Wedding Song

by Farideh Goldin

  Turning fifteen, my paternal grandmother, whose name “Tavous” means “peacock” in Persian, was given in marriage to my grandfather. This time, she didn’t protest. Her new husband—well-known and respected in the community—had lost his wife after their third child was born. Tavous was sturdy. She had strong legs, wide hips for childbearing, and strong hands for raising children and running a household. She remained married to my grandfather until he died, raising his three sons from a previous marriage as well as eight children of their own.

  When my turn came for marriage, the rules had changed somehow—women weren’t married off at such a young age, but the old rules stood that they had to be clever housekeepers, be modest, and be accepting of the elders’ role in arranging marriages. In keeping the traditions, I learned to clean sabzee and chop it too; I knew how to shell fava beans for baghela polo, and how to wash fresh tobacco, salt, and dry it for my grandmother’s waterpipe. I helped wash the clothes by hand and press them with a charcoal iron. I polished everyone’s shoes on Fridays for Shabbat. I could clean the lining of the cow’s intestines and the four stomachs and stuff them with a mixture of cilantro, short grain rice, and split yellow peas.

  My maternal great-grandmother, Dina Salem. Her husband’s early death made her destitute, forcing her to marry off her daughters very young.

  I also spent quite a lot of time beside my father in his jewelry workshop, watching him string pearls on gold threads and sew them on a solid piece of gold hammered into the shape of flowers. I frequently sat beside my great-uncle, Daee-bozorg, in our backyard under the shade of the rose tree as he rinsed gold and silver particles from the rubbish that came from my father’s shop. I listened to the stories of his adventures in Baghdad while he melted the gold dust and poured it into iron casts. He told me Biblical stories too as I crouched next to him and watched him weigh flour for Passover matzah, shadowing him whenever he was around. He showed me how he built a mud tanoor for baking the unleavened bread and, unlike other adults, he enjoyed my questions; I loved his stories.

  Dina’s mother, Adina Sabba. Her successful merchant husband was murdered in an Iranian village for being Jewish. His death brought financial devastation to the family. Most of the family pictures were collected and preserved by Nahid Gerstein.

  Until I was of marriagable age, around sixteen years old, I acted as a son to my father and followed him on his business ventures into poultry farming, helped him experiment with hatching chicks and feeding them at home. I traveled with him to Tehran and watched him conduct his business. Therefore, my world was dramatically different from that of the women I knew. The bond between my father and me lasted for many years and didn’t break until my brothers were older, and I became more assertive.

  Dina’s mother-in-law, Hamineh Saed. She diligently helped the Alliance school in Hamedan. Picture courtesy of Alliance office in New York.

  The first time the khastegaree, the marriage proposal, came for me, I was only twelve years old. I was at the movies with my mother to see an American comedy, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Wearing a new brown dress with yellow flowers, I yearned to run and make its flowing skirt twirl, but I knew girls had to be modest and squashed my desire to skip from happiness. As we waited in the newly opened indoor theatre, an old woman in chador approached my mother and whispered something in her ears, while her eyes focused on me.

  My mother threw her chin up, indicating a negative answer in the Iranian fashion. “No,” she said.

  Still staring at me, the old woman replied, “He’s from a good family.” I hid behind my mother’s skirt. “You don’t know what fate will bring. You should consider it. You don’t want to wait too long,” she warned.

  A synagogue in Shiraz. Mothers lined their daughters on the front row of the balcony, or right outside the windows in the yard, for a good viewing by eligible bachelors.

  “I was married young myself. I don’t want my daughter to have the same fate,” my mother said. She gave her refusal finality by turning her back and walking away. Then she looked directly into my eyes. “I could have given you to them, you know. That’s what happened to me.”

  I kept quiet, but my heart ached. I felt helpless; I crossed my arms to hide my small budding breasts. Feeling flushed from the stranger’s gaze, I tried to hide behind my mother until the lights started flashing and we entered the movie hall.

  The incident led to two major squabbles with my extended family. I was ruining my posture, they said, by covering my chest with my books, by hugging the bag of groceries, or by crossing my arms. A family member’s fists usually landed on my back to straighten it out, and although the shock worked momentarily, I stooped as soon as the pain subsided.

  Despite the fact that I had become reticent, one family member or the other constantly reminded me of my past veragi. With my new attitude, they gave me yet another hated title: kaleh-shagh, stiff-necked and stubborn. The elders particularly scolded me for refusing to act as they wished when in public. Saturday evenings, Jewish women gathered at the large traffic circle in Felke-ye-Shah, which displayed a gigantic statue of the Shah on horseback standing on top of a monument. Roses, geraniums, water fountains, benches, and modern lighting decorated the tiny park. Women greeted one another. “Shavua tov, a good beginning for the week ahead!”

  Each family chose a corner, spread a small Persian rug, and pulled out sandwiches and drinks, waiting for the men to join them after services at the synagogue. My grandmother always told me to go for a walk, and if I refused, she took me for a stroll herself. I blushed and tried to make myself as small as possible until my father’s or uncle’s fist came down on my back. Since this was a place for matchmaking, the family expected me to be gracious, but I wouldn’t smile and often refused to go through the custom of exchanging niceties, embarrassing and infuriating them.

  When my aunts came to visit my grandmother on Saturdays and Wednesday evenings, I helped my mother serve tea and biscuits, watermelon slices, sour cherry sharbat, and romaine lettuce with pickled vegetables or mint syrup. In fine weather, they sat on a Persian carpet on the bricked backyard, under the citrus trees; at other times, they gathered in a circle in the family room, sitting cross-legged, smoking waterpipes, and cracking squash seeds with their back teeth. They gossiped and asked for advice. Once in a while when I entered the room with a fresh pot of tea, they went quiet. Then, my grandmother would say, “Farideh, go outside for now and close the door.”

  I left, turning to close the door just to see the women’s faces fixed on me. On those days, a new marriage proposal was being discussed. Someone had approached my grandmother in the women’s section in the balcony of the synagogue, another had made a call to my uncle’s office, a third had stopped by my father’s shop to say hello. Whoever was approached by a suitor’s family felt proud and became the defender of that family’s good name and fortune. Resentful and angry, I chewed my nails and felt the bile in my throat with each incident.

  Whether I could accept it or not, I knew that high school was a time of marriage for many women. One by one the school administrators dismissed my classmates upon hearing the news of their engagements. Most parents wanted their daughters to marry young, when they were more desirable. In those days, I was curious why so many teenage girls went willingly to the slaughterhouse—which was my view of marriage.

  Feathers and Hair

  Cousin Ziba married shortly after high school. The day of her wedding, women of the family divided into two groups; one group celebrated with my cousin, while the other plucked the chickens for the festivities that night. The more prestigious women, including my grandmother, the mothers of the bride and groom, some aunts, and many prominent women of the community, leaned against large pillows on Persian carpets in the living room of my aunt’s house, decorated for a pre-wedding party. Some of the younger female cousins passed around trays of sweets, limeade, and sharbat as older women showered the bride with candy, covered their mouths with their chadors and ululated, “Kililili.” The
second group of women—my mother, myself, my sister, the washer-woman, and her daughter—sat on low stools behind the party room in the brick-paved backyard to clean mounds of chickens.

  A short distance away, under the persimmon tree, the shokhet said a brakha, plucked a patch of feathers from underneath the neck of the chicken, pulled the head back, slit it, and then threw the body on the grass to do its dance of death. Next, the father of the bride gathered two or three throbbing birds in each hand, holding them by their feet, and dropped their warm carcasses in front of us to pluck.

  Weddings tested a young woman’s skill in cleaning chickens. Since refrigeration wasn’t available, chickens had to be cleaned quickly and cooked right away, leaving the pluckers little time to bathe and dress for the wedding party.

  I felt hurt that I was excluded from the party room, missing the fun and treats. As I grew older, my fate, my role in the family, became more tightly connected to my mother as an outsider, as if I still swam in the amniotic fluid that had protected me in her womb, but now it offered no warmth or safety. Instead, its cloudy stench kept me at a distance from the other daughters of my generation, those cousins who should have been my equals, my friends and confidants.

  Khanom-bozorg came by, noticed my look of disappointment, and told me that I was doing a mitzvah by plucking the chickens for a wedding, that I would be blessed with good luck, a good husband. I didn’t want to get married; I hated the hard and dirty work. I knew that by the time the chickens were feathered, gutted, and cleaned, I would not only be covered in chicken feathers, fat, blood, and excrement, but would also smell like a barnyard.

  I kept at the work, sulking. A large surface of the carcass had fine feathers, easy to pull, and I could get through them quite fast. The larger feathers, however, embedded deep in the flesh, were the most difficult, particularly on the wings, where the delicate skin tore easily. Even worse was the fatty backside of the chicken, where the long quills often pulled out and splashed fat and blood on my hands, arms, legs, hair, and clothes, where the fine feathers clung, making me look so silly that everyone smirked. Sometimes, the quills broke and I had to trap the imbedded piece between the edge of a small knife and my thumb to pull it out, careful not to cut my finger. My mother’s hands, however, were already rough from housework and the knife made only a small dent on her thick calluses.

  While I worked on my third chicken, I realized that the ceremony down the hall was a bandandazi party. As the bandandaz entered the room with her little basket of thread, we heard a wave of ululation. We echoed the celebratory cries while plucking. I had seen this particular woman before. She held the end of a string between her teeth, looped it and put it close to the skin. With her other hand, she pulled the opposite end of the thread and swiftly removed the hair from women’s legs, arms, faces, and armpits. Its growth and darkening being synonymous in women with their loss of childhood beauty and innocence, body hair obsessed Iranians, and its removal appealed to Middle Eastern men, who preferred a youthful appearance in their women.

  Plucking the chickens, I listened to the noises from the party room. The ululation went on; water gurgled in the waterpipes, and once in a while I heard a subdued moan from the bride when the bandandaz pulled a particularly stubborn hair.

  The chickens were almost done when the small groans became heartwrenching screams that all the noise from the ululation could not muffle. Horrified, I started to rise from my stool to help Ziba, but my mother pulled me down with a knowing smile on her face. What was going on? No one seemed to want to talk about it. Instead, my mother and the rest of the women joined in, drowning the screams in their own sounds of ululation.

  I had learned not to ask questions, but I didn’t have to wait too long for the answer. My mother left briefly to fetch water. We had to wet the feathers once in a while to keep them from flying. Then, one of the cleaning people (whose low-class status freed her from the inhibitions of the “high-class” people) bent over and, using a derogatory word, whispered, “They’re doing her private parts!” Then she giggled hysterically, covering her mouth with her feather-laden hand.

  There I was cleaning the chickens while the aristocracy of the community plucked my cousin’s pubic hair! I couldn’t get Ziba’s image out of my mind, legs spread in front of women who themselves were covered modestly in long chadors, having the hair plucked all the way down to her private area. Angry and worried, I plucked recklessly, ruining the skin of the next few chickens.

  The removal of the body hair didn’t bother me, since I had seen the bandandaz working on women’s faces, legs, and arms; I had seen naked bodies of married women with shaven private parts in the hamam. Rather, the public nature of the ceremony terrified me, the loss of privacy and self-determination; this initiation into a culture of conformity appalled me, although it delighted the other women.

  I was only fourteen, a year older than my mother at her wedding, and three years younger than my cousin. Instead of accepting the custom as a show of support and camaraderie, as many women did, I felt lost and feared that my life could spin out of my control as I grew older and became a woman.

  A few weeks later, I asked Ziba about the ceremony. “It hurt like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Even the bandandaz said she had never seen anyone bleed so badly.” She spoke with a pride I couldn’t understand.

  For years, I analyzed the ritual, trying to understand why Ziba’s mother and grandmother had allowed it, especially after having experienced it themselves. The realization sank in slowly and bitterly. All mothers helped to perpetuate the cycle of misery for their daughters, I concluded. For a long time, I wondered if my mother too was going to drag me with her into darkness; I wondered if I had to break the bond between us in order to free myself.

  Thinking of Ziba’s mother, and of her grandmother, who was also my grandmother, passing the customs of torture to the next generations appalled and horrified me. Their joy in linking their chains to the younger women made me feel lonely and powerless, for the plucking of both the feathers and hair plainly symbolized our mothers’ subjugation.

  At the end of the party, my grandmother stopped by to see how the chicken cleaning progressed. She blessed me, “I pray for the same happiness and good life for you.”

  And I, who had learned to shut up, once again lost control of my tongue. “May it not be God’s will!” I blurted.

  In the silence that followed, looks of horror spread over every face, including my father’s as he happened to walk by to check on us. I felt sorry for both my parents, since a daughter’s wedding day was the ultimate desire for Iranian Jewish parents. Still, I just didn’t want it, not this way. But which way? I recognized myself as an oddity, a loner, a defiant girl. My heart went out to my parents. I was sorry that they found me an embarrassment, but I also feared my own fate. What was going to become of me—the one who didn’t belong?

  A decade later I would move to the United States and marry an American man. At my own wedding, I so adamantly wanted to distance myself from my past that I took care to exclude all rituals of my heritage from the ceremony. I walked down the aisle American style; I offered neither Iranian stew nor aromatic rice for the reception party, and I was glad that the chickens weren’t plucked by anyone I knew. The poultry came from neat packages that did not even look like chickens—breast of chicken stuffed with wild rice was on the menu for my wedding.

  Today, partly through my writings, I have come to peace with my past, and if I have any regret about my wedding, as beautiful as it was, it’s the fact that I allowed my fear and disgust of some customs to erase all others. But in May of 1977, my fiancé and I selected music with an Eastern-European flavor, and I was actually pleased that my aunts weren’t there to sing vasoonak, the traditional Shirazi Jewish wedding songs. I was jealous when my grandmother became the center of attention at my wedding, smoking her ghalyan with Iranian tobacco. She covered her hair with colorful silk scarves for modesty, sat cross-legged on the floor, sipped mint tea with a sugar l
ump in the back of her cheek. Taking puffs of her waterpipe, she entertained her American grandchildren with the gurgle of the water at its base. Men ran inside for cameras.

  When they were gone, my grandmother put her lips to my aunt’s ear, signaled toward me, and in a loud whisper, asked, “Has she taken care of the stuff?”

  For a moment, I didn’t understand what she meant. When I realized the meaning of her words, anger went through my body like a jolt of lightning. The memory of Ziba’s wedding flooded my mind. How could I have forgotten? But I composed myself and, with a smile, replied, “Yes, definitely,” and in a small voice she could not hear, “for generations to come.”

  A Viewing

  During my college years in Iran, khastegaree rituals changed in many ways to accommodate the more educated generation. Yet many elements remained unaffected. Since public hamams were not in use by the upper class who had moved out of the ghetto, the synagogue became a focal point for hunting brides. During the holidays, many families scrambled to have their daughters sit closer to the main sanctuary (the men’s section), either on the front row of the balcony or in the yard, to be seen by the young men inside. Still, the most likely judges were the other women, who viewed the new crop and passed the information to families on the lookout for their sons.