It’s a glass vase with a bulbous base and a narrow sinuous neck that twists upward toward the rim, where an oval flowerlike opening resembles a small ear trumpet. Maryam sees me admiring this strange and beautiful object. “Can you guess what it is?” she asks. I shake my head. “It’s a tear jar,” she says. “It was used by women while their sweethearts were away at war. They’d collect teardrops of sadness as a gift for them on their return.” Ah, yes, that makes sense—looking again at the little flowerlike opening, I can see it’s shaped to fit over an eye.
Capturing and storing tears is an idea that seems quite remote from the culture in which I grew up, where expressions of sorrow tend to be muted or even suppressed. Yet in many countries, self-control is absent from the process of grieving. We’ve all seen television coverage of parts of the world in which the bereaved mourn their dead in an unrestrained display of emotion, whether it’s crowds of ululating Turkish women in the aftermath of an earthquake or Iraqi mothers shrouded in black, rocking back and forth in vociferous grief after losing a family member to a suicide bomb. And it’s hard to forget the extraordinary scenes of emotional public grief that followed the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Loud, unself-conscious, and highly public, these kinds of laments give visual and vocal shape to mourning.
To get a glimpse of powerful ritual laments, I’ve come to Iran during Muharram. This holy month commemorates the martyrdom in AD 680 of Imam Husayn, grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Culminating in the sacred day of Ashura—the day on which, centuries earlier, Husayn was killed in battle—this is Iran’s most important religious holiday. It’s not a joyous occasion, but a time of intense sadness, when Iranians get together for a period of collective mourning.
Of course, unlike the anguish captured on TV newscasts, the mourning here will be for an individual who died many centuries ago. Moreover, the weeping and acts of penance performed for Husayn and his family are inextricably bound up with deeper bonds uniting Shi’a Muslims across the globe. But while the lamenting ceremonies won’t be the same as the grief you might see at a funeral, I want to get a sense of a culture where mourning is embraced, not hidden away.
* * *
The man Iranians weep for every year at Ashura died in the Battle of Karbala (now a city in Iraq) after leading his small band of family and followers in a march across the desert to seize Kufa, a city ruled by Yazid, who was said to be flouting the teachings of Islam. Before reaching the city, a group of soldiers surrounded Imam Husayn and his men, cutting off their water supplies, subjecting their families to terrible thirst. After several days of bitter fighting, Husayn, his family, his followers, and their relatives lay dead on the battlefield. Husayn’s death, considered to be a martyrdom, was a critical moment for the Shi’a movement, heralding the separation of the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam.
Iranians know the story of the battle by heart. It’s been told to them since they were children. Yet, every year, they mourn Husayn’s martyrdom and remember his death with great outpourings of grief—as if he’d died only yesterday.
Ceremonies and activities, even civic decorations, are designed to promote weeping. In theaters around Iran, ta’zieh, or history plays, re-create the battlefield scenes with elaborate costumes, male-only casts, live animals, and audiences who are encouraged to cry at the most poignant moments in the performance. On streets and in religious halls, people watch lamentation ceremonies in which groups of men stand together, slapping their arms hard against their chests in powerful rhythms as they shout out Husayn’s name. In public places, posters depict his riderless horse weeping for its lost lord and water gourds spurting with blood. Fountains are filled with dye so that they, too, appear to be running with blood.
Until recently in Iran, men marked this occasion by whipping themselves with barbed chains or blades—popular images in the Western media because of the high drama and bloody nature of the ceremonies. This practice was banned in Iran several years ago (although it continues in other countries and secretly in parts of Iran). In a new penance tradition, mourners give blood during Muharram, and instead of blades, men beat their backs with clusters of chains attached to wooden handles. In mournful street processions moving to the slow rhythm of drums, chain clusters rise up in unison before falling back heavily onto the shoulders of their owners. Even young boys join in using child-sized bunches.
I get a taste of what’s to come on my second day in Tehran, as Maryam and I stroll through the Grand Bazaar, the ancient market in the city center. This is a place that’s usually alive with activity—in open-fronted stores beneath nineteenth-century brick arches, women in chadors haggle with traders over the price of a pound of mutton and small boys run around with trays of hot tea, dodging boxes of dried fruit and stacks of china plates.
Today, though, the storefronts are shut. The cobbled streets are quiet. Draped across the majestic arches of the bazaar are green and black velvet banners with prayers and eulogies dancing across them in elegant Persian script. Some have photographs pinned to them in memory of deceased former merchants.
Up ahead of us something’s going on. A group of old men has gathered around a bearded man who’s singing into a microphone. The song, explains Maryam, is a lament for the death of Husayn and the martyrs of Karbala. The men shuffle their feet, hang their heads, and add their quavering voices to the sorrowful chants of the leader. Theirs is the weary melancholy of the older gener
ation. Some rub their hands into their eyes. Others cross their arms and tap their chests gently with the palms of their hands, in the ancient Middle Eastern gesture of mourning.
Meanwhile, outside the bazaar, passions are mounting. Heavily amplified chanting, drumbeats, and the shouts of young men wielding chains penetrate the bazaar’s deep brick walls. Large loudspeakers send laments echoing down the cobbled alleys. Maryam translates the lyrics of one for me: “I will mourn for you even if you cut off my head.”
* * *
Until recently, when reality TV swept trembling voices and watery eyes onto British shores, stoicism characterized my countrymen’s response to death. You found it in the stiff upper lips of the musicians on board the Titanic, performing on deck until the moment the ship sank into the ocean, or the quiet heroism of Captain Titus Oates, one of Robert Falcon Scott’s fated 1910 Antarctic exploration team. In a bid to help save his colleagues, Oates headed out of the tent into a blizzard and certain death. His last words, recorded by Scott, were famously unemotional: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
British reserve often triumphs over human tragedy. One friend recalls an incident that took place the day his father died. On leaving the hospital, he ran into a family friend he’d not seen for some years. After exchanging a few pleasantries, the friend inquired after his father. Exhausted and emotionally numb after weeks of watching his parent suffer the last throes of Alzheimer’s, he could think of nothing to say, except, “Actually, he’s dead.” Surprised and lost for words, the friend had spluttered, “Oh—so not so good then,” before they both exploded with laughter at the absurd exchange.
British stoicism once even became a propaganda tool. In the 1942 film Mrs. Miniver, producer Sidney Franklin wanted to help win sympathy for the Brits to garner U.S. public support for America’s entry into the Second World War. In Mrs. Miniver, a British housewife (played by Greer Garson) is unflappable, displaying fortitude in the face of disaster as, first, their home is bombed and, later, her daughter-in-law Carol dies beside her on the sitting room floor after being hit during an air raid. “Dear, won’t you try to get a little rest,” she tells her son next morning, stifling tears, as he returns from duty to see his wife’s body.
My family, at least its more senior members, comes from this tradition. When Fa’s mother died, I was a child and barely remember the day’s events, except for the tone of his voice when he answered the phone, telling me something significant had happened. There was certainly no sobbing in the house. Some years later, when a call came in the middle of a dinner party with news that my uncle Gavin had died in a car crash, Sam recalls that Fa remained stony faced, as did the dinner guests who, after his announcement, offered their condolences and quietly left.
For us Brits, disaster is met not with weeping and wailing but with pragmatism, etiquette, and control. When faced with loss, we make a pot of tea. We encourage the bereaved to “get a little rest.” At funerals and memorials, we try not to bawl, but instead weep as discreetly as we can. “She bore up well,” we say admiringly of those who remain poker-faced when their hearts are broken by loss.
We try to avert emotional displays, too. “There, there, don’t cry,” is something we’re always being told as children, instructions that seem to retain their influence over us well into adulthood. Yet why should we not cry for the loss of a dear friend or close relative? Surely it’s the most natural thing in the world?
Nevertheless, I did not weep when Fa died. For me, the worst moments came during his illness. There were the sad car rides with Sam after visits to the Joseph Weld Hospice, when talk of his approaching death seemed somehow easier to conduct from within a moving vehicle. There was the anguish of watching someone endure a pain and discomfort that could only get worse. After a year of horrors, the end came as a relief, for him and for us. But for that year, frequent, tense sighs were the way I mourned him.
* * *
It’s early evening and Maryam and I are sitting on the floor of the upper balcony of a Husseinia (a religious hall) looking across at a blaze of fluorescent light. The balcony is high up, near the roof of the building, supported on ranks of iron columns painted in a lurid green. We’re waiting for a Tasoua ceremony to begin. Tasoua means “ninth,” for this is the ninth day of Muharram, the day before Ashura, and it commemorates the eve of the Battle of Karbala. Below us, on the ground floor, a carpet-covered expanse of concrete is where a pageantry of woe will soon be taking place.
This Husseinia is in Yazd, an ancient desert city in the center of Iran, about four hundred and fifty miles south of Tehran and known for religious conservatism. Along its narrow alleys, heavy wooden double doors puncturing mud and wattle walls still have paired knockers, each making a different sound to distinguish male from female visitors and let the women inside know whether or not to cover themselves before answering. Out on the streets, women are shrouded in full-length black chadors, turning them into anonymous inky shapes, shadows casting shadows.
These shadows have become real people on the balcony of the Husseinia—cheery, chatty, gossipy women. While the men sit quietly in neat rows on the floor below, up here, everyone’s busy handing around drinks and snacks and sorting out the children. It’s an indoor picnic. The only problem is the heat. Because it’s midwinter in Iran, waves of hot air are rising from four huge cylindrical heaters on the ground floor of the hall. I’m in my thick, woolen coat, long shirt, trousers, and boots. I’m sweltering, and longing to take off my head scarf. But Iran’s dress code makes this impossible in public without censure or even arrest.
After almost an hour, with nothing happening and the temperature rising, I’m tempted to leave, but then the announcer starts talking and Maryam tells me the ceremony is about to begin. I hear a noise from the street—singing and rhythmic drumming. It’s quiet at first, but it gets louder as a troupe of men enters the hall. As they insert themselves into the spaces between the men sitting on the floor, I realize that the drumming sound is actually being made by slaps, as the performers beat the palms of their hands against their chests. They stretch their arms out and pull them in again—in and out, in and out. Slap, slap, slap.
From up here, it’s an astonishingly beautiful display, as a sea of arms rises and falls. Pale hands stand out against black clothing, creating an effect like a shoal of flying fish leaping from a deep lake or a cloud of migrating butterflies fluttering above a stormy landscape. Although the men stand close together, they never once flinch or strike each other, even as they throw their arms wide to the heavens before reining them in to meet their chests. The visual drama is heightened by the way the performers are standing—not facing the same way but positioned in all directions. They’re dancing with their arms. And through it all, there’s a slow rhythm, one found in mourning ceremonies and funeral marches of all kinds—a relentless regularity of sound that seems designed to keep the heart beating when really it wants to break.
This is a noheh, or lamentation song, and like most of the rituals taking place at this time of year, it tells of the bloody battle at Karbala. In between the lamentations, the leader calls out through a microphone, addressing the members of the holy family directly. “Come to see what has happened to your son!” he cries to Husayn’s mother. Then: “Husayn, where is your commander? Husayn, where is your sweet son Ali Akbar?”
The answer, of course, is that Husayn, his commander, Ali Akbar, and the others are all dead or mortally wounded and caked in blood, arrows piercing their hearts, limbs severed from their corpses.
Everyone in the hall knows this and has heard the cries many times before. But these direct appeals to the holy family bearing the dreadful news about relatives and kinsmen are delivered as if their deaths had just happened. The cries have a powerful effect, unifying everyone in a moment of shared grief and anger at a common enemy. Well, almost everyone—a small girl in a pink dress stands up in front of me. Grinning cheekily, she stretches her arms out and slaps them on her chest a few times,
mimicking the men. She is plainly enjoying herself.
* * *
Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born writer, once called the Shi’a faith “a religion of lament more concentrated and more extreme than any to be found elsewhere.” Yet while the ritual mourning for Imam Husayn might be bound up with Shi’a beliefs, lamenting in Iran has deeper cultural roots. Mourning is at the heart of Persian legends and poems, which invariably end in tragic deaths that are recounted in poignant language designed to elicit tears.
In the epic Shahnameh, tenth-century poet Ferdowsi tells the history of Persia from its earliest days to the Arab conquest of the seventh century. In one part of the story, the great hero Rostam, unaware that he has a son by a princess called Tahmineh (a woman he’s not seen for many years), finds himself opposite his son Sohrab in battle. Father and son have no idea they’re fighting each other. After a single-combat struggle, Rostam delivers a fatal stab wound to Sohrab before seeing on Sohrab’s arm the bracelet he’d given the princess years earlier. He realizes, to his horror, that he’s just killed his own offspring.
The mourning for Sohrab takes on monumental proportions. Princess Tahmineh “heaped black earth upon her head, and tore her hair, and wrung her hands, and rolled on the ground in her agony,” writes Ferdowsi. “And her mouth was never weary of plaining.” Her father, the King of Samengan, “tore his vestments” in anguish. Meanwhile, the house of Rostam “grew like a grave, and its courts were filled with the voice of sorrow.”
Lamenting is enshrined in courtly Persian poetry, in stanzas awash with tears. Take the verse of a poem by Hafiz, the fourteenth-century poet from Shiraz:
My face is seamed with dust, mine eyes are wet.
Of dust and tears the turquoise firmament
Kneadeth the bricks for joy’s abode; and yet …
Alas, and weeping yet I make lament!