Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  The trauma of dislocation varied, of course, by generation and gender. Young husbands felt the pain of not being able to provide, with great wounds to their male dignity and self-respect. Older people like my grandparents missed the comforts of retirement in a familiar milieu, with old friends and trusted servants; they felt vulnerable in a strange country, with a language they couldn’t speak. But the loss everyone felt together, among the most acute, was the loss of gardens. Trees, flowers, the garden courtyard occupy a hallowed space in Iranian culture. Just look through the photo albums of an old Iranian family. You’ll find faded images of parents seated outside on a raised divan covered with Persian rugs, with children playing by a fountain, or amidst a grove of trees, in the background. In one of my favorite stories that Maman would tell me as a child, my great-grandmother, in a fit of wounded rage at my great-grandfather, taking a second wife, ordered the leveling of one of the oldest mulberry orchards—tall, proud trees that had grown for decades, destroyed in revenge for his betrayal. She had found no better metaphor for the death of her love than the destruction of trees. In California, the absence of gardens seemed the bitterest part of our reconstructed lives.

  They tried to make do, my grandparents. Their apartment in San Jose, which faced the garbage dumpster, had a small, squalid patch of green out front, covered in coarse, dusty ivy. My grandfather, whom we called Agha Joon, patiently cleared it away, and tried to grow gol-e shamdooni (geraniums). Each day he would water them, determined to make something bloom, to resist letting himself go. My grandmother, fiercely proud, had from the beginning decided on a strategy of not caring; if she could not have her orchards at Farahzad, she didn’t want gardens at all. When the time came to minister to the flowers, she would roll her eyes, “It’s Katouzi, what can I say?” as though my grandfather—whom she called by his last name, in that stately, old way—were watering a desert. Their apartment complex was built around a large pond, with grassy patches on its banks, and on summer evenings we would lay out a rug and loll under the suburban sky with thermoses of tea. My grandmother would cook a huge, steaming pot of fava beans, which we’d unpeel, dipping the hot beans in a vinegary sauce, after popping them out of their long, velvety pods. I wondered whether anyone I knew from school might see us—so absurd, we must seem, all sprawled out on a rug by the pond, eating beans from the pod.

  My father, too, was obsessed with the re-creation of a garden. He rented a plot of land in a lot in Saratoga, and each weekend after he picked me up from Maman’s, we would drive there to water his patch. He transported me to and from the patch in a white Volvo, the first of many white Volvos to come, with the license plate RAKSH, after the name of the hero Rostam’s wondrous white steed, in the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, the ancient Persian epic poem. What’s your dad’s license plate mean? my friends sometimes asked. Oh, it’s just this horse in this one story, I said quickly. Eventually the Volvos graduated to SUVs, still white of course, and RAKSH became RAKSH Jr., bearing us round the wide streets of San Jose, as though the suburbs were a battle.

  With seeds he had relatives bring from Iran, Daddy planted rows of eggplant, narrow cucumber, mint, basil, and all the herbs necessary for Persian cooking that at the time didn’t exist—at least in their proper variety—at the immense supermarket that everyone else’s parents seemed to find sufficient for their produce needs. The only aspect of Iranian culture he cherished, and wanted to pass on to me, was this reverence for nature, which he worried he might not be able to instill amidst the cement and strip malls of San Jose. And so, after monitoring the progress of the Persian herbs, we would take long walks through the hills of Los Altos, stopping at each new tree to note the quality of the bark, the shape of the leaves. Eventually I could distinguish a mulberry tree from a walnut, walnut from almond, and both from the tree that would grow pomegranates. At nights, Daddy would take sheets of white paper and trace the outline of what looked like a bloated cat. He then built me an architect’s table, on which I too could learn to draw the proper dimensions of the cat, which he informed me was the accurate geographic contour of Iran. Until I became an adolescent, and insisted on living at the mall, this was all my father and I did together: cultivate herbs, draw the cat-Iran to scale, pass leafy examinations.

  Agha Joon, my grandfather, was a gentle, lyrical man, who spent his days in America—almost three decades of them—reading Persian poetry, going for walks, and not learning English. He never complained about the hardship or the crudeness of his transplanted life, and somehow managed to keep that same remote, blissful look in his eyes until the very end. His great joy was also his patch, which he eventually did transform into a wild garden. When I would run back to the apartment after swimming, waiting for my bathing suit to dry, he would point proudly to the blooming flowers, his voice lilting softly with a Turkish accent, from his childhood in the ethnically Turkish region of Iran: Look, daughter, look at what God has created. As a first-grader, it puzzled me that he considered this an offering from God. Besides the fact that everyone knew he shunned religion, the sad, valiant garden seemed more a cause for sorrow than thanks. But seeing the world gently was how Agha Joon coped, and what protected his spirit from a change that had crushed stronger men. This is how he kept the shame of these new circumstances from eating away at him, as it did my grandmother. He ambled around the neighborhood, praised America for its vast malls, the quality of its television channels, the orderliness of its traffic. Eventually he abandoned prose altogether, and began communicating exclusively in verse, remaining connected to us only by the vast stores of poetry in his memory. In each conversation he would dip into his reserves, and find a suitable line or couplet to voice his thoughts. When Maman and I bitterly fought over some new restriction, he refused to take sides. With eyes twinkling through his thick glasses, he would elusively repeat the verse reserved for our arguments—“with the way illuminated, why do you take the darker path? Go then, for you deserve the consequences!”—leaving it intentionally unclear to which of us it was directed.

  Only at rare moments did I suspect that Agha Joon was not entirely preoccupied with his flowers, but felt the sting of loss—on those days he would ask Maman to play Banaan, the classical Persian singer whose voice ached with melancholy. He would sit on the couch, pouring his tea into a saucer so it would cool more quickly, sipping it through the sugar cubes held between his teeth. He would sit like that for hours, as the tape played over and over. I would try to turn it down—my friends from school were calling to discuss field hockey, and lip gloss, and I didn’t want them to hear foreign wailing in the background. But Agha Joon’s hearing was starting to go, and he would look up with such desolate surprise that I quickly turned the volume back up.

  As detached as my grandfather was—dar alam-e khodesh, in his own world—or had managed to make himself, my grandmother was alert. My cousins and I stopped watching television in her presence, frustrated by her constant demand for translation. What are they saying, she would ask, even if she was in the kitchen, her hands stained with green juice, wrist-deep in colanders of minced herbs. To her mild irritation, Agha Joon was content to watch only animal world programs, whose stalking lions and hatching eggs rendered words irrelevant.

  Mornings, in the sunlight by the window, my grandmother sat me down to teach me a set of unfamiliar sounds—al-fatiha, the opening sura of the Koran. But how can God be good, if he invented Khomeini? I asked, trying to evade the lesson. I didn’t want to learn these unintelligible words; I already had my tap-dancing routine and piano scales to memorize. Khomeini has never done anything bad to me personally, she said. Well, duh, that’s because he didn’t know you, I replied, rolling my eyes.

  She always had a tin of French raspberry pastilles in her bag, and had named all her children with names beginning with F. Like all Iranian grandmothers, she never called out the name of one per se, but a staccato string of all their names (Fariba, Ferial, Farzi, Fariborz) one of which would inevitably be correct. When we would set out to
gether from the apartment, for the short walk to the grocery store, she slipped her hand into mine, and said, Asay-e dast-e mani, you are my hand’s cane. I felt this as both a privilege and a burden, knowing that I, barely in second grade, would have to defend her honor at the checkout line. Her acuity was a hundred times more painful for me, because I knew with dread that she felt every backward glance, was stung by every rude word from a pimply, ignorant teenager who only saw a strange old woman in a veil in the line at the grocery store, taking too long to fumble the bills out of her clasp purse, counting them out slowly.

  My grandmother cooked often, exclusively Persian food, and in that manner typical to immigrants, exerted some control over her transplanted life through purity of the palate. Since she refused to eat in restaurants, the kitchen became her domain, from whence she spun fantastically delicate custards and fluffy cakes. Katouzi, she would call out to my grandfather, come eat. And he would assume his usual place at the table, making his way through a heaping pile of my favorite dish, adas polo, fluffy rice with cinnamon, lentils, and raisins drizzled with saffron. Then he would remind us—as usual, in verse, with a couplet that says when the appetite dwindles, the end approaches—that at his prime, he could eat four times the amount of whatever he had just consumed, and drift into his bedroom for a nap.

  My mother modeled herself after Agha Joon, seeing only what she wanted to see, impervious to everything else. I was like my grandmother, proud, thin-skinned, sensitive to every backward glance. And so it was with us, as it was with them—a constant friction, a dismay with the other’s approach to the world. As Agha Joon planted his garden, enraptured by the petals and leaves, my grandmother ignored it icily, disdainful of its modest size, preferring not to have one at all. As my mother dragged me to operas, where we had to stand because seated tickets were too expensive, I fidgeted sullenly, mortified at being relegated to the serf quarters in the feudal system that was opera house seating. I’d rather stay home and rent a movie, I insisted, than endure that sort of humiliation. But she wouldn’t hear of it, and so we went, planted on our feet for hours on end, weekends in a row.

  The apartment complex was overrun with other Iranian exiles, and the shoved-up-against-each-other intimacy of condo life—to the chagrin of Khaleh Farzi, who lived with them—erased the social distinctions imposed in Tehran by neighborhood and district. There were Iranians we could associate with, adam hesabi (good families), and a slew of undesirables who I wasn’t sure whether I should say Salaam to. The bogey man of the émigrés was a man who I remember as Mr. Savaki. He had been an official in the SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret service, and he now spent endless hours by the pool, turning his body on the beach chair as though he was on a rotisserie. I didn’t know what savaki meant at the time—didn’t know it was a byword for torture—except that every grown-up’s face drew tight and grave when the word was uttered. When my cousins and I spotted his leathery, wrinkled body stretched out on a pool chair, we would stare briefly at the tattoo of the Shah’s face on his bicep, and then flee. On the days he would come by for tea, sitting with Agha Joon to enumerate the flaws of Ayatollah Khomeini, Khaleh Farzi would fume. Maman, I don’t understand why you let that man into our house, she complained to my grandmother.

  Perhaps the only person more offensive than Mr. Savaki was Mrs. Bazaari—a vulgar rug merchant who prowled the complex in search of adam hesabi to terrorize into having tea. We secretly thought she was pleased with the revolution, because her husband could stay in Tehran and sell rugs to the newly rich revolutionaries, while she attempted to social climb among the old guard abroad. Despite the fact that she was now working at Woolworth’s, Khaleh Farzi stood her ground; our transplanted circumstances might make us vulnerable to every sort of indignity, but nothing could force her to consort with bazaaris. Occasionally the cunning Mrs. Bazaari would find pretexts to gain a foothold in the house, kidnapping Agha Joon in the neighborhood, driving him home, and then claiming she had found him lost, wandering miles away. Khaleh Farzi would wordlessly serve her a cup of tea, in silent protest against the transgression.

  That we lived near two immense highways, and could go days without seeing anyone we knew at the grocery store, didn’t diminish the tribal and village customs native to Tehranis. Namely, being nosy about the personal lives of people we did not deign to know. For weeks Khaleh Farzi had watched a parade of lovely young women enter and exit the house of an unkempt Iranian man, who lived in the building next door. Baffled that someone so bireekht, so ugly, could attract such company, Khaleh Farzi investigated, and learned that he dealt cocaine. It was upon making such discoveries that Khaleh Farzi would lapse into a deep funk, and try not to care that the Pakravans were buying their eleventh columned home in Los Altos. Observing all this as a child, I had the impression that if life in Iran was anything similar, society must be one vast sieve, with everyone trying to catch the people they wanted and filter out the rest.

  This émigré political salon convened each Sunday at the condo complex’s Sunday brunch, over donuts and coffee. The discussions became engaging enough that soon Iranians from around the city began showing up, and until well into the afternoon—after the last rainbow sprinkle had disappeared—they would debate the state of the country. The Sunday coffee was the ideally neutral space for an inclusive discussion; here the social regulations governing laws of interaction ceased to apply. There was no consensus on anything at all, except the fact that the country had been ruined; No one agreed on whom to blame: Jimmy Carter, the Shah, the CIA, the British, the BBC, the mullahs, the Marxists, or the Mujaheddin?

  Sometimes the intricacies and exoticness of this inner Iranian world made me feel lucky, as though I’d been granted an extra life. There was Azadeh at school, who managed to look and sound like the other kids, barring the occasional lunchbox oddity; and there was Azadeh at home, who lived in a separate world, with its own special language and rituals. More often, though, living between two cultures just made me long for refuge in one. Maman’s attempts to fuse both worlds, instead of compartmentalizing them, complicated everything. She didn’t want to sacrifice anything: neither her Iranian values, nor her American independence. She refused to abdicate one side for the other, not even for a time, and it made our life together harrowing and unruly.

  Next door to us on Auburn Way, two blocks from my grandparents’ place, lived a single mother with two young girls. Unlike Maman, who had seemingly taken a vow of celibacy after her divorce, the single mom next door went out on dates all the time, and when she decided to stay the night with the man of the week she’d leave her daughters home alone. One night the younger one began to cry, emitting keening howls of fear, which Maman listened to for about half an hour, and then could no longer bear it. She went next door, invited them over, and made peanut butter sandwiches. We watched cartoons, while she set up little beds in our living room, and finally drifted off to sleep in front of the TV. Early in the morning a loud knocking woke us—their mother, still dressed in her evening clothes, was pounding on our door, shouting, and waving the note Maman had left her. She was going to call the police, she screamed, how dare we take her children—kidnap them—out of her house? Maman turned pale, and tried to invite her inside for tea. She explained that the girls had been scared, but that they were fine—see, all snuggly in their pajamas. I could already anticipate my father’s angry recrimination come Friday, when he’d come to take me for the weekend, and she would recount the savagery of American mothers, abandoning their children and then terrorizing a neighbor who showed them kindness. “Fariba jan,” he would say, “you can’t do that sort of thing here. This is not Iran, you can’t just take people’s kids out of their house in the middle of the night.”

  When it served her purposes, Maman embraced America and lovingly recited all the qualities that made it superior to our backward-looking Iranian culture. That Americans were honest, never made promises they didn’t intend to keep, were open to therapy, believed a divorced woman was still a who
le person worthy of respect and a place in society—all this earned them vast respect in Maman’s book. It seemed never to occur to her that values do not exist in a cultural vacuum but are knit into a society’s fabric; they earn their place, derived from other related beliefs. Maman thought values were like groceries; you’d cruise through the aisles, toss the ones you fancied into your cart, and leave the unappealing ones on the shelf. When I was a teenager we constantly fought over her pilfering through Iranian and American values at random, assigning a particular behavior or habit she felt like promoting to the culture she could peg it to most convincingly.

  Our earliest battle on this territory was over Madonna. Maman called her jendeh, a prostitute, which I considered an offensive way to describe the singer of “La Isla Bonita.” On what grounds, I argued, was she being condemned? Was it because she flaunted her sexuality, and if so, did that make out-of-wedlock sexuality a bad thing? My defense of Madonna seemed to infuriate Maman; her eyes flashed, and her bearing radiated a grave, ominous disappointment. It was the same disproportionate reaction she’d show when I would forget which elder in a room full of aging relatives I should have served tea to first, or when I’d refuse to interrupt an afternoon with a friend to take vitamins to an elderly Iranian lady who couldn’t drive. Certain conversations or requests, unbeknownst to me, would become symbolic tests of my allegiance to that Iranian world, and the wrong response would plunge Maman into dark feelings of failure and regret.