by Holly Morris
“Why go to all this trouble if you just have to cover up?” I ask Persheng.
“But our faces are not covered, and that explains all the makeup—often heavy makeup—not to mention the nose job craze. And the scarves get pushed back enough to show off the highlights on the hair,” Persheng says. The bits that do show become ever more important. And of course, women are often unveiled in private homes.
Manicures, pedicures, and a deep commitment to hair removal animate the parlor’s landscape. I walk around shooting b-roll of body creams, hair products, and an impressive range of “muscle massagers,” which look suspiciously like mid-century vibrators. Julie is getting the fuzz on her upper lip removed using a Middle Eastern method called threading. A long white cotton string resembling dental floss hangs around the beautician’s neck, and the strands cross in front of her chest. The beautician finesses this intersection of the threads, twisting them together at a rapid-fire pace, creating a friction against the face that pulls out the hair.
“Islam,” she says with a nod toward her handiwork, meaning “this is how we do it here.”
“Look Iranian,” I say to Julie as I zoom in on her full-blooded Italian upper lip, which is magically going bald.
“Does it hurt?” I ask, wincing for her.
“Uh-huh,” she responds in a slightly higher than usual pitch. “It’s like a row of fire ants is mowing its way across my lip.”
We go down a metal spiral staircase into a basement full of a dozen gurneys, the ladies on them in varying degrees of repose. The two chatty beauticians in the room go from woman to woman, carrying out procedures with the speed and levity of Trapper and Hawkeye in the M*A*S*H operating room.
“Your turn,” Julie says, grabbing the camera. I drop my drawers and climb up. A five-foot-three-inch, kindly, unveiled Iranian woman hugging a small bucket of what looks like gurgling crude oil comes my way. I prepare to be waxed, Persian style. The woman cuts five-by-seven-inch swatches of translucent cellophane-like material, which will affix to the wax. I sense a silent flinch from across the room, and prepare myself as she ladels gobs of hot copper-colored wax onto my legs.
“If you ask a woman in her twenties,” Julie says, “what one thing she would want to have if she were stranded on a desert island, the answer is—”
“Yooowww,” I screech as my gentle waxer rips out all the hair on my right inner thigh. I am part Greek; we give the Middle Eastern women a run for their money when it comes to fur.
“Lipstick,” says Julie, “and if you ask a woman in her thirties . . .” Julie continues.
“What? What?” I say, clenching for the next sear of pain.
“Tweezers.”
Understandably, none of the Iranian women would agree to be filmed getting waxed. Julie and I climb back up the spiral staircase, dazed and hairless, debating the ethics of passing off an American thigh for a Persian thigh in the show. When we emerge from downstairs Persheng tells me that when we send a tape of this show back for the Iranian divas to see, it can’t include the waxing sequence. Otherwise it will never get through the censors.
“Oh,” Persheng says, tapping her watch, “we’ve got to get going to meet Pooran,” reminding us of our meeting with an Iranian poet and scholar. With that, we throw on our manteaux, cloaking a half-day’s worth of hard-earned beauty, and trade beauty politics for poetry.
“Poetry for Iranians is religion, a religion as powerful as Islam,” writes Elaine Sciolino in her book Persian Mirrors. Even the pious in Islam may have a volume of poetry on their coffee table next to the Qur’an. In Iran, poetry is revered, and poets (especially talented, dead ones) are rock stars. People flock to the graves of poets in Iran the way Americans go to Graceland. We first learned of this phenomenon in Shiraz, when we visited the tomb of the fourteenth-century lyric poet Hafez. Here in Tehran, we’d heard people, especially women, go to the grave of Forough Farrokhzad.
Forough has come to represent the creative, rebellious, self-determined life and is an icon for many Iranian women. Imagine a cross between James Dean, Sylvia Plath, and Eve Ensler. Her legendary status grew when in 1967 she was killed in a car crash at age thirty-two. We will visit Forough’s grave, but first we will go see her sister Pooran, who’s less well known than Forough (except among intellectuals), but is reportedly just as independent-minded.
We arrive at Pooran’s house in central Tehran, carry our equipment through a fenced-in garden, and buzz the door. Pooran is portly, with abundant brown hair pulled back into a bun, and she wears a long dark gown. Her face has loads of sparkle and a paradoxical heaviness. In addition to being a writer and editor, Pooran is the keeper of her sister’s flame. Pooran immediately warms to us. (“I like Americans,” she would tell me later, “they are simple.”)
She leads us to a comfortable couch and we drink coffee and chat as Orlando sets up the camera. Pooran’s house is Westernized, like many in Tehran, in a style circa 1952.
The inscription at the front of Hafez’s tomb in Shiraz said that “the grave of a poet is a place where you can smell love.” So I dive right into the love thing. “As a scholar, and the sister of a beloved poet known for her sensual writing, you must have some insight about the Iranian approach to love.” Pooran responds without hesitation (and Persheng translates).
“In general all Iranians are in love, in other words, hot-blooded. The reason is the sun that shines directly over Iran. And when the sun shines so strongly the cells move more rapidly. And when they move more rapidly, love is more passionate,” Pooran explains emphatically, with her soul, as much as her voice and hands. And here I’ve been complaining about the heat. “And when love is more passionate, it gives rise to poetry.”
“In reality most Iranians are poets,” Pooran continues. “Even those street peddlers who during my childhood sold beets and ice cream, their chants were rhythmic and they spoke with poetry. If you pay attention you can see that Iranians can come up with poems instantly and the reason for it is love that is inside them.”
“Your last book is about poetry, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Yes, it is about the path of poetry by women from the fourth century [the tenth century A.D.* 3] until my sister Forough. I have studied how women poets lived, because the male-dominated society did not allow women to speak at all so the women were forced to live behind closed doors and would compose poetry. The fact is, we only had around four hundred women from the fourth century until Forough who were able to write poetry but, because women had no identity, most of them wrote the poetry from the words and perspective of a man. Women had not yet gained their historical identity so they did not have the audacity and bravery to write poetry in their own words,” she explains.
“And where does your sister fit within the canon?” I ask.
“My sister Forough in reality started a new school of thought, meaning that for the first time in Iran she wrote from a woman’s perspective. Forough speaks plainly and simply and is frank and sincere. She is brave and candid.”
Forough is widely regarded as a charismatic genius, an artist answerable to her own ethic. She urged her sisters to rise up and “uproot the roots of oppression,” and she made some unconventional personal choices, including divorcing her husband and giving their son to his father so that she could pursue her poetry. She shed light on the oppressions endured by Iranian women, and urged them to take action to change their situation. Forough’s poetry was banned for years for its sensuality. Case in point, an excerpt from her poem “Another Birth”:
Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette
in the narcotic repose between two love-makings
or the absent gaze of a passerby
with a meaningless smile and a good morning.
Pooran smooths the lap of her black gown and goes on to explain the culture in which her sister created. “Eastern people—not just Iranians, but Easterners in general—always live under a kind of mask. They never show their true selves, but rather, like an onion with many layer
s,” she says, miming the act of peeling, “you have to keep peeling away layer after layer to uncover the real person. Forough was just herself; there are no skins.”
All that Pooran is saying jibes with the experience we have had here. The onion explains a lot, actually. For example, Americans hear that Middle Easterners “lie,” but it’s more like they tell you what they think you want to hear. It almost falls into the category of a courtesy. But this is a communication dance that plain-spoken Puritan-bred Americans have a hard time following. The reason Pooran likes “simple” Americans is that no onion peeling is necessary.
“What do you think are some of the myths about the East that the West has?” I ask, noting that Pooran, like her sister, communicates with unusual directness for an Iranian.
“When people from the West come to interview me I’ve realized that they look at us from a different perspective, as if they have come to visit a woman from a thousand years ago. This is not the case at all. We have certain rules here, and naturally owing to our upbringing we have learned to accept those rules, but the truth is something else.”
I wonder how many layers Pooran will pull back.
“The intellectual aspect has always been more important to me. It is always during the hard times, under pressure, that growth takes place. The women in Iran have gone through an amazing period during this past twenty-five or so years. They have taken an intellectual journey. In spite of the destiny that may have been decided for them, they went in the opposite direction and have achieved tremendous growth.”
Pooran shows me around her house. The walls are covered with framed photos of her late sister and of their brother Fereydoun, also dead. Fereydoun was killed a few years ago, allegedly by fundamentalist Islamicists in Germany for being bisexual and outspoken against the Islamic Republic.
“My brother was the love of my life and his sorrow is always with me; it’s always alive with me.”
The untimely loss of two of Pooran’s siblings has not made her cower but, rather, has made her pursue all that is poetic in life.
“I am not afraid of anything. I am traveling a path,” she says, arcing her hands into the air in unison, as if daring fate to double down.
“We create fear, it doesn’t exist, it comes from our own weakness. I’m not weak, not at all,” Pooran says, her chin slightly lowered, slowly moving side to side, creating emphasis. “Not even my brother’s death scared me. I grieved, but I wasn’t frightened. I never fear.”
Cameras and veils fall by the wayside, and Pooran serves us a meal of shormeh sabzi, a delectable feast of lamb, herbs, and lemon. I watch her pretty young brunette assistant flirt with Orlando; Julie and Pooran dance a bit to Kurdish folk music, then meander through Pooran’s vast library of books. As we leave, Pooran gives me a pair of bear hugs. Before the first she looks me in the eyes and wishes me well with my work; before the second she says warmly, “Yes, I like Americans.” And then she writes down directions to her sister’s grave for us.
Unlike the tomb of Hafez, visiting Forough’s tomb is discouraged by them. Every day people sneak into the cemetery where Forough is buried and light candles and recite her poetry over her grave. The wrought-iron front gate of the cemetery is locked with a thick, rusty chain. A small, stooped old woman comes to the gate and denies us entrance.
“Emrooz ta’tile,” she says, crankily. Go away. Closed.
I pull out ten dollars. I’ve never greased palms to get into a cemetery before, but the woman snatches it with a speed that indicates she is clearly well versed in this quid pro quo.
“Doorbin nemish,” she says. But no cameras. We return the DigiBeta camera to the van and tuck the PD 150 under Persheng’s manteau.
We walk through an old, wooded cemetery and weave between flat tombstones in various degrees of disrepair. We amble through windy, overgrown paths until we spot a small cluster of people gathered deep in the cemetery. “Must be Forough,” I say to Persheng, who slides the camera out from under her wrap. We approach the women and a man who are gathered around Forough’s grave, which is marked by a large white marble slab lying flat on the ground, covered with beautiful Farsi engravings. The women ladle water from a bucket and wash the tombstone with their hands. One of them lays six red roses on the fresh, clean surface.
A woman with dark hair, wearing a mint trench coat, white headscarf, and fresh lipstick, begins to read from one of Forough’s volumes.
I shall wear
a pair of twin cherries as earrings
and I shall put dahlia petals on my fingernails
there is an alley
where the boys who were in love with me
still loiter with the same unkempt hair
thin necks and bony legs
and think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
who was blown away by the wind one night.
The next morning, back in our hotel’s restaurant the instrumental theme to Titanic bleats on for the seventh time in the last two hours.
“If I had to work here and listen to this incessant tune I’d go nuts,” I say to Julie, scratching my temple with a pinky under my gray scarf.
While in Tehran we’ve stayed at this hotel and, naturally, we’ve bonded with the proprietors. Tired of the Titanic, I ask if we can put a few of our CDs on the hotel sound system. The men agree and point us toward the stereo cabinet. Julie slides in a CD and presses play: when Suzanne Vega comes on—maelstrom.
“Nemishe! Ejazenadareem!” (“Oh my, not allowed! It is illegal!”) the men yell as they run for the sound system. Waiters come dashing from the restaurant; cleaning ladies freeze wide-eyed. We have been actively looking for a woman who will sing on camera, and know full well that women’s voices are not to be heard publicly in Iran, yet we still inadvertently transgressed. Honest to God, it was an accident. We hadn’t even connected that rule with our Suzanne Vega.
“The police may come. Bad. Very bad,” says the manager, yanking the CD out of the player, his discomfort eclipsing his kindness for the first time. He has met so many of our requests—Internet access, bottles of water, black coffee—and here we have put him in jeopardy. We apologize over and over again.
The Suzanne Vega incident illustrates that it’s not just hair but a woman’s voice that can be dangerously tempting. Julie and I want to find someone who can explain the laws about women singing, and maybe even sing on camera.
We have two days of shooting left and, realistically, only one chance at landing such a singer. Pari Zanganeh. Zanganeh is an icon in Iran. Her performing career thrived in the seventies but then was practically stopped dead by the revolution. Yet her popularity as a folksinger remains strong. Zanganeh maintains a sort of phantom career; her fans play her old records behind closed doors, and she is recognized as if she has a televised concert every Saturday night.
I was initially reluctant to put her in the show because she is famous, wealthy, Shah-associated, and, according to Jeannie, who met her on the scout trip, she has a tiny white fluffy dog with a jeweled collar. But aristocracy would do in a pinch. She’s agreed to meet us for an hour.
The whole truth is that Pari could have easily left Iran with the revolution and continued her skyrocketing career in the United States, what with its large expat community. (In fact, Pari does frequently tour the United States and sings to huge crowds.) But Pari chose to stay in her native Iran because she loves her country, and she loved her mother, and her mother wouldn’t leave.
Julie, Orlando, Persheng, and I walk through a tall metal gate, step onto the manicured grounds of the Zanganeh estate, and marvel at the white-columned mansion in the foothills of the Alborz. The small white fluffy dog comes tearing toward us, yapping. We walk up the stone path, past a pool, and under a white latticed arch and knock on the front door. The door swings open and Pari stands there, looking very sophisticated in dark glasses. Pari was in a car accident in her twenties that left her blind. In addition to her singing career, Pari has raised loads of money for blind chi
ldren, and she writes kids’ books that are published in Braille. She is wearing a black-rimmed hat atop coifed sandy-brown hair, a white linen blazer, black skirt, and pearl earrings, and her lips are topped off with a cinnamon shade. The big, black, square sunglasses give her a slight Jackie O look.
Pari greets us with a smile and gracefully ushers us into an elegant living room with parquet floors, white furniture, and a piano against one wall. Framed photos of herself and other unveiled women adorn the house. We have been in Iran long enough to feel how risqué this is. As we set up the cameras it occurs to me that Pari is the first person to be interviewed without a head scarf; she just wears the hat. I wonder if this will get her in trouble with them, and what kind of power protects her when she bends the rules.
Over tea and sweets Pari begins by telling me, in English, about a series of small concerts she has recently been allowed to perform.
“So you’re saying you can perform as long as it’s only for women and it’s in a private space?” I say.
“Yes, since four years ago we have been allowed to sing for ladies, which is a great occasion for me. We go step by step in Iran.”
I’ve got an understanding of how stifling the rules can be for women here, but I want Pari’s take. She lives in such a different world than, say, Mokarrameh Ghanbari or Zahra Rahnavard. I want to know how the public quelling of women affects the heart and soul of a performing artist.
“Well, it has been like this since the changing of regime in Iran. The women are a little bit . . . how can I say . . . the activities of the ladies are restricted a little bit.”