I perched on the side of the hospital bed, and pressed his smooth, brown-speckled hand between my own, to draw him closer. Is it you, dokthar, daughter, he asked, finally focusing on me. Where have you been? I was in Iran, Agha Joon. This reply intensified the fog. He never really understood that I had gone to live in Tehran; it was a twist too strange for him to absorb, at the end of his years. The family emigrated en masse to America, adjusted slowly, and watched the second generation put down roots—it was all for them, in the end, so they could bloom and learn in a civilized, modern place. I told you last time, Agha Joon, that I moved to Iran. He just looked at me, tempted into prose by the oddity of my words. His prose was rusty, and came out lyrical anyway: “What were you seeking, in that distant place?”
I took small pride in how his face lit up, when we spoke. I had scarcely seen him since early college, when my Farsi groaned under an American accent, like all of the diaspora’s children. This handful of years later, when we sat together, and I recounted where I had been, I could speak naturally, not hesitating each minute for the right word. His eyes glittered, registering that something unexpected and interesting had occurred. Listen, Agha Joon, listen to all the poetry I’ve learned. And as I recited everything I could remember, his face finally became animated. Bareekalah dokhtar, he praised me, beaming. Ustadat ki bood? Who taught you?
He delighted in everything we learned. Perhaps it was because he himself refused to learn English, used the same five phrases for thirty years, and in comparison, our easy acquisition of local skills seemed impressive and dexterous. More likely, because he had learned to savor the smallest things—an old tape of Banaan; the postcard of the Blue Mosque I sent him one summer from Istanbul, which he carried in his pocket for weeks; an unlikely new bud on what seemed a doomed plant. When I first learned to drive, and stopped at yellow lights, he said precisely the same thing from the passenger seat, with the same smile. Who taught you?
We took a slow stroll down the hall of the nursing home, an alley of parked wheelchairs, and he guided me to the front lobby with his walker, toward a waist-high cage of canaries. He sat down in the padded, green armchair next to them, gesturing proudly. “Look! . . . What birds! . . . See how they sing!” One of the poems he recited often opened with a couplet about nightingales; “a bulbol bore, in its beak, a petal. . . . ”
As far back as I could remember, Agha Joon had a talent for filtering out the ugliness around him—the suburban sprawl, the gas stations like warts on every corner—and spotting only what he wanted to see. We would be sitting at a traffic light, at the most soulless intersection conceivable, and he would point to a tree in the distance, at a far-reaching branch. See dokhtar, this thing of such beauty, that God has created? And I would strain my eyes, and finally spot a nearly invisible bird’s nest perched at the end of a distant branch. Even here, at the very, very end, his vision blurred out the foreign trappings of senility and death and strained to admit only the birds.
I arrived to a quiet house, not bustling in preparation. In the two decades since the revolution, enough Iranians had died in America that there were now people to call to handle the elaborate rituals and commemorations. A caterer would cook the feast for the service, would buy and pit the dates and fold them into pale squares of lavash, would cook the four-day-in-the-making sweet halvah, and send waiters to circulate with cups of tea. Scratched down in address books was the number of the local Sunni volunteer committee, who offered to wash the dead, even the dead of the Shia, in the ritual fashion Islam required.
The day before the service, we lingered over breakfast, taking progressively smaller bites of toasted barbari bread, smeared with sour cherry jam and fresh cream. We were miserable, and chose to provoke one another as a diversion.
“I think I won’t wear nylons tomorrow,” I announced, even though it was cold out, and even though I didn’t know what I was going to wear.
“I think we should serve wine,” said my aunt. At this we all looked up in surprise, but she immediately turned her back to pour tea, to hide her expression.
“Feri, have you gone crazy!” my mother exclaimed.
“Agha Joon loved wine. He didn’t believe in all this pious ritual, and I think if we’re going to be true to him, we should have wine,” my aunt argued. This outrageous thought, as it was intended to, short-circuited my mother, who excused herself to make phone calls to Tehran (where people were sane and did not suggest serving wine at khatms), punching in the numbers of the international calling card as she cried.
There was nothing for me to do but buy some extra candles and a black dress. Oh welcome task! I could not wait to escape the cloying atmosphere with an afternoon of religiously sanctioned shopping. Everyone was lost in private regrets, angry self-condemnation. As I was about to leave, my mother came back into the kitchen and reminded me, as though this was her first not fifth mention, that I needed to write an elegy for Agha Joon in English, “so the American guests don’t get bored sitting through an hour of Farsi.”
“I don’t know why we have American guests in the first place. Agha Joon didn’t even speak English. How could he have had American friends? Who’ve you invited?” I asked accusingly.
It turned out my mother and her sisters had invited their friends, some colleagues from work, in the Iranian tradition of expecting even the outer rings of one’s social galaxy to make an appearance at a funeral. I was furious. The language in which I loved Agha Joon was Farsi. To speak about my adored grandfather to an audience of American strangers in English was an obscene idea to me.
“It’s out of the question. How do you expect me to write a tribute of grief to Agha Joon in an alien tongue?”
“Azadeh, jaan. You’re a writer, aren’t you? Just write.” Hah! When there were elegies to compose or long complaint letters to airlines or insurance companies, I was elevated to the status of writer. Otherwise, I was a collection of other things: a non-attendee of law school, a gypsy doing “God knows what” in the Middle East, a rejecter of suitable Iranian-American doctors, an exceeder of bank accounts, who liked to write as a “hobby.”
“Can’t we just pass out a flier with explanations?” I asked, as we had done for the Iranian wedding ceremony of my cousin to an American.
That night I sat for hours, poring over reams of Persian poetry, trying to find a few stanzas of verse that might be appropriate, that might translate. In Farsi I found the perfect lines—playful, elegant, profound—but they stubbornly refused to be led into English. I traced the Farsi words under my finger, in frustration, wanting to tear them off the page, command them to cross the border and not cling so willfully to just one world. The pile of rejected possibilities grew. Their translation was stale and constricted. So wearily, I sat before the screen, and just let my fingers type. And eventually something came out, mostly on its own, that I did not love, but I felt spoke the truth about my grandfather. And that is what I read.
My cousin Daria stood next to me. After I finished, he talked for a few minutes about our grandfather in broken Farsi, charming the audience with all the love that shone through his jagged words. He didn’t think, of course, about what a conventional Iranian gathering expected to hear at a khatm. He simply spoke of Agha Joon, as he knew him.
My grandfather, he began blithely, never prayed once, not a single rakat of namaz, his entire life. The crowd, a hundred Shiites, dressed in head-to-toe black, prepared to weep in our thousand-year-old tradition of mourning, broke out into laughter instead.
Our mothers, standing next to each other along the wall, eyed each other in alarm. Everyone quickly covered their mouths, peering around, discomfited to have stepped so dramatically out of character. But once they saw that the spirit of Karbala would not strike the room with a bolt of lightning, they relaxed.
Daria continued. He didn’t pray, my grandfather, but he was more ethical, more kind, than any other man I have ever known. I smiled, and rested my fingers on Daria’s arm, proud of his Iranian heart, and his simple,
American naturalness.
That moment resides, a precious still-frame, in my consciousness. Exiles spent so much of their lives adrift through time; grieving for the past, pruning regrets, bracing for a future that was anticipated rather than lived. But in those seconds of surprised laughter we lived, collectively and wholly, in the present, an unfamiliar place we seldom met alone, even more rarely together. Afterward, a stooped-over old woman, wearing a head scarf of black lace, tottered over to us. Good for you, pesaram, my son, for not forgetting your culture, she said, patting Daria on the back and swinging the braided chain of a worn Chanel handbag in my direction. Tell that cousin of yours she should learn Farsi.
That night we assembled at my aunt’s house in Los Gatos, heaving the towering trays of leftover fruit, herbs, lavash-wrapped dates, into the garage. If you had swapped a few of the stews, the menu would have resembled a wedding. I bit into a Persian rice cookie, the kind that immediately crumbles upon contact with your lips. We didn’t like to admit it, but these cookies, like many Persian sweets, tasted better here in America. The quality of the butter and flour were finer than what bakeries used in Tehran. The taste buds, at least, can’t be tricked by nostalgia.
Maman was on the phone with relatives in Tehran, speaking three decibels louder than necessary, as though to compensate for the fiber-optic distance. Daria was locked up in his room, inconsolable. He and Agha Joon were closer than any of us were to either of them. The bass of his angry hip-hop reverberated throughout the house. It made me feel better, too.
The house was full of people, yet it also felt empty, composed of negative space. It was vibrantly the house that it was, yet at the same time, it was not the houses in Tehran, where on the other side of the world, our estranged relatives were registering that Mr. Katouzi, nearly the last of his generation, had died.
Ever since I had put down my pen the night before, and surrendered the obsession to translate poetry, a possibility had slowly crept over me. Maybe the fixed lines I had drawn around worlds, around countries, around languages, were distorted, like a flat map of the earth.
The urge to translate, this preoccupation with language I had dragged around with me, had been a resistance to the sense of foreignness I felt everywhere—a distraction from the restlessness that followed me into each hemisphere. If I could only have conquered words, purged from my Farsi any trace of accent, imported the imagery of Persian verse into English prose, I had thought, then the feeling of displacement would go away. Just as I didn’t like to admit, even to myself, that the shirini here tasted better than in Tehran, I didn’t want to accept that displacement was an inescapable reality of a life between two worlds.
I felt the weight of my mother’s arm around my shoulders, as she introduced me to a distant cousin, who smiled kindly. Iran existed here, in the interior intimacy and rhythm of our lives. This enclave in California felt as much home as did the strange world of Tehran, the homeland itself, where our Iranian relatives lived as strangers. I resigned myself to never saying goodbye, because I now realized that I would perpetually exist in each world feeling the tug of the other. The yearning, which I must embrace and stop assaulting, was a perpetual reminder of the truth, that I was whole, but composed of both.
On a summery night in Manhattan, my Iranian crew of friends assembled at Lincoln Center, for one of those avant-garde performance art productions put together by Iranian artists who had been away from Iran for years. I expected in advance that it would be disappointing, as art produced in exile often was (or at least our art)—either flat, from want of creative synergy with the changing homeland, or predictable, for the reuse of dated themes, the visuals of Iranian suffering going back to the revolution. We settled into our seats, and the lights dimmed. In the background, shapeless figures trekked through woods. A single woman emerged, and sank into a pool of water. Black and white landscapes flashed on the screen, the woman keened, and the trekkers trekked. The story was inspired by The Conference of the Birds, a twelfth-century Persian epic poem by Farid Ud-Din Attar.
These static, arid images evoked nothing of the Iran that I knew. My Iran was alive with ideas, a place of clumsy fashion shows and sophisticated bloggers. They were like artifacts, these visuals, remains of an era when my parents’ generation used words like Mao and SAVAK instead of tech bust and stock split. Bored by the incoherence of the performance, and only partly entertained by the singer’s divine voice, I peeked over to my right, to see if I was alone in my thoughts.
Hafez Nazeri, whose father is one of Iran’s preeminent classical musicians, was sitting next to me, and could compare as well as I the caliber of art being created in Tehran, and the vacant, atmospheric spectacle before us. He raised an eyebrow, and leaned back with a skeptical expression.
I closed my eyes, and thought instead of the poem, The Conference of the Birds. It was a story I remembered well, the story of the mythic bird the Simorgh. When I was young, my mother and Khaleh Farzi and her husband drove down to Big Sur nearly every other weekend, to perch on the terrace of a magical place called Nepenthe, a restaurant you reached by climbing up through a small forest of redwoods, to a terrace that wound around the side of a cliff, high above the south coast of the Pacific. The terrace, the horizon, and the proud trees blended into one enchanting space, and we would sit for hours near the outdoor fireplace, listening to the logs crackle, gazing at the white foam of the crashing waves, the stars on the velvet sky. Khaleh Farzi and my mother sipped cognac, and talked about Iran. I drank creamy hot chocolate, and ran around asking pesky questions. Nepenthe, I found out, meant a place you go to forget your sorrows. I was young, and glad the sorrows drew us to a place with such crispy French fries.
There was a carved wooden statue of a phoenix at the tip of the cliff. What’s that? I asked my mother. It’s a phoenix, which is really like our bird, the Simorgh. The Simorgh, she explained, was a mystical bird, the leader king of all birds thousands of years ago. One day, the birds were summoned and asked to undertake a journey to reach their king. They accepted, though it was a hazardous journey, fraught with obstacles and valleys. Some of the birds—the nightingale, the sparrow—dropped out along the way.
With closed eyes, still tuning out the ululations around me, I tried to remember the story, as it had been told to me on that terrace so many years ago. Yes, in the end, the birds that made it through to the final valley gathered and waited expectantly to meet their leader. Their guide turned to them, and announced that there was no leader, no Simorgh—that if they looked around them, they would realize that they themselves were the Simorgh. The tale relied on a play of words; in Farsi, si- means thirty, and morgh- means bird. The birds looked around, and realized there were thirty of them. The goal of their journey, which they had imagined as a quest for their king, was actually their quest for self.
I edged out of the aisle, into the lobby, and finally outside, to sit on the cool cement steps, and breathed in the night sky. The notion of the Simorgh sifted through my mind, its end—the shock of the coveted mystery unveiled as the familiar—uncannily resonating with the recent twists of my life. My journey to Iran was meant to be a search for homeland, the prize for which I had trudged through the long days, the frightful, sleepless nights.
I had taken the first steps assured in myself, intent on discovering Iran, and I had eventually found that Iran, like the Simorgh, was elusive, that it defied being known. Its moods changed mercurially by the day, the scope of its horizon seemed to expand and shrink by the season, and even its past was a contested battle. Though with each day there I accumulated as many questions as answers, like those steadfast birds, something kept me honed on course, a belief in the obscured value of the destination. The knowledge had been unfurling in me slowly since the day of Agha Joon’s funeral—that the search for home, for Iran, had taken me not to a place but back to myself.
Inside, the lights went on, and my friends filed out. We gathered at a Moroccan lounge in the East Village, and raised pitchers of mojitos in
to the air. Pouria and Hafez were engrossed in a discussion of Iranian classical music. Maryam talked about her upcoming wedding on a Greek island, how she had carefully chosen the destination because both Iranians from Iran and Iranians from America could get visas to attend. The axis of evil had made the choice of neutral-visa territory a foremost consideration in wedding planning. These were our preoccupations.
We spoke Farsi in different accents, or not at all. Some of us had extensive memories of Iran, others fewer. Our individual blends sparkled distinctively. In Hafez’s voice, I heard the steely assurance of the fearless new generation; in Pouria’s, the melancholy nostalgia of our family; in Maryam’s laughter, the fusion of Iranian femininity and sharp New York attitude.
All our lives were formed against the backdrop of this history, fated to be at home nowhere—not completely in America, not completely in Iran. For us, home was not determined by latitudes and longitudes. It was spatial. This, this was the modern Iranian experience, that bound the diaspora to Iran. We were all displaced, whether internally, on the streets of Tehran, captives in living rooms, strangers in our own country, or externally, in exile, sitting in this New York bar, foreigners in a foreign country, at home together. At least for now, there would be no revolution that returned Iran to us, and we would remain adrift. But the bridge between Iran and the past, Iran and the future, between exile and homeland, existed at these tables—in kitchens, in bars, in Tehran or Manhattan—where we forgot about the world outside. Iran had been disfigured, and we carried its scraps in our pockets, and when we assembled, we laid them out, and were home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book wasn’t meant to be a memoir, but since it turned out that way, I need to thank the many people whose presence in my life made the stories possible.
The spirit of Kaveh Golestan, the bravest, most talented photojournalist I have ever known, runs through these pages. With his unrivaled zest for poking into Iran’s darkest corners, he taught me, and the Iranian journalists and photographers of my generation, that resistance could be an art and that art could be resistance. His place is permanently empty.
Lipstick Jihad Page 29