Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  It was only once we arrived in Iran that the mystery of our life in California began to make sense. I finally saw the world that had been left behind, and the world our existence in California was dedicated to recapturing. Before that summer, my first visit back, I had suspected my family of collective dissimulation. I would ask my grandfather countless times, “Agha Joon, were you really a judge in Iran?” I couldn’t conceive how, if the stories were true, they could be reconciled with the only reality that I knew.

  I was entirely unconscious at that age of the revolution, and how in classic revolutionary fashion, one social class had overthrown another. Before that came to pass, Iranian society was divided into a tiny upper class, a wide middle with its own distinguishable upper and lower parts, and a sizable body of poor or working class. My mother’s family fell somewhere in the area between middle and upper-middle, which meant that they were landowners, and able to send four children to the West for university. Most strands of my father’s family were wealthy, and belonged to that upper class that the revolutionaries of 1979 were bent on unseating. One of my uncles had been roommates at Berkeley with Mustafa Chamran, who became one of the leaders in the uprising. They had been friendly in those college days, and when at the dawn of the revolution my uncle was taken to prison, he contacted his old roommate Chamran. No reply. “Your type must go,” came a message, through a friend.

  Leaving Tehran broke my heart. My pet duck died the week we were to go, and Maman tried to console me with promises of a kitten back home. I was too young to understand that what I didn’t want to part with was a newfound sense of wholeness—a sense of belonging in a world that embraced us. The memories of those few months colored the rest of our life in America. They flooded back vividly, when my grandmother cooked jam, when Maman took me with her to the bank, to visit the safety-deposit box where she kept all the jewelry she no longer wore, the gold bangles and dainty earrings our relatives had bestowed on me in Tehran. In times of acute alienation, they were a reminder that things could be different; proof that the often awkward fusion of East and West in our American lives didn’t necessarily point to our failure, but the inherent tension of the attempt. At those times when I was most furious with Maman, I would recall the lightness of our days in Tehran, her easy smile and fluid movements, and remind myself of the strength it took for her to build a life in a strange country, alone.

  My maternal grandparents came to the United States in the mid-1970s, intending to base themselves for good near Stanford Hospital, where my grandmother’s ailing heart could be sustained by a pacemaker and tended by skilled cardiologists. My own parents had attended university in California in the late sixties, along with their many siblings, but like most Iranian students of that generation, they chose not to stay. They returned to Iran with American degrees, and lofty dreams of modernizing the homeland, and discouraging the Shah of Iran from behaving like an authoritarian American puppet. In 1976, my parents married and came to the United States, with no fixed idea of staying forever, but a passing wish to be near my grandparents, lonely in their medical exile. The rest of the family, all their brothers and sisters, remained in Iran, intending to lead international lives traveling back and forth between Iran and the West, the twin poles of modernity and home. Until 1979, the year of the great catastrophe that tossed our lives up into the air, scattering us haphazardly like leaves in a storm.

  It came to be known as the Islamic Revolution, though even that term is contested by people like my relatives, who insist it was a populist uprising stolen by fundamentalist clerics. Until 1979, Iran was ruled by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a detached, out-of-touch leader whose unpopular government was propped up in 1953 by an American-British coup. The Shah, in the classic style of Middle East potentates, reigned with an authoritarian hand and an allegiance to policies favored by his American backers. He spent vast reserves of oil money on the latest American military technology, but neglected to manage the urbanization and rapid growth that was transforming Iranian society. While he staged baroque, extravagant spectacles in honor of the Persian dynastic tradition, his critics were silenced, and great swaths of Iranian society stayed poor. The sliver that thrived did so flamboyantly, with a Western easiness that provoked the majority of Iranians too traditional and too poor to appreciate the advent of bikinis and Christian Dior. By the late 1970s, resentment against the Shah’s regime—for its pro-Western tilt, for its stifling of political dissent, and for economic policies that widened the disparity in wealth—gained momentum, and the revolution unfolded. Some of my relatives left shortly before, when the rumblings grew louder. Of my father’s two brothers, one went to prison for his ties to the monarchy; another stayed to cheer the great nationalist revolt.

  When radical students took the American embassy hostage in 1979, they transformed a classic revolution into a dramatic confrontation with the United States. The hostage taking energized the uprising and added an iconoclastic dimension, a historic triumph of East over West. That is why, to this day, the Islamic Republic cultivates its stale anti-Americanism, once the life force of the revolution. The freshly minted regime immediately went to war with Iraq, and the two great strategic powers of the Middle East sapped each other’s strength for nearly a decade.

  To be Iranian in the United States during the 1980s meant living perpetually in the shadow of the hostage crisis. Many Iranians dealt with this by becoming the perfect immigrants: successful, assimilated, with flawless, relaxed American English and cheerfully pro-American political sentiments. Not Maman. I should’ve known the day I was flipping through old black and white photos of her college years in California. There she stood, with an elaborate beehive, wearing a mini-skirt covered with paisleys, hoisting a placard that read “Palestine is ours!” From my aunts, other relatives, and American family friends who had attended college at places like UC Berkeley and USC in the 1960s, I’d heard stories of a thriving expatriate Iranian student scene—they snorted cocaine, skied, drove fast cars, jet-setting between California, Europe, and Tehran. Why hadn’t she been hanging out with them?

  Maman imposed on our life in California her strict sense of justice, which others seemed to find noble but which to me was simply an effort to destroy my peace of mind. Often I’d come home from school to find a perfect stranger at the kitchen table, the latest Iranian charity case—an abused wife, a teenage runaway—she’d taken up to rescue. Sometimes these strangers would live with us for weeks, while Maman ignored my complaints that she should be concerned with baking cookies and acting like a normal American parent.

  But fate, it seemed, had dealt me a mother who night after night shook her fist at the television, decrying America’s latest interference in Latin America, or the brutal crimes being perpetrated against Palestinians. At the time, these tirades confused me. I didn’t understand how what happened in Palestine related to us, living quietly in our corner of California. I didn’t understand why these distant political conflicts were woven into her consciousness, why they resonated so forcefully.

  The high volume of Maman’s emotional politics made me feel even more estranged from my friends at school, at an age when nothing is more painful. Their houses were oases of calm, full of candy and movies and carefree parents who took them to baseball games. In these sane households, the biographies of visitors were simple; at our house, even casual acquaintances came through with political résumés (“This is Fereshteh, a reformed Mujahed; Dariush, who was once Fedayeen . . . ”). Only after serious deliberation would I bring the most trusted friends over, exposing them to strange smells, wailing music, and Maman yelling political grievances into the phone (“you’ll never believe what these bastards did today in _____!”). For many years my overriding objective in meeting new people was to avoid mention of my Iranianness. That my name gave me away, that people would ask in a smiley, kind way where I was from, and that I would have to say it, “Iran,” and watch their faces settle into a blank, this was a permanent source of discomfort. I wasn’t sur
e what made me feel more wretched: being embarrassed to be Iranian, or guilt at being embarrassed. Saying I was Persian helped, but no one knew what or where Persia was, exactly, and there would often be follow-up questions. The adults were marinating in politics, and had little sense of how hard it was on us, the kids.

  I can still recall with perfect vividness the first day of school each year, when I would squirm miserably in my seat as the teacher called roll. As she approached the K’s and L’s, I knew the second she slowed down that she had arrived at my name; that she would bludgeon its pronunciation I had already accepted, but I prayed not to be asked in front of everyone else its origins, to have to utter that word, Iran. Maman suggested I take on an English name for use at school, and I toyed with Elizabeth, the most un-Azadeh name I could think of. I practiced signing my diary entries with Liz, in a flourish of violet ink, but it glowed on the page, embarrassing and alien. I resigned myself to a life of Azadeh, which means “one who is free,” a name that became popular right before and after the revolution. As a rebellious teenager, constrained by Maman’s rules, my relatives teased me mercilessly. You’re not free, neither is Iran. Haha.

  As though she knew how earnestly I sought to keep my Iranianness under cover, Maman, my nemesis, would sweep into my classroom each year in the spring, and do a special presentation on Persian New Year (Noruz). Each year I would drag myself out of the navy blue Volvo, its somber, boxy lines a fitting vehicle for my dejected spirit, and watch her patiently unpack the colored eggs, and everything else that went on the haft-seen, the ritual table setting of the Seven S’s, out of the trunk. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” I’d ask her. “I think everyone still remembers your presentation from last year.” It was always futile, and I would prepare myself for the hour when she would undo what I had spent weeks trying to cultivate: ethnic ambiguity. “The eggs—like your Easter eggs, see how nicely Azadeh has colored them—symbolize fertility; the coins success; the sprouted wheat, new life. Two weeks after the new year, we go on picnics, tie scraps of fabric to trees, and toss the wheat in the river.” I tried to visualize what must be going through my classmates’ minds: masses of mad Persians flinging clumps of grass into the dank reservoir at the local park. I wanted to kill her.

  When she wasn’t busy canceling subscriptions to news magazines that were too pro-establishment, Maman tried to find us a niche in California. Finally she did—among the hippie, hyper-educated liberals who sent their kids to alternative school with organic lunches. I condoned this set of acquaintances, despite the peacenik coffees, because they talked so knowledgeably of Iran—its poetry, music, and history—and seemed to think being Iranian was wonderful. In the presence of these hippie friends, my resentment of Iranianness receded.

  Around the same time Maman took up Hinduism, and on weekends we drove up to the ashram in Oakland to chant together at children’s satsang, the practice of coming together in the company of Truth. There were work-shops on most everything, from living life with spontaneity to reupholstering the divine source within you. Eventually we switched to a local ashram, but occasionally went to Oakland for many years. The hours I spent crosslegged in these candle-lit, incense-infused rooms were among the only moments I felt comfortable in my own skin. Everyone was too dippy and preoccupied with vegan curry and their chakras to care that we were Iranian; in fact, they thought it was sort of neat, and we were embraced with the squishy affection of people fond of the exotic.

  The Iranian community of northern California, in my youth, was an enclave of constantly shifting associations, of social and financial status, political affiliation, and otherwise. There were older families, like my parents, who had been there longer, but as the revolution churned Iran, it cast out thousands of exiles, many of whom gravitated toward California. In weather, the proximity of beach to ski slope, the climate resembled Iran. Over the next decade, these Iranians would re-establish their social networks, assimilate, and rebuild their lives, with a constant eye at how their co-exiles were faring—who was adapting faster? Who managed to transfer their wealth, and who had to start over? Who was making social concessions in their selection of acceptable acquaintances, and who was becoming more exclusive? All these questions were meant to get at the most important one of all: who had managed to maintain their dignity, keep their way of life intact, and who had been forced, either by financial ruin or mental weakness, to dignify the revolution by allowing it to determine all that was to come? Fate had scattered much of upper-class Tehran throughout Europe and America, but it hadn’t absolved the age-old compulsion to weigh ancestry and make authoritative judgments separating the common from the elect. Often when Iranians encountered each other in public, they pretended not to recognize each other as fellow Iranians, speaking English to one another in identical accents. This self-conscious public theater was preferable to acknowledging each other in Farsi, a language that is spoken differently depending on whom one is speaking to. Even my father, the Marxist who spurned class barriers and ridiculed my mother’s operagoing bourgeois habits, would whisper hamvatan, country-man, to me, in a store, then proceed to address the person in English.

  Our relatives, whom I will call the Pakravans, had somehow managed the crossing more proficiently—in suburban northern California their houses multiplied, their cars seemed to upgrade themselves, and with each passing year they acquired more desirable zip codes, until finally they had succeeded in re-creating a sort of life that approximated the one they had left behind. They had shed the shameful compromises imposed by our less well-managed crossing, and the contrast always stung. It was never quite discussed as such—confronting this would have meant also confronting how we had somehow failed. The reasons why they had recaptured their status, forcibly reinstated grace and comfort into their lives, became a source of obsession for Maman, her sisters, the entire family. My great-uncle went in person to the bank in San Jose where everyone managed their finances and demanded the manager tell him how much money Mr. Pakravan had transferred from Iran. I can’t disclose that sort of information, he was told. My great-uncle drew his shoulders back. Once a colonel in the army of his Royal Majesty, the Light of the Aryans, now being dismissed by a petty clerk. You must tell me, at least who brought more? He did, the bank manager finally said in exasperation. Was it a question of orzeh (talent) or timing? The debate raged. But the truth, as it tends to be, was actually rather simple. The Pakravans were savvier with their finances, saving and investing with wisdom and forethought. With my mother’s side of the family, not only did fiscal prudence not come naturally, but old habits died hard. Thousands of dollars could be cut down to nothing in a few hours at the roulette table. Annual trips to Europe were deemed necessities. Wardrobes required maintenance. Unsurprisingly, it did not all come together very well. Over the years their laments became a mantra of regret: if only my grandmother had brought her money over when the toman was strong against the dollar (for Iranians, when the dollar equaled seven tomans and before the revolution were interchangeable markers of time); if only she too had bought houses when her savings could have easily purchased them and not waited until the devaluing of the toman made even the rent of a modest two-bedroom apartment a hardship.

  Those were the first years after the revolution, when it wasn’t clear whether Iran would mutate once again, consolidate, or collapse under the weight of a war with Iraq. How do you make decisions, when your fate hangs in the balance of a country in chaos? How do you force yourself to build a new life, when deep in your heart you hold out hope that the nightmare will end, and your country will be returned to you? My youngest aunt, Farzaneh, who I called Khaleh Farzi, held out hope until doing so became foolish. During my childhood in California, she was one of the most important women in my life, and she became central again in 2000, when I moved to Iran. Just like so many thousands Khaleh Farzi had been drawn to the revolutionary street protests in Tehran without a clear sense of their destination, without any inkling that they would explode the worl
d of which she was so fond. Tehran under the Shah, with a nightlife so dazzling she abandoned her studies in England to come home to party—weekends at the Caspian, smoking grass on the beach in bikinis; weeknights in Tehran, making the rounds of private clubs, drinking champagne in dresses from Paris.

  The move from her pre-revolution party life in Tehran to the bedroom she shared with her husband in my grandmother’s rented apartment in San Jose, was a shattering, incomprehensible blow. She couldn’t drive, there had never been a need; that’s what drivers had been for. She never thought she’d need to work, and like so many Iranian girls educated abroad for the principles of being modern and well-bred, she had a useless degree—in her case, in sociology. Soon it became clear that if her husband, Hamid, were to transfer his medical license to the U.S., he would need to pass a bevy of tests in English. That meant many expensive classes. So Khaleh Farzi stopped spending her days wistfully floating through the department stores she could no longer afford to shop at, and donned the scratchy, dull blue uniform of a Woolworth’s waitress. I wonder what people thought of her, this shy young Iranian woman with her bobbed hair, delicate gamine features, and sad eyes. I wonder what she minded most: that an Iranian she knew might walk in; that she had a college degree and was serving milk shakes; that this might be reality, and not a bad dream—not a cruel interlude intended to make her value the life she gambled away with what she later came to consider reckless idealism.

  As though this all wasn’t enough to bear, her own sister, Maman, had the nerve to proclaim the revolution a good thing. Maman had left Iran a few years back, and had more memories of the Shah’s oppressive politics; in 1979 she was a single mother of a three-year-old, untroubled by the loss of a glittering social life. And it was still early then. No one knew whether to believe the reports of the countless executions; the full truth of the bloodbath would only emerge later. Full of fire and exultation that the U.S.-puppet Shah had fallen, my mother coaxed my aging grandmother into the car and drove to San Francisco to vote at the Iranian consulate in a referendum to support the newly formed revolutionary government. Khaleh Farzi looked on bitterly.