Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE - The Secret Garden

  CHAPTER TWO - Homecoming

  CHAPTER THREE - We Don’t Need No Revolution

  CHAPTER FOUR - My Country Is Sick

  CHAPTER FIVE - Election

  CHAPTER SIX - I’m Too Sexy for My Veil

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Love in a Time of Struggle

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Summer of the Cockroach

  CHAPTER NINE - Not Without My Mimosa

  Acknowledgements

  PERMISSIONS

  A READING GROUP GUIDE TO LIPSTICK JIHAD

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR LIPSTICK JIHAD

  “[The] sense of being an outsider in two worlds may have made daily life difficult for Ms. Moaveni, but it also makes her a wonderfully acute observer, someone keenly attuned not only to the differences between American and Iranian cultures, but also to the ironies and contradictions of life today in Tehran.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Moaveni has closed the cultural gulf between young America and young Iran by building a bridge of her own and personally escorting readers across. It’s an invitation readers should accept.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “[A] vivid memoir of . . . Moaveni’s time as a journalist among the ‘lost generation’ of young Iranians and their rebellion against the petty rules that symbolize the greater freedoms denied to them.

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Moaveni writes unusually well and perceptively.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “[Lipstick Jihad] shows us what Iran looks like in spring and fall, with all those seasons’ biting winds and unexpected days of sunshine.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Moaveni suffuses her book with the rich detail and critical observation of a good reporter. . . . It is refreshing and astonishing to see what lies behind [Iran’s] closed doors: real people who do yoga, drink exotic cocktails and are torn about whether the United States is their enemy or potential savior.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “The verdict: A moving memoir of identity. This finely written and thought-provoking memoir . . . will resonate with readers who have struggled to find themselves in the world, apart from geography or cultural mandates.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Lipstick Jihad . . . is as much personal as political, recounting [Moaveni’s] efforts to find satisfaction in being Iranian, and to achieve a sense of belonging that eluded her in California. . . . The author’s capacity to appreciate these moments and yet look critically at political and social problems in the country is a kind of integration of nostalgia and reality that sets her story apart from what could have been a predictable homecoming tale.”

  —The Nation

  “Moaveni’s memoir takes us nowhere we’ve been before, or even read about in the daily papers, with tales of young people whose hedonistic lifestyle behind closed doors helped push the pendulum so far in the other direction that they effected real change on the streets. . . . A must-read for anybody interested in taking a peek at the multifaceted human experiences that lie behind the headlines.”

  —Elle.com

  “[A] deeply personal glimpse of Gen X Iranians in the United States and Iran. [Moaveni’s] account . . . possesses an irresistible vitality.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Reading Lipstick Jihad is a bit like hearing someone’s cell-phone conversation on the bus, only way better: Her words are interesting, and she’s talking to you. The only frustration is that you can’t talk back.”

  —Time Out New York

  “[G]ripping. . . . Moaveni paints a damning picture of daily life in Tehran with a hundred fascinating, subtle details. . . . But much to [her] credit, she is able to find the redeeming aspects of what often reads like a sojourn in

  one of the outer circles of hell.”

  —LA Weekly

  “Moaveni’s insider status . . . allowed her a particularly detailed and revealing view of Iranians, especially those of her generation, while her work as a journalist allowed her access and freedom of movement. For the reader, she is the ultimate guide. . . . Her portrait of Iran . . . is a fascinating, layered study. Lipstick Jihad offers a new and welcome understanding of a troubled country where daily life is infinitely more complicated than newspaper

  headlines would lead us to believe.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “American perceptions might be challenged by reading Moaveni’s insider accounts of an Iran that includes private parties, presidential elections, plastic surgery, Weblogs, skiing, hamburgers and sushi bars, and watching Ally McBeal and Sex in the City via verboten but widespread satellite dishes.”

  —East Bay Express

  “In recording her struggle to find and make a home in the world Moaveni joins other hyphenated Iranian writers like Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis and Persepolis 2), Gelareh Asayesh (Saffron Sky), and Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran). Moaveni’s advantage is that she has both a private and public life in Tehran, and is willing to mine both for material.”

  —Chicago Reader

  For my parents,

  and

  in memory of Kaveh Golestan

  INTRODUCTION

  I was born in Palo Alto, California, into the lap of an Iranian diaspora community awash in nostalgia and longing for an Iran many thousands of miles away. As a girl, raised on the distorting myths of exile, I imagined myself a Persian princess, estranged from my homeland—a place of light, poetry, and nightingales—by a dark, evil force called the Revolution. I borrowed the plot from Star Wars, convinced it told Iran’s story. Ayatollah Khomeini was Darth Vader. Tromping about suburban California, I lived out this fantasy. There must be some supernatural explanation, I reasoned, for the space landing of thousands of Tehranis to a world of vegan smoothies and Volvos, chakras, and Tupak.

  Growing up, I had no doubt that I was Persian. Persian like a fluffy cat, a silky carpet—a vaguely Oriental notion belonging to history, untraceable on a map. It was the term we insisted on using at the time, embarrassed by any association with Iran, the modern country, the hostage-taking Death Star. Living a myth, a fantasy, made it easier to be Iranian in America.

  As life took its course, as I grew up and went to college, discovered myself, and charted a career, my Iranian sense of self remained intact. But when I moved to Tehran in 2000—pleased with my pluckiness, and eager to prove myself as a young journalist—it, along with the fantasies, dissolved. Iran, as it turned out, was not the Death Star, but a country where people voted, picked their noses, and ate French fries. Being a Persian girl in California, it turned out, was like, a totally different thing than being a young Iranian woman in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In hindsight, these two points seem startlingly obvious, but no one ever pointed them out, probably because if you need them pointed out, you clearly have problems. So I learned for myself, as I endured a second, equally fraught coming of age—this time as a Californian in Iran. I never intended my Iranian odyssey as a search for self, but a very different me emerged at its end. I went looking for modern Iran, especially the generation of the revolution, the lost generation as it is sometimes called. The generation I would have belonged to, had I not grown up outside.

  For two years, I worked as a journalist for Time magazine, reporting on the twists and turns of Iranian society, through high politics and ordinary life. Since 1998, the revolutionary regime’s experiments with political reform—a brief flirtation with democracy—had captured the world’s attention. The cultural rebellion of Iranian youth against the r
igid, traditionalist system fizzed with unknown potential. As a journalist, I arrived during these times with urgent questions. Was Iran really becoming more democratic? What did young people want, exactly? Did demographics (two-thirds of the 70 million population is under thirty) make change inevitable? Would there be another revolution, or did Iranians prefer this regime to secularize? Were Iranians really pro-American, or just anti-clerical? Often there was more than one answer, maddeningly contradictory, equally correct.

  I came to see Iranian society as culturally confused, politically deadlocked, and emotionally anguished. While the vast majority of Iranians despised the clerics and dreamed of a secular government, no easy path to that destination presented itself. In the meanwhile, revolutionary ideology was drawing its last, gasping breaths. Its imminent death was everywhere on display. You saw it when Basiji kids, the regime’s thug-fundamentalist militia, stopped a car for playing banned music, confiscated the tapes, and then popped them into their own car stereo. You saw it when the children of senior clerics showed up at parties and on the ski slopes, dressed in Western clothes and alienated from their parents’ radical legacy. It was there outside the courthouse on Vozara Street, where young people laughed and joked as they awaited their trials and lashings, before brushing them off and going on to the next party.

  Iran’s young generation—the generation born just before the revolution or along with—is transforming Iran from below. From the religious student activists to the ecstasy-trippers, from the bloggers to the bed-hopping college students, they will decide Iran’s future. I decided I wanted to live like them, as they did, their “as if” lifestyle. They chose to act “as if” it was permitted to hold hands on the street, blast music at parties, speak your mind, challenge authority, take your drug of choice, grow your hair long, wear too much lipstick. This generation taught me how to unlock the mystery of Iran—how nothing perceptibly alters, but everything changes—not by reading the newspapers but by living an approximation of a young Iranian’s life. That is why I cannot write about them without writing about myself. That is why this is both their story, and my own.

  Today, in a quiet room in a country not far from Iran in space, I am finally unpacking the boxes from those two years in Tehran. As I sort through the clothes, peeling veil from veil, it is like tracing the rings of a tree trunk to tell its evolution. The outer layers are a wash of color, dashing tones of turquoise and frothy pink, in delicate chiffons and translucent silks. They are colors that are found in life—the color of pomegranates and pistachio, the sky and bright spring leaves—in fabrics that breathe. Underneath, as I dig down, there are dark, matte veils, long, formless robes in funeral tones of slate and black. That is what we wore, back in 1998. Along the way, the laws never changed. Parliament never officially pardoned color, sanctioned the exposure of toes and waistlines. Young women did it themselves, en masse, a slow, deliberate, widespread act of defiance. A jihad, in the classical sense of the word: a struggle.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Secret Garden

  You ask me about that country, whose details now escape me,

  I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history.

  And should I visit it in memory,

  It would be as I would a past lover,

  After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion,

  With no fear of regret.

  I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy.

  —FAIZ AHMED FAIZ

  It was so cool and quiet up in the toot (mulberry) tree that I never wanted to come down. I didn’t have to; the orchard was so dense that I could scramble from the limb of one tree to another, plucking the plump, red berries as I went along. The sweet juice made my fingers stick together, but I couldn’t stop climbing. The trees stretched out as far as I could see, a glorious forest of mulberries, ripe for my picking. I loved mulberries, but until that summer in Tehran, I had only tasted them dried, from little plastic packets sold in the Iranian grocery story in San Jose. Riveted by the abundance, and the squishy texture of the berry in its fresh form—a whole new delight—I had spent the better part of the afternoon perched in the shady canopy of the orchard. “Azadeh jan, I am going to count to three, and you had better come down,” came Maman’s glaring voice from somewhere far below. I gave in, but only because of the preliminary pangs of the hideous stomach-ache to come. Sedigheh Khanoum, one of the farmers who took care of the orchards at Farahzad and who had tended Maman’s stomach when she was little, made me tea with sugar crystals, to soothe the cramps. And I lay content on my back on the Persian rug outside, as Maman chatted with Sedigheh about our life in America, debating whether tomorrow I should go after the delicate white toot, or the dark red.

  Only a very small child in the safety of a walled family compound would have felt liberated in Iran one year after the Islamic Revolution, but I was blissfully unaware of such matters. Finally, I was unleashed, and wanted to stay forever in this country where I could romp about freely. In Iran I could play wherever and with whomever I wanted—in the street, in the backyard, with the caretaker’s daughter, with my brand-new duck. When my cousins and I played at our grandparents’ apartment complex in California, we had to be visible and within hearing distance at all times. We were tethered to our parents’ fears: that we might consort with “street children”—which I later realized only meant normal kids who were allowed to play outside—or that some terrible fate might befall us in this as yet foreign country. If we were to blip off the radar for more than a few minutes, a search and rescue squad would fan out in our pursuit. Neither I nor my cousins tolerated this cloying protectiveness well, and occasionally we would dial 911 in revenge, for the pleasure of watching our poor grandmother or aunt explain to a stern policeman who knocked on the door that “Surely, sir, there is mistake; here we are having no emergency.”

  In Tehran that summer, I wasn’t the only one unleashed. My mother could barely stay put, flitting from house to house, from Tehran to the Caspian and back again; even when she was at home, sitting down, she was gulping in space—high ceilings, drawing rooms vast enough that I could race a tricycle down from one end to the other—as though her lungs had only been partially breathing the whole time she’d been away. I finally saw Maman, my beautiful, proud, mad mother, laughing gustily, instead of the tight-lipped smile she wore as she chauffeured me around San Jose, to piano lessons, to ice skating lessons, to gymnastics, back and forth to school, all by herself. It was often just the two of us, on this trip to Iran, and back in California as well. My parents had divorced shortly after they permanently moved to America in 1976, just a few months after I was born.

  She took me to the pastry shop on Pahlavi Boulevard, where we bought the bite-sized creampuffs we had labored over in our kitchen in San Jose, and the ice cream that I forever after associated with that summer in Tehran, that fleeting glimpse of the life we might have had. Akbar-mashti, it was called, saffron-colored, dotted with bits of cream and bright flecks of pistachio, perfumed with rose water. Pahlavi ran north-south through Tehran, from the foot of the Alborz mountains downtown, and we walked its northern length, licking our ice cream as it dripped between two thin wafers. Later I would learn that Reza Shah, the late Shah of Iran’s father, modeled the boulevard after the arteries of Paris, and that it had been renamed by the revolution Vali Asr (after the Mahdi, the occulted, final iman of Shiism), but that everyone still called it Pahlavi. Years later I would flee down its side streets, tripping in flimsy sandals, away from Islamic vigilantes with clubs who would kill and die to make sure the name never changed back. But that summer it was only an elegant slope of sycamores where Maman would take me for bastani (ice cream), where I first discovered that a boulevard could be lined on both sides with a flowing stream, a joob, covered with little bridges.

  To my five-year-old suburban American sensibilities, exposed to nothing more mystical than the Smurfs, Iran was suffused with drama and magic. After Friday lunch at my
grandfather’s, once the last plates of sliced cantaloupe were cleared away, everyone retired to the bedrooms to nap. Inevitably there was a willing aunt or cousin on hand to scratch my back as I fell asleep. Unused to the siesta ritual, I woke up after half an hour to find the bed I was sharing with my cousin swathed in a tower of creamy gauze that stretched high up to the ceiling. “Wake up,” I nudged him, “we’re surrounded!” “It’s for the mosquitoes, khareh, ass, go back to sleep.” To me it was like a fairy tale, and I peered through the netting to the living room, to the table heaped with plump dates and the dense, aromatic baklava we would nibble on later with tea. The day before I had helped my grandmother, Razi joon, make ash-e gooshvareh, “earring stew”; we made hoops out of the fresh pasta, and dropped them into the vat of simmering herbs and lamb. Here even the ordinary had charm, even the names of stews.

  It was high summer, so many nights we slept outdoors, on the roof of my uncle’s building in Shemroon, north Tehran. The servants would carry out the mattresses, the piles of pillows and linens, and we would talk until late, sipping sour cherry juice, before falling asleep under the stars. When the weather turned cold, one of the rooms inside was transformed into a korsi—a cozy heap of cushions, carpets, and blankets, arranged in a circle around a central fire of coals, a sort of giant, round, heated bed that served as the venue for winter salons. Each morning, I would sit at my spot at the long table in the airy kitchen, and spin the silver jam wheel, deciding whether to heap carrot, quince, or fig jam on my hot, buttered barbari bread, before sneaking off to snuggle under the korsi.