Adventure Divas (35 page)

“This one,” Sherkat continues, holding up another issue, “is about runaway girls in Tehran and how homelessness is becoming a problem; this one is about AIDS.” Other issues the magazine covers include domestic violence, rhinoplasty, patriarchy, feminist films, and temporary marriage. The latter, a loophole in Islamic law, allows a couple to marry for as little as a few hours. Some condemn it as legalized prostitution; others defend it as a way for unmarried women to have sex in a country that prohibits it.

Her magazine, now in its twelfth year, is still being published, despite a prison sentence over her head for speaking out against the legal enforcement of
hejab.

“What do you think Western feminists misunderstand about Iranian feminism?” I ask.

“And also, what do they understand?” she responds warmly, a small, sly smile bringing her face to life.

“Yes, well . . .” I stumble, reminding myself not to lead with my Western guilt.

“Basically I think the Western feminists don’t know that an Iranian feminist movement exists. Some people think that women in Iran still remain at home hiding behind the veil. But, as you may have noticed, women are present and active in many layers of social and political life in this country,” Sherkat tells me. “This is not something granted to them by the government, but rather the will of women themselves, which has forced the government to accept their participation in various aspects of life in the society. I am a Muslim, I have Islamic faith, and at the same time I am doing the work that I do.”

Sherkat sees no conflict between her religious faith and her feminist faith. She explains that women in other Islamic countries, however, such as Saudi Arabia, are often denied more rights, such as driving and voting, than are Iranian women.
Zanan,
she says, tackles issues relevant to Iranian women’s lives. Many of those issues are previously unexposed in journalism and certainly are not discussed in public.

But I want to know more about the overall tension between reformist journalists and the government. As of April 2004, there were eleven journalists behind bars, several of whom have never been charged or tried. Several major daily newspapers have been shut down and websites are heavily censored.

“So how do you survive in this atmosphere? I mean, it’s hard enough to publish a magazine anywhere,” I say, knowing from my own experience that feminist publishing is a difficult racket.

“Journalism in developing countries is like walking on a tightrope, it requires a tremendous balancing act—never mind publishing a magazine that is exclusively targeted toward women. Sometimes you encounter an extremely valuable article with a potentially strong impact on the readers, one that can all by itself result in greatly positive influence on the society as a whole. I may decide to publish such an article,” she says, “even if it results in the closure of the magazine,” she says matter-of-factly.

She continues: “There are also times when the costs of publishing a piece outweigh its benefits, and can cause problems for a magazine that has been around for ten years and may even survive for another ten. In this case we decide not to publish such an article.”

Near the end of our talk we discuss the coming elections, and Sherkat turns the tables. She’s been pretty sober up to this point, but she gets a playful crinkle around her eyes and asks me, “Which of our two countries do you think will have the first woman president?”

I know she’s challenging the presumption that the United States is more liberal on women’s issues. And it’s true that although Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton come to mind, it does feel implausible that the United States will have a woman president anytime soon.

“Forty-six women are candidates for this term of the presidency. We have an article about it,” she says, handing me an issue still hot from the presses.

Who knows. Maybe Iran, like Pakistan (Benazir Bhutto) and India (Indira Gandhi) and New Zealand (Helen Clark), will be led by a woman before the United States is.

On the way out, walking past the young women who work for Sherkat, I don’t focus on their gray and black chadors as I did when I came in; instead I notice the subtle sheen of pink on the lips of the graphic designer, and the researcher’s lavender toenails.

It would be six months after we left Iran before Sherkat’s appeal was settled and her prison sentence for publicly challenging
hejab
was commuted. The fine still stood. The mullahs got the money.
Zanan
is still publishing.

The next day
Maryam continues our education in the boundaries of
hejab
by taking us to a “happening” coffee shop in northern Tehran. We linger around a cascade of outdoor decks vibrant with young women and men sipping café glacé and making eyes at one another, just like in any mall-of-youth in the world. Sixty-five percent of Iran’s population is under twenty-five—which means an entire generation has come of age since the revolution. Like twenty-somethings the world over, members of that generation are interested in defining their own lives morally and politically. The decks are surrounded by trendy stores featuring high-ticket Western items and designer knockoffs. This is tony Tehran and we are among the Westernized elite, who find the clerics’ dress code oppressive and push its boundaries. Only one woman here seems to be honoring the most modest interpretation of
hejab.
She is a lone woman, with a baby, and is wearing a black chador. She stands out as not fitting in.

“Capri pants visible at two o’clock,” I stage-whisper to Orlando, our cameraman, so he can film a daring, tall brunette with glistening peach lipstick, toeless sandals, and painted toenails. “And check out that ingenue.” I nod toward a twenty-year-old with a fiery red veil perched five inches back on her head. “How does she manage that?”

“Bobby pins,” says Julie.

Personal acts of defiance, such as wearing makeup, revealing an ankle, letting bangs tousle out from underneath a carefully positioned scarf-cum-veil, give a pretty clear indication what these woman think of living under sharia as interpreted by
them—
the mullahs. Despite it being against the law, Iranian women wear a lot of makeup, much more than American women do. I love this beauty revolution. “How do they get away with this?” I ask Persheng.

“They don’t, always,” she responds. “I have a friend who went too far when she was camping up in the Alborz. She was caught with her veil off and sentenced to flogging. Seventy lashes. Luckily, she was able to buy them off and get a more lenient flogger who wouldn’t hit so hard.”

Legislating women’s powerlessness (via, in part, a dress code that makes them invisible) seems to be the centerpiece of the theocratic leaders’ struggle to maintain their own power. From Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to Turkey, the degree of political freedom a population experiences in general is directly expressed in the degree of control over women. But this is certainly not a tactic limited to Islamic societies. Tightening the reins on women and overall political freedom happens whenever fundamentalism lurks. Case in point: the Bush administration’s agenda to limit civil liberties (the Patriot Act) and revoke a woman’s right to choose.

“You guys are obsessed with the veil,” Maryam sighs. She shakes her head and finishes her
qahvé Turk
as we shoot through a second tape at the coffee shop.

“You’re obsessed too much with it,” she says, waving her hand. “It’s finished. The deal is
finished.
I mean, it’s more than twenty years now.”

“Would you wear the veil if you didn’t have to?” I ask.

“Of course not,” she says, looking at me as if I am a confused simpleton. “Would I wear it? What a thing to ask.”

While Maryam would not choose to veil, many Iranian women would for a variety of reasons: to honor the Qur’an’s code of modesty, to avoid harassment from men and keep from being overly sexualized, to keep the sun off.

Maryam is right that the veil is just a scarf, a piece of clothing worn throughout the Muslim world and beyond. Obsessing about it instead of, say, the repressive marriage and family laws of Iran, may seem misguided. But in making the veil mandatory, as Iran’s theocracy has done, the veil becomes a powerful and institutionalized symbol of oppression. And for better or worse, TV is a visual medium, and the veil is a powerful image. So I toss Orlando a third tape.

Resistance to the mullahs’
monoculture is not limited to the big cities or urban sophisticates. Jeannie came back from the scout trip with a story of a folk painter and rice farmer named Mokarrameh Ghanbari. Ghanbari, she told us, was challenging Islamic art taboos in a way that had made her a sensation in the tiny village of Darikandeh, on the Caspian plains. We leave behind the haze and head for the hills to meet her.

We drive through the Alborz Mountains, passing the highest peak in Iran, the 18,300-foot volcanic Mount Demavand, which has been muse to hundreds of Persian poets. The Caspian plains are the heartland of Iranian agriculture and run the length of the country’s northern border, stretching between the Alborz and the Caspian Sea.

Julie and I are used to being in production overdrive and assumed we’d make it to the Caspian in five hours. (That is, unless our tires melt in the outrageous heat.) But every hour or so our Iranian team pulled home-field rank and stopped for tea and pistachio breaks at one or another of the open-air roadside eateries with thatched roofs. When it comes to road trips, the Persians’ three-thousand-year-old culture becomes apparent. Very civilized. We Westerners had to curb our eat-and-run ways. And we Westerners were outnumbered four to three.

The road through the Alborz, like most that breach mountain ranges, follows one stream up to the divide and another back down to the plain. Along the way we pass a huge dam. “My father oversaw the electrical production of that dam,” says Persheng. Persheng’s parents now live in Manhattan. The Iranian diaspora, like the Cuban, is largely made up of the country’s well-off and educated who chose to (and were able to) leave.

The descent out of the Alborz is much steeper and curved, and the trucks, fueled with cheap gas and testosterone, play chicken on the two-lane highway. I secretly thank Allah for the alcohol ban. Because the Caspian fog creeps up these canyons, they are more lush than those of the ascent, and the steep downgrade makes the views more spectacular. Despite the occasional spike of adrenaline through my body, I begin to relax. “A fast-moving car is the only place where you’re legally allowed to not deal with your problems,” says Douglas Coupland, extolling the virtues of road trips. And, I’d add, in Iran, a fast-moving car in the mountains, away from the watchful eyes of the morals police, is one of the few places you can let your scarf slide back enough to allow a bit of fresh wind to cool the scalp.

Julie and I slouch in the backseat of our van, doing just that, trying not to let our Iranian crew see us. I notice some pink silky fabric hanging out from under Julie’s dark gray manteau. “Are you wearing your pajamas?”

“Yeah. It was the coolest thing I had. It’s like having to wear a coat and hat in Manhattan in August. Hotter than hell here,” she replies, flashing me her pajama hemline. We giggle like girls who’ve just talked their way out of gym class.

The Caspian plain is created by countless streams that run from the mountains to the sea, in many parts creating the perfect conditions for growing rice. “The best rice in the world is grown here,” says Persheng. “When Iranians want cheap rice they buy the stuff imported from California.”

During the Clinton administration, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright lifted the trade embargo with Iran for limited items: rugs, pistachios, and caviar. Ahh, the power of luxury goods. The way that American companies get around the embargo, and sell rice to Iran, for example, is that the U.S. parent companies do not directly participate in the trade; foreign subsidiaries take all responsibility and U.S. companies simply take a piece of the profit. Coke, Jergens, Halliburton all do this.

We reach Nowshahr, a scenic town on the shores of the Caspian in the same province as Mokarrameh’s village.

“You can feel the sea before you see it,” Jeannie had told me of the Caspian during the passing of the baton back in Seattle. “It’s humid, not like the desert air of Tehran. And the orange blossoms,” she swooned, “reminded me of California when I was a kid.”

When we pulled up along the sparkling, blue-gray Caspian, I see chunky, brightly colored wooden fishing boats playfully galloping out to meet the sturgeon. The rocky shore is lined with many men, but I zero in on the handful of women pumping their shoulders underneath floral patterned chadors, casting out lines from thick twelve-foot rods. I suck in what feels to be the greater freedom offered by the Caspian region, though I know that this freedom is partly illusory. While we had slipped away from the watchful eye of the largely Tehran-based theocracy, Iranian rural areas can be hotbeds of conservatism and religious fundamentalism.

When we find Darikandeh, it isn’t hard to pick out Mokarrameh Ghan-bari’s home once we get within eyeshot. Her tall metal front gate is painted with friendly, blue and white toy soldiers wielding big guns.

She is dressed in a white veil and a black sweater that hangs over a patterned red skirt and she greets me at the front door with a lip rub on each cheek. She’s five feet tall, seventy-six years old; small and roundish in that layered, peasant way.

“Salam, khosh aamadid.”
Mokarrameh greets me, grasping both my hands in hers.
“Madaret kojast
?
”
(“Is your mother with you?”) she asks, remembering Jeannie’s earlier visit.

We step into Mokarrameh’s house, and in one glance I take in more color and joy than I’ve seen in an entire week. Bright blood-red and jet-black Persian rugs cover the entire floor of her living space and the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with paintings, many of women swathed in cheerful fuchsia and greens and yellows. A grown-up playhouse. This exuberance and personal flair is a strikingly different Iran from that found in the public hotels, offices, and street corners we’ve experienced so far.