by Holly Morris
A bit? A lot is more like it. Clearly, even Pari must be judicious when choosing her words.
I tell Pari about our hotel lobby incident. “Can you explain the thinking—the philosophical defense—behind women not being allowed to sing?”
“It is hearing the voice of women singing solo that is forbidden. One thing is, I think the government—even if they themselves have discovered that it doesn’t harm the human behavior—they are somehow trapped with this idea that the voice of women is tempting. Tempting towards the sexy feelings of men. By seeing my hair or hearing your voice they just go crazy, huh?” Pari laughs at the absurdity of this.
Fear of voice seems to stem from the same place as uncovered hair. Iran’s president in the nineties, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was considered a moderate but that did not stop him from saying, “It is the obligation of the female to cover her head because women’s hair exudes vibrations that arouse, mislead, and corrupt men.”
“They do everything they can to protect themselves against sex and women,” Pari adds with a good-natured snort.
Whether she is performing abroad or at home, Pari tells me, she prefers modest dress. The Islamic restrictions may go too far, but the other extreme—sex-obsessed—can be just as oppressive.
“In the United States, my God, they advertise for cheese, even for cheese, chairs, tables, I mean handkerchief, dress. If they want to make it appealing: ‘sexy cheese,’ ‘sexy dress,’ ‘sexy chair.’ Everything is with the word sexy. How to sit sexy, how to talk sexy, how to wear sexy,” she says with an exasperated laugh, crossing her sexy stockinged legs.
“You’ve got our number,” I concede lightheartedly.
As a parting gift, Pari goes to the grand piano and belts out a rousing operatic number, tempting the world with the full-throated voice of a diva.
During our time in Iran I asked one of the women we interviewed (I won’t name her here as her comment was dangerously frank) if she would be willing to go without head-covering while we filmed. I knew the answer would be no, but I was curious what her response would be. Perhaps it was unfair of me to ask.
“They will kill us,” she had responded with a look of terror. And like every diva, with the exception of Pari (who wore a hat), as the cameras went on, she donned the veil. Fresh flowers and hospitality, humor and intellect dominated our private interactions in Iran, but that spirit was often obscured by veils and cameras and fear.
As a “simple” American who best understands the syntax of straight talk and the premium of individuality, I was confused by Iran (oh, that onion), humbled, but, most of all, struck by the many women who are indeed anything but shrinking violets.
Whatever its reforms, the theocratic regime creates a fear-based atmosphere, in the face of which publishing articles about patriarchy, appearing on camera in a hat instead of a veil, or expressing the artistic vision within you represent exponential acts of courage.
On our last day in Iran, Vresh drives us forty minutes outside of Tehran so we can capture an image that three weeks ago would have struck me as incongruous, but now seems plausible: women hang gliding. A half dozen gliders are congregated on the top of a plateau, choosing their own covering; tossing aside old-fashioned shoes for heavy black boots, strapping on thick helmets. The yellow sails lie on the ground behind them, separating us, occasionally whipping up in the wind and obscuring our view of one another.
I’ve tried to see through the veils, peel back the layers of good manners that hide more complex sentiment, lift the scrim of public discretion that implies complacency. Beyond the docile, shrouded image of Iranian women, there is passion: women who live by poetry and sing behind closed doors, and whose risk-taking bears great consequence.
One by one the hang gliders sprint toward the cliff, thick-heeled boots still peddling in those first moments of takeoff. I watch them sail off the cliff, like so many Sky Prancers blazing through the air, exhilarated, the ironies fluttering in the wind like the chadors, revealing blue jeans underneath.
“Veil may be a four-letter word,” I say to Julie, “but so is diva.”
We shoot film until we have nothing left and Tehran begins to light the sky in the distance; then we call it a day.
EPILOGUE
Hatching vain empires. . . .
. . . Who shall tempt, with wand’ring feet
The Dark unbottom’d infinite abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way . . .
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST, BOOK II
TO: JEANNIE
FROM: HOLLY
SUBJECT: BOA CONSTRICTOR
hey Mom,
I’ve decided Adventure Divas reminds me of the first page of The Little Prince—remember?—the simple drawing of the “cowboy hat” turns out to be a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant. Don’t know what our next step should be, business-wise. Let’s just tread water for the moment. It’s nice to be at a booty-appreciating latitude, the caipirinhas are perfectly bittersweet, and at some point in each day the surf is always up. More soon. love, Hol
We returned from Iran knowing that our footage held great importance. The tectonic shift after September 11, 2001, created a culture of fear and reactionary politics; our footage held the opportunity to put a human face on a region increasingly characterized as “terrorist,” and we jumped on it.
The planes hitting the towers of the World Trade Center was a dramatic, deadly meeting of the fundamentalist and imperialist camps—camps our pilgrimage had set out to ignore in search of an alternative (if sometimes subliminal) empire, divadom. But ash from that cloud of fear settled on us, too.
The adventure travel industry, where much of our money came from, dried up overnight. Our little Adventure Divas empire, built on halter tops and hope, foundered along with the rest of America. We had been standing in still water for months when I fled to Brazil.
Right now I am writing these words in a blue spiral notebook, sitting cross-legged on a boulder just north of a sleepy fishing village in the Brazilian state of Bahia. After years of crossing the globe in overdrive, I’m holed up—free from obligations, deadlines, or film crews—trying to finish this book, learn to surf, and decide if our enterprise can continue.
“Surfing is work, so we don’t surf on Sunday,” said instructor Benjamin yesterday. Bahia’s tropical-paradise setting has been a salve, but the magical image of surfing that first caught my attention was manifesting as rote work: sore shoulders, an infected toe, a bruised hip and ego. So far the week had been one of hard knocks, each tough lesson built on the previous day’s wipeouts.
Last week, in preparation for surf camp (and for sitting on this boulder in one of Brazil’s physics-defying bikinis), I, driven by my when in Rome zeal and somewhat forgetful of the agonies of Iranian wax, found myself spread-eagled in a beauty parlor. A squat, white-smocked woman named Gabriella plopped down a small metal bucket. Towels protected her hands from the heat.
“Relaxa. Respire,” she said, and ladled on thick wax, then began to search out and uproot virgin hair from places that theretofore had received little depilatory consideration, most notably . . . My Package.
riiiiip
sssseaaar . . . ahhhh!
peeeelll tugggg
“Terminado,” she declared after an hour. “Americanas. Demoram muito. Sao muito peludas,” she said, and shook her head. Americans. Take long. Lots of hair.
I looked south: Bald, bald, bald—bald as a Ping-Pong ball. Except, that is, for one exquisitely carved, perfect strip of glimmering copper hair, perched atop my mons, proud, like a tiara.
A friend had written down a question for me in Portuguese; I leaned over and handed it to Gabriella.
QUAL EH A COISA MAIS IMPORTANTE EM DEPILACAO? (What is the most important thing to know about waxing?)
Gabriella stopped and considered the question for a moment. Then she said, “Saber o que quer tirar antes de colocar a cera.” Know where you’re going before you put
the wax down.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this advice, as I try to make sense of the last few years. Did I know where this was going before I put the wax down with Adventure Divas? Not really. We jumped in and began to root out, and uproot, with no assurance of a final result and little idea how daunting, and exhilarating, our task would be.
Sometimes in life a confidence, or runaway idealism, or just-the-right-time-of-month hubris presents itself and leads to pure action; that was the genesis of Adventure Divas. We were laser-focused on our goals. Before we snuck into Cuba, I put it in a speech: “We’re sort of in that no-man’s-land of developmental wisdom—too young for hindsight and too busy for foresight—but we have been around enough to trust our instincts.”
With divas in our sights, we did succeed in exploring cultures through the eyes of people whose independence, talent, and vision are transforming lives, communities, and political landscapes in their respective countries. We were inspired by a new brand of role model: the self-determined woman who grapples with fear, lives passionately, and, in doing so, improves the world around her. We tried to put a face on the accepted (but yet-to-be-fully-acted-on) socioeconomic fact that the progress of nations depends upon the empowerment of women.
But did we measure and map global feminism? Our data would probably not satisfy the Academy. Gathering empirical evidence to prove something as elusive as a tidal change on the horizon is tough, and not something Adventure Divas was built for. But divadom—that global realm of potential inhabited by so many of the women we met—does exist. It speaks many different languages and doesn’t (thank goodness) gather in a circle to sing ‘Kumbaya.’”
And by broadcasting divadom’s stories, I hope, in a small way, we helped light that rocky path between imperial grasping and fundamentalist entrenchment—illuminating the way not with a hundred-watt flood lamp but with the flashlights and votive candles of individuals who work to slay darkness, ignorance, and fear, and chase—as Keri Hulme put it—life’s updraft.
“Um, dois, tres, quatro, five, six, seven.” Jumping jacks on the soft white sand have been surf camp’s morning ritual, and the exercise inserts a much-needed dose of visceral to the stasis of writing.
“Center yourself, paddle, paddle—now—turtle dive!” instructor Adriano has encouraged as I’ve practiced balancing on the longboard. I wish like hell I’d not skipped so many yoga classes, which I’d been taking, whenever possible, since the India shoot.
Day after day “Abaixa mais” (stay low) wafted across the din of surf (usually right before I tumble off my board) as I tried to learn surfing’s fundamentals “on the inside”—that is, on the already broken whitewater waves near shore. But even on the inside, I’ve been struggling.
“You need to pay attention,” Adriano imparted kindly as he bandaged a cut on my foot.
Today, on this welcome day of rest, I sit cross-legged and scribbling. The buxom, green South Atlantic, like a crisp mountain range at dawn or the infinite Sahara, is a siren that commands my attention, and I hope it will deliver some 20/20 vision with which to make decisions about the future.
What of this television business? Nefarious opiate of the imperialist transnationals or underutilized power tool to be co-opted? “Master’s tools will never bring down the Master’s house,” said the poet Audre Lorde. Perhaps. The jury is still out.
And what of me? Desk jockey turned nomad. A transitional nester like our cousins the orangutans. In the end, all journalism is subjective and all pilgrimages are personal. I set off to make documentaries and spread divavision, but what I took away was a deeper understanding of individual agency around fear, templates for happiness in service, tutorials on courage in the face of oppression. More often than not, it was the wanderings off the path—into a staring contest with Bornean snake, or into a contest of wills with a glistening twelve-pound Cuban bass or an alpine abyss—that locked in these lessons from the divas.
I also found out that road life is not simply a means to an end; it’s who I am. Most countries have their nomadic people and maybe I’m among them. Every night spent shivering under a scratchy wool blanket, every rat I ate in the name of cultural sensitivity and “that TV moment,” every bittersweet parting of ways confirmed my suspicion that I am one of those visceral learners (who sucks at bubble tests). I have to lay my hands all over something to understand it; burn myself to know it’s hot. I need to feel the fear of a gut-wrenching drop to see the summit clearly. Being in motion, not knowing what’s going to happen next, not only suits me, but has become an unlikely vehicle for faith. “Salvation is being on the right road,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “not having reached a destination.”
And so it goes. If there’s one thing the divas have shown it is that to indulge your passions fully is to know yourself completely. Only then can you treat the rest of the world—its people, its ecosystems, its politics—with proactive wit and compassion.
That, you might say, is the nutgrab.
Ah, the nutgrab. When I got back from Iran I explained to Jeannie that although the shoot had been a logistical challenge—what with the Big Brother government and itchy fabrics that got in the way—we had successfully found the nutgrab.
“The what?” she said with a laugh.
“You taught me the term—y’know, the TV thing. The most important ideas crammed into one concise notion.”
“You must mean nutgraph—the journalism term. I like that though—nutgrab—gets ’em by the balls, you know.”
What? Nutgrab is nutgraph?
Oh my. I’d trotted around the world feigning credibility, all the while bandying about a locker-room perversion of journalistic jargon. One could draw a profound Buddhist What-you-think-is,-isn’t lesson from this. Or perhaps one should simply know where she’s going before she puts the wax down. In any case, the nutgrab snafu seemed an apt example of the working relationship my mother and I had developed over the past few years—an odd, loving, highly functional miscommunication.
“Did you hear the big news?” Adriano asks as I meet up with my surfing comrades on my last day of camp. “The fishermen caught three massive tiger sharks last night,” he says, enthusiastic (and tells me I can get some for dinner at the fish stall down by the water).
“Yeah?” I say, only mildly concerned as there are never shark attacks in these waters. (And one doesn’t have to be a child of karma to know a surfer should not eat shark. I decline.)
We tie down our boards on top and pile into a van to drive to a beach called Engenhoca, which means “genius machine.”
“It’s called that because the waves are always working,” says Benjamin, moving the long VW gearshift into third. This is a graduation day of sorts for me. Today I get to go “to the outside”—that mysterious area beyond the break that elicits hushed murmurs of “tubes,” “curls,” “positive adrenaline,” and “serious drops.” Surfboards tucked under our arms, we walk half a mile down a winding dirt path through playful, swaying clusters of palm trees. We strap on our leashes, which will anchor us to the surface should we get thrashed about, and make our way out beyond the break.
Benjamin quizzes us on wave-break direction, and for a while we half-heartedly paddle toward unpromising swells. The waves are working today, but quietly. Nearly an hour passes; I am happy to bob and watch the waves roll into the divinity-kissed beaches.
Benjamin yells something I can’t hear over the lively ocean.
I turn my cheek and rest it on the wet board, and look over the expanse of water. Usually I’d be scanning for fish, wanting a glimpse of a sleek fin darting about, but, funnily enough, right now it seems to be enough just to believe they’re there.
Benjamin hollers again, louder and excited this time, from under his floppy khaki hat. “Ready to catch some green?” This time I hear him. He nods toward a fast-gaining set for which I am perfectly positioned. A wash of fear surges through my shoulder blades into my gut.
But then, my heart springs into gear.
I turn the board, wave now at my back, and paddle fast and hard. Faster and harder and stronger than I ever have. For two strokes strange, hulking synchronicity overtakes me.
Upward dog, then, measured and quicklike, I fling my feet perfectly into position. I am up! One. Two. Awkward and thrilled to be riding the power of the wave. Three. Four. Magic seconds.
I sssssurf.
—Just as fast, the moment is gone. I hurl off the board into the sea and am churned around for what feels like minutes, but is not. My right hip scrapes along the rough bottom; it hurts, but I know it will only bruise—not bleed and bring the sharks. All goes oddly quiet and calm; then I am pushed up, up, up, with the happy inevitability of a cork easing from a wine bottle. When I breach the surface my eyes sting at the salt and fresh light. I fumble for the board, grab the rails, haul myself, ungainly and panting, onto the fiberglass, and paddle out to practice some more.
ENDNOTES
* 1 All statistics are from Joni Seager, The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, third edition, New York: Penguin, 2003.
* 2 An island province of Papua New Guinea in which a nine-year secessionist revolt ended in 1997.
* 3 Iran follows the Islamic calendar, which starts with the birth of Muhammad in 570 on the Christian calendar.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Adventure Divas enterprise—the TV series, the website, and this book—has been an exercise in gratitude, hard work, and camaraderie from the start, and individuals all over the globe helped make it possible. The size of my appreciation is reflected in the epic length of these acknowledgments.
The divas who appear in this book, and the many others who appear in the television documentaries but could not be included in these pages, continue to be a driving inspiration: Iramis, Dori, and Janet of Instinto, Gloria Rolando, Lizette Vila, Carilda Oliver Labra, Assata Shakur, Emilia Machado, Kiran Bedi, Alice Garg, Anuradha Pal, Bachendri Pal, Ruchira Gupta, Ela Bhatt, Shubha Mudgal, Marilyn Waring, Helen Clark, Sima Urale, Hinewehi Mohi, the Land Girls, Tania Stanley, Gaylene Preston, Keri Hulme, Tahmineh Milani, Mokarrameh Ghanbari, Shahla Sherkat, Azita Hajiyan, Pari Zanganeh, Pooran Farrokhzad, Zahra Rahnavard, and Zahra Moussavi.