Adventure Divas (36 page)

Mokarrameh shuttles around her living room, leading us from one painting to the next with a bounce. She touches her gray bun of hair, covered by the white veil, with girlish nervousness and frequency.

Mokarrameh’s painting was born out of a bout with depression. A friend gave her paper and colored pencils to express herself and once she started, she couldn’t stop. Later, her son gave her paints, and today he is still her supplier. Initially the walls of her home were her canvas, and as her depression lifted, she moved onto the doors and windows. Many of her paintings are on the back of discarded wallpaper.

Strict Islam forbids the use of the human figure in religious images (only Allah creates) and discourages figurative sculpting or painting. Mokarrameh has had visits from the Komiteh Emdad (revolutionary guards) because of her work, which includes shapely ladies with skin showing. I am especially drawn to a vibrant painting of a slightly busty mermaidlike figure in a gold, sparkly gown, but even it is benign by American standards. One wonders if the rumor of an old village woman painting—a class- and gender-defying act—brought the authorities to see her as much as the “heretic” nature of her work did.

As we speak it becomes clear that nothing was going to keep Mokarrameh from doing her art: neither her lack of formal education, nor the revolutionary guards.

“I didn’t go to school and I am not literate,” Mokarrameh tells me, “so I do not know enough, and I only look at a few pages of Qur’an as an inspiration, but I cannot really read Qur’an. I don’t lie. I don’t think Islam says that drawing shouldn’t be done. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it,” she says in respectful defense of her passion.

“I started painting at sixty-four. For four years I would only paint at night. If I had an unexpected visitor, I would hide everything very quickly. If they saw the paint on my hands, I would try to pretend that it was nothing and hide my hands and change the subject!” she says with a giggle, hiding her small, thick hands under her thighs.

Every painting has a backstory and she is eager to tell them all. Mokar-rameh shows us a leggy woman in a bejeweled dress beside a handsome dark-skinned man. “The man and woman are lovers and now they are going to marry, even though the bride’s father disapproves,” she narrates.

“But now he gave in,” she says of the father, with a note of triumph, as if she both created and changed a bit of history through her painting.

When Mokarrameh began painting, just about everyone in the village was against it, as much out of fear of the unknown as out of religious conviction.

“Now it is different. For the past two or three years, I have been painting freely. I can leave the doors open and paint in freedom and nobody considers it strange anymore,” she says earnestly, her arms and chin swinging up and to the right in a gesture of victory.

“I have had some people and guests coming from other cities and they ask me, ‘Don’t you get scared at night with all of these strange paintings around you?’ and I say, ‘No,’ and they say, ‘You’re lying,’ and I say, ‘No, I swear. God created humans, is he scared of his people? And I have created these paintings and I am not afraid of them.’ ” Mokarrameh’s paintings aren’t strange or scary, so my only guess is that the “fear” question comes from others’ perceptions of how odd and forbidden it must be to be surrounded by human images of one’s own making. Like Keri Hulme and her blue people, Mokarrameh (though I suspect she’d hardly look at it this way) is also “playing God” by creating her own universe and peopling it.

While we are talking, a neighbor stops by, clutching a chicken by its feet. Its red head dangles, and its unhappy clucks are muffled by the thick cloth of the woman’s black chador. Mokarrameh takes the chicken and hands the neighbor a painting. These days most of Mokarrameh’s neighbors have her paintings, as gifts or currency. Seems the local community has acclimated to the painter next door.

“Painting isn’t all I’ve done,” Mokarrameh tells me. “I was a seamstress for ten years, and I started when I was fourteen. I did the makeup for the local brides for fifteen years. I have delivered many children—at least twenty-five of them. I was a chiropractor and fixed a lot of bones and limbs.”

I look toward Persheng in hopes of getting her to explain Mokarrameh’s chiropractic skills. Turns out she practiced the “old way” of setting broken bones and fixing sprains, learned only by experience, rather than med school, and from information passed from one healer to the next. There are always people in villages who are believed to have a unique “touch,” or healing power in their hands. Apparently, Mokarrameh is one of them.

Mokarrameh’s son has joined us for the day, in part to help translate. He translates from Mazandarani, which is a local dialect spoken in the northern parts of Iran, into Farsi for Persheng, who then translates into English for us. This son is one of nine children, and because he is single, he is the most involved with Mokarrameh’s day-to-day life. He supports her artistic endeavors, but not without some occasional reservations.

“One night,” Mokarrameh tells me, “he walked in as I was painting and asked me, ‘Mother, what are you painting?’ I said that it was Adam and Eve.” She walks me over to a three-by-eight-foot painting of the famous couple.

Only tiny leaves delicately cover their genitalia.

“He said, ‘Why would you paint a member of the human family naked?’ ”

“I told him when God created us we were all naked!—and then my son didn’t talk to me for ten days. The revolutionary guards also questioned me about the painting. I was so angry with my son,” she says with a mischievous little smile, “that I painted two more naked Adam and Eves! . . . But he’s okay with it now,” she concludes, nodding toward her son, who smiles a bit sheepishly and shrugs. I wonder if he ever regrets giving her those paints.

Mokarrameh takes my hand and walks me over to a huge painting that dominates one of her walls, which she describes as a family portrait. It depicts a large round wooden table, around which are seated a dozen of her family and friends, there to celebrate a wedding. She starts to explain who is depicted.

“This is Manoochehr, Mr. Jon, Mr. Haj, Monir, Mahastee, she is my
havoo.
”

“Your what?” I ask.

“My
havoo
is the one sitting on the bottom.”

A
havoo
is a woman’s husband’s other wife, Persheng explains. In Islam polygamy is still legal on the condition that the man treat all of his wives equally and be able to support them. Mokarrameh’s husband had three wives and apparently treated them all equally badly.

“I had two
havoos
but I really liked my older
havoo.
The middle one has died.”

“I can’t tell you everything now because you’re filming,” she whispers conspiratorially. “But in the old days—it wasn’t like today, people having boy-friends and girlfriends. They used to marry you and take you off by force. My husband was a
kadkhoda
[a very powerful leader of a land or village]. He liked me very much but I didn’t want to marry, and after one whole year they married me by force,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Is your husband in the painting?” I ask, wondering what a
kadkhoda
looks like.

“I didn’t want him to be in there. That is where he was,” Mokarrameh says with a small smile, pointing to an empty gray smudged spot between images of two of her sons, “but I whited him out.”

All the way back to Tehran,
Julie is curled up, battling one of the migraines she endures every few years. The loose cloth layers of her charcoal-colored manteau are squinched around her body. She looks like a sad, gray ball. Tiny groans occasionally breach the folds.

“The Caspian is famous for bringing on migraines,” says Maryam sympathetically. “It’s the light. And the barometric pressure created when the moist ocean air hits the mountain air.”

The only stops we make are for Julie. Along the roadside, I hold back her veil, and a few layers of material, so she can barf unobstructed. Truckers toot their horns. We make it back in a record five hours. At the hotel, Julie pulls the red velour curtains, collapses into bed, and holes up in her dark room for twenty-four hours. “I am so sorry, Holly,” she says through her pain, which is made worse by feeling that she is not doing her job.

“Julie, don’t be ridiculous. I spent two days unconscious in India, remember? It happens. We all go down now and then.”

“Did you see . . . see that woman. In the Caspian. Black chador, with the baby. She was at the coffeehouse too,” Julie says, quietly and gravelly from under the covers.

“What?” I say, wondering if she’s a bit delirious with pain.

But she’s fallen asleep, having succumbed to the migraine pills.

I leave three bottles of water at her bedside, and ask the man at the front desk to check in on her every few hours. His eyebrows rise with concern.

“She’ll cover up before you go in. Don’t worry,” I say.

Orlando, Persheng, Maryam, and I drive across Tehran to Al-Zahra Uni-versity, a women’s college, to talk to the chancellor, Dr. Zahra Rahnavard. I wanted to meet an insider who could explain how theocracy could coexist with the kind of self-expression I’d seen in women like Shahla Sherkat and Mokarrameh Ghanbari.

Dr. Rahnavard is an academic and a sculptor, and was one of President Khatami’s trusted advisers. “This interview is a big deal,” says Persheng. “She’s close to Khatami, but she’s also one of the most respected intellectuals in government right now. And she must have written a dozen books. She’s very establishment and religious, but she agitates for reform in her own way, I guess.”

Dr. Rahnavard’s office is large and filled with windows and chadored assistants scuttling about. Her small sculptures pepper the room and I notice that none of them is a human figure. She stands behind an intimidating large wooden desk, the top covered with glass (all fitting for her academic and intellectual stripes), and greets us. “Welcome, it is a pleasure to meet you,” she says in English, although she will choose to do the interview in Farsi so she will be more fully able to express herself. I wonder, though, if, like Castro, she declines to speak English as a matter of principle. Shan’t speak the language of Mr. Imperialist is Castro’s position.

It is hard to imagine that this formal woman dressed in a conservative black chador was a political rabble-rouser said to have worn miniskirts before the revolution. (Then again, I once wore a cheerleading outfit; we all change.) There was some initial disagreement within our (secular) crew about whether or not we should interview Dr. Rahnavard. While faith seems to be a part of the fabric of many, if not most, people’s lives here in Iran, being religious and actively intertwining religion with politics is an ideological stand that is discomforting to some. (Of course this intertwining happens in places like the United States—come on, John Ashcroft!—and Ireland too, although in those countries it is more informal and less institutionalized.) Like Shahla Sherkat, Dr. Rahnavard participated in overthrowing the shah’s regime, but unlike Sherkat, Rahnavard is now working within the theocratic government, albeit as a reformer. Despite the debate among the crew, in the end it seemed important to hear from an establishment diva—a self-described devout Muslim and feminist who might offer us a greater understanding of Iran’s intersection of religion, government, and, in Rahnavard’s case, art.

“How do you negotiate being an artist and a politician at the same time?” I ask Dr. Rahnavard.

“In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful,” she starts, a preamble that alarms me, but that is not uncommon in Iran.

“If you are asking, ‘How can a president’s political adviser be an artist?’ This in itself reveals that, in reality, the reformist politics are based on cultural and artistic aspects. And the wave of reform that has begun sweeping over our country in answer to our people’s needs for more liberty and democracy—of course within the boundaries of religious teachings—these reforms have a cultural aspect to them, and because of my artistic character, I can approach politics in a more poetic and free way.”

So, Dr. Rahnavard believes art, democracy, and Islam can thrive in peaceful coexistence, and as an artist herself, she feels she can bring them together.

Dr. Rahnavard has worked to reform the system from within, in several different ways. Her best-known reformist stance is her belief that women should be able to wear bright-colored
hejab.
Sanctioning bright colors in Iran is the equivalent of issuing a nose-ring mandate at home. I ask her if she thinks we in the West misinterpret
hejab.

“I think that the West’s understanding of
hejab
has not been correct.
Hejab
is an Islamic requirement and not something that the Iranian government has introduced. It is written in the Qur’an and observed in the whole world of Islam. I believe that the interpretation of religion and Islam that exists in Iran is one of the most interesting and intellectual interpretations in the world of Islam regarding women and religion.”

Well. There is debate about
hejab
being an Islamic requirement. Appar-ently there are only two places in the Qur’an that suggest such modesty, both oblique and open to interpretation. And Dr. Rahnavard ’s argument seems to sidestep the fact that while veiling may be a historical tenet of Islam, the government’s enforcement of it by law (that if broken lands you in jail and gets you flogged) makes it political.

But Dr. Rahnavard is an expert, a consummate politician, and the author of several books on the subject of
hejab.
I feel a bit of a political dilettante in the face of a powerhouse, so, after briefly considering challenging her assertions, I prudently decide this is a time for active listening. One thing is for sure, the story of women and Islam in Iran is endlessly fascinating and clearly evolving. And players such as Dr. Rahnavard—people who bridge the clerical and secular worlds—might just be at the crest of the next wave of change.

“What is the biggest risk you have taken?”

“One of the biggest risks I have taken has been entering the world of religion because I chose it myself and it was not practiced in my family. When I entered this world, I felt that I had entered a beautiful and superior world. I was criticized a lot by my family and friends but I insisted on following the beautiful Islamic beliefs that I had gotten to know.”