Lipstick Jihad

by Azadeh Moaveni

  That year, in the late winter of 2001, all the decadent, corrupt, coed swooshing about irked the regime. Some office of doomed ideas, doubtless based in Qom, tried to organize an alpine morality police force to ensure everyone behaved Islamically on the slopes. But the sort of people recruited to such a force were not the sort who had been on skis since infancy. Several broken legs later, it became clear they wouldn’t reach ski police levels of proficiency anytime soon. So instead, on weekends when the slopes were crowded, a mullah showed up at the bottom of the lifts to lead noon prayer. He stood there with his turban and robes against the gleaming snow, a Grinch-like figure with no purpose but to inject a little Islam into the atmosphere, in case anyone was starting to feel too glamorous.

  During the cold months, the Tehran party scene shifted to Shemshak, and a smaller resort closer to the city called Dizine. Young people preferred gathering in these places to Tehran, because the snow and long driveways between the road and houses muffled the noise and discouraged the police from raiding their parties. Initially I found the parties out in the wilderness refreshing. You could actually see the stars in the sky. You could breathe in crisp, forest air instead of smog. And you could stroll for a good half an hour without seeing a billboard of a mullah or a war martyr.

  I wobbled at the top of the perilously steep ski slope wondering whether one of those helicopter-ambulances could be summoned to take me down. Heights scared me, in the same way as yoga headstands. I needed to feel as though I was in control. At that moment, the panic started in my stomach, and spread until I felt there was no longer blood in my veins but liquid terror.

  Siamak was already swooshing down, but when he realized I wasn’t behind him, he arced into a stop. You said this was an intermediate slope, not a ninety-degree angle, I yelled, waving a pole at him. Come on aziz, dear, just make wider turns, he urged. You’ll be fine. That one word, aziz, caught my fear off guard, conjuring so many primordial sensations of comfort that I felt a warmth spread through my limbs, felt myself lean forward effortlessly and push off.

  Until then, I had believed smells were the keys that unlocked memory, uniquely able to transport you back to some distant point in the past, in a heady flash. Words, I thought, exerted their powers more subtly, working through the layers of consciousness over time. But when I heard the word aziz, that endearment woven into the fabric of my childhood, which I had heard thousands of times, in the voices of those who loved me first and best, I melted like a cat picked up by the scruff of its neck.

  During all of my life in California, I had refused to date Iranian-Americans, because that’s what my mother would have preferred, an entrée into a one-size-fits-all sort of existence. My experiences bringing non-Iranian guys home to meet Maman had never been encouraging. The entrance of these English-speaking young men into the home seemed to magnify our distance from Iran, and its imperfect re-creation in our American lives. This re-creation was something of an optical illusion, which we all had to perpetually squint to maintain. It depended on the impossible: my cousins and I forever remaining children, never displaying “American selfishness” (otherwise known as the desire to lead one’s own life).

  The intrusion of a non-Iranian, in the role of the boyfriend, shattered the illusion that we, the second generation, would grow up in our parents’ image. It cemented our displacement, shook the exile stupor and brought us face to face with our California lives. Both my parents, even my grandfather, attempted to understand and adjust, but this resigned graciousness was worse than a tirade. Watching them silently surrender yet another layer of a dream opened up a wound inside me. I almost wished they were more small-minded, more inflexible. Other Iranian-American parents forbade their daughters to date (knowing they did so secretly), preferring the comfort of feigned ignorance; the sanctity of their own fantasy—that they could transplant themselves thousands of miles without exposing themselves to change—was more important to them than participating in their daughters’ reality. But my family wasn’t so keen on charades. We would scream awful names at each other, throw things, and hold decade-long grudges, but we didn’t hide behind lies and fake smiles.

  And so they agreed to meet American boyfriends over strained dinners that bored everyone. On these occasions, I would preside tensely as simultaneous translator, making sure observations made it across the cultural divide, hovering with an invisible butterfly net, poised to catch potential gaffes. I kneaded the conversation, tried to make it more interesting, more light. It sank anyway. I was scared to go to the bathroom, afraid they might offend each other in my absence.

  My mother would labor in the kitchen, mincing, like, ten different kinds of herbs into discrete piles, to make some complicated Persian stew, whose name she would enunciate slowly to the warmly welcomed, unwanted guest. My grandfather would beam beatifically, repeat the English phrases he knew: “Hello! . . . Thank you my friend”—over and over again, and then retreat into the living room so we could speak English comfortably, without having to pause to include him with Farsi asides.

  Small slights, like forgetting to take off your shoes, or not greeting my grandfather within ten seconds of entering the house, would afterward cause my mother to despair. In her mind, each one corresponded to a more deep-seated disregard or contempt for our traditions. “Don’t these people teach their children any manners? What can you can expect from a culture that abandons its old people to die in nursing homes?” she’d say with a sigh. Her eyes would go hard and distant, as she imagined grandchildren with non-Persian names like Jed and Stacy, and then their children, who wouldn’t even have her around, to sing them to sleep with Farsi lullabies.

  Although I knew I was disappointing my mother, dating an Iranian, at the time, would have meant signing up for even greater doses of the overwhelming presence of Iranianness in my life. Being Iranian myself was emotionally draining enough. I didn’t want to have to be Iranian for two. I wanted a personal life of order and straight lines.

  In Tehran, the equation changed. Siamak and I faithfully and serially dated other Iranians, convinced they would understand us better, fit more effortlessly into our lives. Not out of guilt, or to appease our parents’ hopes and expectations, but because we had both been raised outside, and carried a cavernous longing for Iran deep inside us that refused to be filled. We heaped in devotions of all sorts, professional and political, and it still yawned hungrily.

  Like Fatimeh, who sought Davar to secure her identity as a photographer, and like Mira, who wanted a boyfriend to mirror her passion, Siamak and I looked for Iranians who would complete the missing Iranian parts of ourselves. Finding and marrying the right Iranian, we thought, would bring us closer to this country we were right up against, but still yearned for.

  But I met and rejected the candidates who passed through his life, and he met and mocked mine. One day, I wondered, would we regret the evenings and weekends and social currency squandered on these unsuitables? Would we regret the wasted hours spent trying to will ourselves into happiness with relationships we knew, deep down, would lead nowhere? Neither of us had anything to show for our misguided convictions. Maybe the problem was that we were dating pure Iranians, who had spent their whole lives inside. We found them missing a quality fundamental to our natures, and one they could not be faulted for lacking—the ability to slip easily in and out of more than one culture.

  It occurred to me that a fellow hyphen—not an American, and not an Iranian, but an Iranian-American, just like me—was the solution, the missing ingredient required to complete me. Someone who had lived this cleft between two worlds, who understood what divided me, because the same forces tugged and pulled on him, too. Maybe he had made my journey to Iran inside his own head. Together, we would bend our lives to fit the Persian cat’s curves. I was so certain of this, that I didn’t need to talk it over with ten girlfriends, in two languages, and I congratulated myself on finally getting it together, figuring out how I wanted my life to be.

  I spun the fantasy ene
rgetically, already imagining my mother and his having coffee together, glowing with satisfaction and planning our sofreh-e aghd, the Iranian wedding ceremony. It was almost incidental, the perfect Iranian-American man who would play the role. But because he was the first man I saw at that moment of epiphany, like a duckling whose eyes fall on a galosh and imprint that as its mother, I chose Siamak, my best friend in Tehran. Siamak could be Mr. Perfect Hyphen!

  Ideally, he would lack a patriarchal Iranian man’s alarming hangups and Taliban-like expectations of women. Mr. Perfect Hyphen and I would grow old together, enmeshed (but not too enmeshed) in each other’s families, fluent in the old, emotion-laced language of our culture. We would cherish our friends and relatives with intimacy and devotion, but pull back when those ties began to smother our privacy, dictate how we should behave and what we should believe.

  When my mother screamed horrible, hurtful things down the phone line (“You are immoral and God will punish you!”), he wouldn’t be appalled and send me to therapy to recover from being unloved. Instead, he would be familiar enough with my culture to help me put her reactions in perspective, to remind me that old attitudes survived immigration, and that she didn’t intend to hurt me. This would be true, and it would heal the ache. These were delicate distinctions that I assumed only two hyphens can make. He would call me aziz, and I would call him honey jaan. But the chores, those we would divide. Such a brilliant idea. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before?

  The only problem was, I didn’t love Siamak. From the very first moment Siamak and I met, we related as siblings—constantly fighting, teasing, but deeply protective of one another. We joked, expressed affection, sketched ideas across two cultures, in two languages, and the quick, seamless interplay of our halves generated energy that crackled. It was not romantic energy but the intersection of spirits, the synapses of brains meeting and recognizing the familiar. It took just moments, the briefest sentences, to explain anything to him, because he understood so effortlessly, anticipating my arguments, fluent in my various voices. Whether we were fighting or playing, in Tehran or London, it felt like the entire breadth of me was tapped, no crevice left dark.

  My uncle played bridge with his mother. Mutual family friends whispered in my ear that it was so heif, such a waste, that we were, “how do you call it? . . . ‘just friends.’” We did everything together. We watched the president speak at campaign rallies. We sat on the couch in the evenings, working on our laptops. I wrote stories; he drafted Power Point lectures. We took breaks to order take-out Indian, watched Sex in the City, and argued whether it was in Iran’s strategic interest to build a nuclear bomb. We careened around Tehran listening to Run-DMC. We got drunk, debated whose romantic life was more pathetic, and cooked pancakes at two A.M. Siamak was closer to me than any male friend—or boyfriend—had ever been, but there was no flicker, ever, of anything besides friendship between us. When I looked at him, I saw not a guy, but my brother. This was a problem, since I had decided his was the jigsaw puzzle piece that fit mine.

  One freezing, cloudy winter afternoon, we drove up to the northern-most tip of Tehran together, to interview a prominent conservative who had set up his office at the home of Iran’s former ambassador to Washington. The sprawling mansion looked out over all of Tehran, once the scene of famous pool parties where American celebrities cavorted with Henry Kissinger. Now a green mosque glowed next to the covered-up pool. We conducted our interview, and on our way out, climbed through the great bales of snow coating the steep, stone stairs.

  Look out, I heard from somewhere above me, and suddenly something incredibly cold smashed into my ear, dripping bits of ice down my neck. Aaaack! No fair, hijab disadvantage! I yelled, cupping a handful of snow in my hands, and molding it into a ball, to retaliate. We pelted each other all the way to his Nissan Patrol, laughing and falling over in the snow. Tehran looked glorious sprinkled with snow, the white dust coating the homely cityscape of four-story buildings, and Siamak made it feel like home. I stopped for a moment, wiping the slush from my cheek, and tried to memorize the moment. High up in the city, with Tehran seemingly frozen before us, we seemed to float above history. The revolution shrank to a speck the size of the snowflakes. Events, dates, passports, borders—always at the forefront of our consciousness—receded. We were two friends, in the city where we both belonged, engaged in a snowball fight. For just a few seconds, life was as gloriously simple as that. Except that we were not falling in love. Not even a little.

  Each morning, I sat with a cup of coffee at the table in my kitchen, watching the snow fall over Tehran through the tall, steamy windows, and reading the newspapers. Khanoum Shabazy, my housekeeper, attempted to distract me with her latest tale of woe, which inevitably ended in a request for a loan. She also cleaned Siamak’s apartment, but to her maternal Iranian personality, he was a prince to dote upon, not solicit for cash.

  “Why always me? Why don’t you ever ask Siamak to help you?” I asked her one frozen morning in frustration.

  She folded her hands together, smiled in her sheepish, actressy way, and pretended to look shocked. “Agha Siamak is a single man preparing for a wife and family. Soon he’ll have to furnish his household completely, getting ready for the day when it becomes a home. But you, you’re alone. You don’t have dinner parties. You just sit around. You have no plan to get married, so you don’t need to save like he does.”

  Aha! I had finally forced her to confess what she thought of me—an alien, quickly becoming torshideh (literally, soured, the Persian term for spinster). She could unlock the door to Siamak’s apartment and find a different woman there three mornings of the week. A kitchen strewn with tequila bottles and cigarette butts. But this would not dislodge his halo, dim its glow.

  His behavior was judged differently than mine—the return of the collective prodigal son, whose American lifestyle was viewed as the bachelor. But for me, the tiniest misstep to the left or right of propriety was swiftly catalogued as “Westernized” misbehavior. Even Khanoum Shabazy, whom he either ignored, laughed at, or bullied, adored him, yet considered me—the one who actually listened to her woes—a misfit, uninterested in anything that mattered (cooking, china, dinner parties). I realized that in Iran, just as in California with my mother, “Westernized” was a convenient label for any female behavior that defied oppressive tradition. It could and was attached as easily to an Iranian woman who had never left Iran, as it was to me, raised outside. But men were like Teflon; the Westernized label did not stick. The other names for their conduct—hypocritical, womanizing, temperamental, fickle, bossy, headstrong—were still organically Iranian. The culture made room for their transgressions.

  That winter morning, I could muster no response to a plea that came wrapped in insult. Instead, I leaned over her shoulder as she prepared lunch, rice with lentils and raisins. She poured, I could have sworn, a full cup of oil onto the soaking rice. She hated me. She knew I wouldn’t eat it that way, and she did it anyway, because she knew then I would tell her to take it home. “Remember how we compared our definition of a drop of oil?” She smiled sweetly, and said it would burn otherwise, as I would know, if I knew how to cook. It was unfortunate we have no word for passive-aggressive in Farsi, since it is half our culture.

  I kept flipping absent-mindedly through the inky pages of newsprint. But wait! Buried on the back page, there was a headline that read “Ghalyoon Smoking Now Illegal for Women.” Oh God. My one, favorite publicly acceptable pastime, unceremoniously banned. I dialed Siamak’s mobile phone.

  “Hi. It’s me. Do you find it arousing, watching women smoke ghalyoon?”

  “Not particularly. Especially knowing that a thousand ugly men have smoked from the same pipe before them.”

  “Well, I have news. One half of the population can no longer smoke ghalyoon in public, on the off chance that a pious passer-by notices, and becomes titillated.”

  That night Siamak invited me over for a homemade ghalyoon, in consolation. I sat cross-legged on
a chair in the kitchen, as he heated the coals on the oven, and contemplated his back. As we relaxed on his balcony, high above the western suburb of Tehran, passing the pipe between us and inhaling its humid, fruity smoke, I thought about how perfect we were for each other. Well, maybe we weren’t perfect. We couldn’t even agree on vacations, as friends. He always wanted to four-wheel-drive through the desert, and camp under the stars, and I wanted to lie on a beach, preferably attached to a plush resort, where a waiter would bring me fresh juice and we would sleep on fresh linens at night. Deep down, I thought he was an unrepentant sexist; deep down he thought I was radioactively high-maintenance.

  But in Tehran, Siamak was the one I wanted to be with. His manner of speaking and thinking were so familiar to me, as evocative of home as the tart sweetness of sour cherry jam, and the smokiness of esfand, the pungent herb we ritually burned to ward off the evil eye. I clung to the belief that in time we could develop feelings for one another. The thought was vaguely gross to both of us, but all those happy, old couples whose marriages had been arranged probably felt that way at the beginning.

  I leaned across his boat-like sofa, poked him with a toe and demanded to know why he had never asked me out on a proper date.