Lipstick Jihad (43 page)

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 into 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.

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.

My aunt and uncle, Farzaneh Katoozi and Hamid Rasti, made Tehran home with their humor and love. The rest of my family—Sharokh and Mimi Moaveni, Shahla and Mahine Jamali, Pirouz Azar, Ferial Katoozi, Mohsen Mahdavi, Pouria Deghanpour, Nadia Babella, and Ardavan, Khosrow, and Forouzan Moaveni—spoiled me with graciousness on multiple continents. The companionship of two beloved friends, Carmen Nersessian and Siamak Namazi, sustained me throughout. My colleagues in the Tehran press corps practiced a solidarity I have never before or since encountered. My comrades, in the truest sense of the world, included Najmeh Bozorghmehr, Hossein Rassam, Suraj Sharma, Nazila Fathi, Negar Roshanzamir, Guy Dinmore, Jim Muir, Lily Sadeghi, Mohsen Asgar, and Ali Raiis-Tousi. Many others shared their Tehran world with me: Ali, Mitria, Nikki, Goudarz, Babak, Aresu, Roxanna, Kiarash, Maryam, Cyrus, Amirhossein, Kamran, Ardeshir, Hadi, Kavous, Nooshin, Yazdan, Ano, Kami, Koroush, and Armen. To protect their identities, certain friends appear in this book camouflaged.

Two friends in Tehran made special contributions to this book. Goli Emami, whose conscience and literary sensibilities I value immeasurably, read an early draft of the manuscript and in the course of our discussions, helped me hone my ideas. Ali-Reza Haghighi's sophisticated insight into the Revolution, reform, and the sociology of the Islamic Republic illuminated my own understanding every step of the way.

I owe an intellectual debt to Farhad Behbahani for explaining the intricate meeting of theology and politics in Iran and to Massoud Filsouf for sharing his accumulated knowledge of the post-revolutionary system. Many thanks to those who kept their doors and phones open during the tensest of times, particularly the student organizers and activists who are probably better left unnamed. My discussions with Ahmed Bourghani, Hadi Semati, Abbas Maleki, Taha Hashemi, Neil Crompton, Simon Shercliff, Saeed Laylaz, and Mohammed Sadeq Al-Husseini always demystified the rapidly changing political moment. Perhaps no one in Tehran helped as much as Mohammed Ali Abtahi, a uniquely devoted friend and a uniquely truthful vice-president. At the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mohammed Hossein Khoshvaght and Ali-Reza Shiravi struggled valiantly against the bureaucracy of seemingly ten different systems to help us do our work. My driver Ali Khatami, unflappable and fiercely loyal, treated my deadlines and dangers as his own.

I am forever indebted to my editors and colleagues at
Time Magazine
—Howard Chua-Eoan, Joshua Cooper Ramo, James Geary, Michael Elliott, Tony Karon, and Jim Kelly—for trusting my instincts, encouraging my ideas, and for a never-ending string of extraordinary reporting opportunities. My deepest thanks to Lisa Beyer, confidante and mentor, for standing behind me from the first moment. At the
Los Angeles Times
, my home during the writing of this book, I thank Marjorie Miller, and especially Dean Baquet, for his support and inspiring example. Both Terry McDermott and Michael Muskal shared their superb expertise with the written word.