I felt no such ambivalence. To vote in the presidential elections, it seemed to me, would be committing treasons against my family, and a lifetime of principled exile. The cat-shaped country my father taught me to draw was our Iran—secular and proud—not the Islamic Republic, and the sanctity of that distinction was the foundation of our lives in the diaspora.
Why else would we choose to be strangers in American and European cities? There was something bigger at stake than patriotism—the desire to live freely. In honor of this value, the diaspora had abandoned Iran. In opening myself up to accept this Iran, in the implied legitimacy that voting entailed, would I not be turning my back on my own community? Did I want to normalize my relationship to this regime—reduce it from the Death Star of my childhood imagination to a regular country whose citizens showed up on the appointed date and checked off boxes on ballots?
I had not been in the country in 1997, when Iranians first elected Khatami. Many who had voted for him the first time around were voting again, despite the disappointment of his first term. Friends and family unanimously said I should, and that en masse, it would be registered as a protest vote. By voting for Khatami, you’re not really voting for him; you’re voting no to the Islamic Republic, most people said, when I solicited advice. I suggested to Khaleh Farzi that we go vote no to the Islamic Republic together, but she was busy buying sohan and gaz and other Persian sweets to take back on her visit to California, and her head was already at the Starbucks counter.
As election day approached, the question ballooned in significance, and I was still undecided. The thought that I might, with a check of a ballot, help legitimize the system, help wash away its evils, made me feel dirty and complicit. But so did holding myself apart, declining to be a part of the decision because I had an American social security number. Not voting meant drawing another line in the sand, separating myself from the Iranians who were part of my world, and who would vote because this was the country they would spend the rest of their lives in. They didn’t have the option of leaving; their lives were entangled in the system and dependent on its stability. They had prepaid for cars, bought apartments, made investments, and they had a stake in its evolution.
For them, voting was not a sign that they accepted this regime, but that they were stuck with it and had to make do. These charged, absolutist attitudes—never shall I vote, never shall I taint myself—were forged and held mostly in exile. They weren’t wrong so much as irrelevant. At least to daily life in Iran. Who was I to sit here, absorbed in my private doubts, arguing with my outraged inner secularist? Really, who cared?
I tilted back and forth for days, until the afternoon I visited the atelier of a painter I knew, Khosrow, down near the old parliament building in the center of town. He worked in the cool basement of an aging, old-style house that smelled of cool old lahaf (quilts), cigarette smoke, and paint.
Khosrow had fought in the eight-year war with Iraq and, like most of the soldiers who returned alive, was bitter and cynical about the regime. He channeled all his pain at the carnage into art so haunting that it could not be exhibited in Tehran, where the official myth of war martyrdom still held that the sacrifice was glorious, that the hundreds of thousands of slain young men were happy martyrs, thrilled to give their lives. Khosrow painted body bags as ghosts, abstract cemeteries with rows of war dead—unflinching, raw renderings of how the war devastated a generation of young men. Looking at his paintings was like looking into the face of a sixteen-year-old who had just watched his best friend blown up on a mine. He served me a cold glass of sour-cherry juice.
After sipping its dregs, we locked up the studio and went out into the alley. I needed a ride to my next appointment, and Khosrow nodded his head toward a motorcycle parked outside. I don’t have a car, he said. I hope you don’t mind. He turned on the engine, and I sat behind him, wrapping the folds of my abaya tightly around me, so its ends wouldn’t catch in the spokes.
A minute later, we were careening through the streets, darting perilously through unruly traffic, and I buried my face in his back, terrified that we would be mangled (motorcycle riders routinely lost limbs all over the city), trying not to think about how strange it was to be smushed up against a man in public, in broad daylight, but invisible.
Driving through the city one could sightsee the puzzling inconsistencies in the policing of gender relations. Motorbikes were cheap and a popular way of getting quickly through horrible traffic, and Tehran was full of them, their riders often couples, sometimes whole families who seemingly fell outside the social code by virtue of being on a bike. Even though buses were segregated, even though there were separate lines for men and women at the passport office, no one thought twice about women flying through the city with men of indeterminate relation literally between their legs. The further north we drove, the stranger and stranger it seemed, passing buses, passing policemen, slicing through lanes unobserved, utterly inconspicuous, in this public embrace. My thoughts turned to the strangeness of a system that permitted such contradictions, a system that was so fixed, yet flexible.
When I finally got home, I grabbed a pomegranate from the refrigerator, slipped the dust-covered abaya off on my way down the stairs, and stepped straight into the shower. I sat down in the tub, my back against the cool spray, and popped the ruby seeds off one by one, watching the water wash the crimson juice off my skin. When I was little, my mother used to bring pomegranates into the bath—because the juice would stain everything otherwise, but also because when she was little, they used to serve pomegranate in the public hamam she went to with her grandmother. Since then, whenever I’m struggling with a decision, I take a pomegranate into the bath, and mull the issues over as I pop and chew the tangy, glittering seeds.
Buoyed by my thoughts during the afternoon’s ride, I was more willing to believe in the possibility of change; not in the simple, facile way I had imagined before—that a heroic president would work miracles overnight—but a longer process, unpredictable, but made possible by the fact that the regime had cracks, and that social momentum would one day broaden them.
And the more I thought about it, the more the decision to vote resonated with the person I was discovering myself to be. When I first showed up in Tehran, brimming with assurance that I was just as Iranian as the next person in line for pastry, I figured assimilation would take a month, at most. Eventually I saw that my character had developed in response to other challenges, not the Islamic Republic’s special perversions. I hadn’t done what so many of my Iranian peers were doing, retreating into the mountains to make out with boyfriends, numbing myself with drugs because a chemical haze was more bearable than the stark reality of daily life.
As my sense of Iranianness simultaneously diminished and altered, my American consciousness grew—not in proportion to anything, or larger than before, but in my awareness of its existence. The more I tried to superimpose my Iranian identity on Iran, on the distresses and contours of my life there, the more I saw that it did not match up. In unguarded moments, the knowledge worked its way into me, until finally it became shiningly obvious: Of course I was partly American. It was strange, how this question of once agonizing importance became unremarkable.
Ironically, it was my American side that was helping me cope with Iran. As an American, I believed in unconditional love, not the contingent affection one had to earn as an Iranian woman. Iranian-style love, though extravagant, poetic, and intense, came with a prenuptial agreement. You had to promise to adhere to tradition, respect boundaries, pretend a great deal, and keep yourself decently coiffed at all times. You were not entitled to love, it seemed, simply by being who you were; but by fulfilling expectations. Or at least pretending the substance of your life until that point had been an accident, and that deep down you really wanted to be married to a software mogul named Payman, driving your Ralph Lauren-baby-line-clad children around the suburbs in a BMW SUV. If you strayed too far, dropped the pretense of harboring such wants, you risked perpet
ual criticism.
American-style love, in contrast, seemed more tolerant, with a more gentle approach to the individual at its core. My American friends pretty much lived their lives as fresh endeavors, unburdened by the feeling that résumés and relationships should make tribal or dynastic contributions to the family. Their decisions were often private, not witnessed by the amorphous community of mardom (people) under whose watchful eye Iranians seemed to exist.
I loved this Iran, with all its dysfunction and unruliness, just as I would one day love my child, even if she had had a baby out of wedlock, decided she wanted to be a musician, or told me she was a lesbian—all things that would have made my mother say “From today you are dead to me, no longer my daughter” and mean it. I cleared the dregs of pomegranate skin from the drain, and dried myself off, twisting my hair into a towel. I had made up my mind, and called Siamak to make my announcement. I’m going to vote, I said proudly. Let me call the Interior Ministry, and tell them they can now proceed with the election, he replied drily.
There was no mystery surrounding the election; the question was not who would win, but the size of Khatami’s landslide. Still, the imminence of the election hung in the air, because suddenly there were Basiji checkpoints all over the streets. The Basiji style of moral policing—aggressive searches of cars, interrogations of their passengers—had for the most part been retired as part of Khatami’s drive to keep the regime out of Iranians’ private lives, but on exceptional occasions, like holidays and elections, the militia reappeared on the streets of Tehran. They set up checkpoints, the kind that had once been a regular feature of urban life, to remind Iranians that they existed, and that their patrons, the hard-line ayatollahs, were still in control.
The memories of what used to happen at those checkpoints were still acute for most people, who reverted to the cautiousness of life pre-Khatami. “There’s no way I’m leaving the house after dark until after the election,” a friend said to me. “Stop being so neurotic,” I scoffed. “You know things are better now.” With no memories of harsher times, and after months of navigating the night without trouble, being waved through the rare checkpoint, I was blithely sanguine.
Two nights before election day, I was heading home after a day’s reporting (Me: Why are you voting for Khatami? Everyone: Because there’s no one better to vote for), intending to drop off Dariush, who had been taking photographs, along the way. As I approached the square near my house I thought there must be some sort of neighborhood bomb threat.
Cars were pulled along the side of the street, and everywhere men in commando fatigues strolled about, kalashnikovs in hand. Inching forward I saw it was a massive Basiji checkpoint, where “suspicious” cars—either expensive models, or those containing men with long hair, or both men and women—had to pull over and their passengers submit to verbal interrogation and possibly a search of their car. Being young, having a member of the opposite sex in the car, and an inch of hairline showing under my veil rendered my car a beacon of immorality. “Pull over,” growled a bearded man.
I glided my aunt’s grey sedan onto the side of the road. Oblivious, Dariush continued yabbering away on his mobile.
“We’re being stopped by police,” I said. “Can you please hang up?”
“How exactly are you related,” the man demanded.
I explained that we had been working together, and both of us got our official press cards out.
“If you’re a journalist, shouldn’t your hijab be more proper?” the Basij asked, scanning the cards.
“Should it?” I asked. “I don’t see why.” I really didn’t.
Dariush nudged me. “Shut up. Don’t provoke him.”
Soon enough, our interrogator spotted the word “America” on my press card and became alarmingly animated. He strode over to his friends and flashed the card at them.
“We have nothing to say to an American magazine but ‘Death to America, ’” he yelled, and soon his fellow Basijis chimed in.
In the middle of a suburban avenue, in front of a fruit stand, this gaggle of scraggly, armed men began screaming “Death to America” in my ear. It was a very stupid, Not-Without-My-Daughter sort of moment, not to mention embarrassing. “Ohmigod, what if we see someone we know?” I whispered to Dariush.
Our interrogator returned, and I reminded him primly that the government’s Ministry of Culture had issued the press card. “Did you read that little line on the back where it says, ‘Please cooperate with the bearer of this card’?” I asked.
“We reject the Culture Ministry,” he replied, as though this was a rational answer, as though ministries, official institutions, were something an ordinary person could simply reject. All right. Not much you could say to that.
Ten minutes later, we hadn’t budged. Dariush fiddled maddeningly with his mobile. I still thought the whole thing was a joke. Reporters and photographers working for foreign media were often held like this while out covering stories. It happened to us all the time. Usually you were released after about an hour, though sometimes you had to put in SOS calls to Mr. Shiravi, the deputy at the Culture Ministry press office, who patiently tracked down who was holding you, and got them to stop.
The interrogator came back and made himself comfortable leaning against the hood of the car. I tried to make small talk, thinking that at least I could use the time to do some more reporting.
“So, who are you going to vote for?” I asked.
He said he didn’t know, and when he asked me, I said I too was uncertain.
“What do most people say when you ask them?” he asked.
“Well, most of them say they’re going to vote for Khatami,” I replied hesitantly, debating whether it would be more stupid to offend him or to tell a preposterous lie.
“Hey listen,” he began yelling. “She’s says she’s voting for Khatami, and that I should too. She’s posing as a journalist, but propagandizing for him, out to collect votes. Take them in.”
I was dumbfounded. In the instant it took to begin sputtering a denial, the rear door of my car had been opened and a severe, bearded face appeared in the rearview mirror. “Drive,” it ordered, from the backseat.
I steered through the summer night, following his directions, to a nearby apartment complex for retired military officers. The two twin towers bore immense, scowling murals of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Not a single question—“Where are we going? Why? What are you charging us with? Who’s in charge here?”—was deigned with an answer.
We arrived at what looked like a Basij barracks, and the scattered shoes outside, dainty sandals amid Adidas sneakers, attested to the presence of hapless young people somewhere inside. We were placed in a room reeking of dirty socks, lit by a glaring fluorescent light, and ordered not to talk. Every five minutes, a man entered and confiscated something. Within half an hour my notebook and Dariush’s camera were gone.
I sat crosslegged on the floor, and stared up at the walls. The room was an ode to Palestine, covered in the Palestinian black-and-white checked scarves called keffeyehs and decorated with photos of Al-Aqsa mosque. The militia’s job, technically, was to promote virtue and prevent vice (Amr be marouf, va nahi be monker), in the Islamic tradition of guarding the ethics of the community. Because they were loosely affiliated with the Supreme Leader’s office, they carried ID cards, but they acted with impunity, often unaccountable even to the police.
They were notoriously corrupt. They operated in neighborhoods mafia-style, taking bribes from local shops, in exchange for allowing them to sell banned CDs. They took cuts from local drug dealers.
“Please tell me this isn’t happening,” I said to Dariush in English. “Please tell me we are not in this room.” Our new captor heard me speaking English and yelled.
“If you don’t shut up,” he threatened, “I’m going to put you in separate rooms.”
My hands grew clammy. If anything truly horrifying could happen to a female journalist, it would be in precisely such a situation
, alone in a room with a Basiji interrogator.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” I pleaded.
“We’re taking you to the Intelligence Ministry,” said an unshaven man in a shabby green suit and bloodshot eyes. By that time it was one in the morning of a public holiday. He sat in front of us, dialing a number, supposedly the Intelligence Ministry. “If you’re going to take us somewhere, you have to tell us first,” I insisted.
If they actually planned to take us there, we would have to put up some sort of fight.
Once you were detained by the Intelligence Ministry, God only knew what would happen to you. If you were passed to Judiciary Intelligence, there could be endless interrogations, possibly a beating, possibly a sexual assault, and possibly a charge of espionage. And no one could get you out. I had seen it happen before. Seen a photographer get taken in, seen the president’s office itself make official inquiries, only to be told their interest in the journalist’s case would only make things worse.
“Why should you be told anything? Should you know where the Intelligence Ministry is? Do you know where CIA headquarters are?” he said. “Actually, you probably do,” casting a significant glance my way. At that comment, my gnawing nervousness turned to panic, and I reached for my mobile phone, to dial Mr. Shiravi and beg for help. “Take out the SIM card,” he ordered. With hands shaking, I removed the tiny chip, my lifeline to the outside world.
Finally, a more senior Basij member arrived and took over the situation. I heard him arguing with the two men who had been handling us up until then, who had clearly been waiting for approval to take our case to the next level, whatever that might be. But he seemed reasonable, and unlike the others took no petty, sniggering pleasure in the fear on our faces, when he came in to talk to us.
“I swear, I wasn’t out promoting Khatami, that man put words in my mouth,” I explained, the minute he entered the room.
Lipstick Jihad Page 17