Adventure Divas (38 page)

A constant, incantatory prayer accompanies the scene:
Allaho akbar.
(God is great.) And then in lower tones:
Besmellah rahmane. Alhamdollallah rab’el alamin.
(In the name of the compassionate God, the God of all worlds.)

Halfway through the prayers I notice Zahra stand and begin to make her way through the lines of women who are tapping the crowns of their covered heads, not in unison, but with a common spiritual undulation, toward Mecca. As the line of heads rises, Zahra scuttles down the aisle sliding business cards onto the ground in front of them. And as the heads bow, they do so right onto
THE LADIES OF PARADISE.
Target marketing, Muslim style.

“Are you networking at mosque?” I whisper to Zahra, slightly incredulous.

“Yes,” she smiles, and tilts her head with a laugh.

Allaho akbar. Besmellah rahmane. Alhamdollallah rab’el alamin.

The Persian sun beats through
the white eyelet curtains that cover the windows of the hotel restaurant back in Tehran two days later. It is a May afternoon, ninety-eight degrees, and we are having lunch: chicken kabobs and orange sodas all around. “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” croons over the hotel sound system.

“Any luck with Operation Beauty?” I ask Persheng, who has been trying all week to get us permission to film in a beauty parlor.

“It’s very difficult,” Persheng explains to me, “no headscarfs means no cameras.” Beauty parlors are one of the few public spaces where women can be unveiled.

“I called the parlor that I’ve been going to since I was a teenager. She’s supposed to call me back tonight. We’ll see,” adds Maryam.

Wherever I travel I try to spend a bit of time at the beauty parlor as I find that it is a hotbed of frank information and, here in Iran, it would seem, ground zero for the beauty rebellion. Furthermore, it’s a chance to make an entry in my catalog of masochistic beauty regimens the world over. In my youthful, unshaven, Birkenstocked days of yore, I condemned beauty parlors with a Khomeini-like fervor. “Dens of corruption,” I might have called them, as the ayatollah called any place espousing Western values. At best, I thought beauty parlors were the realm of The Vain and The Bored. I attributed their nefariousness to the beauty standards pressed on American females (fashion magazines being the worst offenders) that keep them barfing up dinner and hating their bodies.

But times change, and now any sort of orthodoxy tires me out. Now I consider beauty parlors the estrogen-charged answer to the Elks Club.

That night we get the green light
from Maryam’s beauty parlor connection, but it’s going to have to be a top-secret operation.

“She says we can come in the morning, though we have to be discreet,” she tells me over the phone. I call Orlando’s room. “You’ve got the morning off. No men allowed in beauty parlors. I’ll be right over to get the camera,” I say and hang up.

The next day
we are staked out around the corner from the beauty parlor in our nondescript white van.

“Cotton,” I say to Julie, mopping up the sweat that trickles out from under my polyester veil. “Why didn’t Jeannie tell us to bring cotton?”

Our cell phone rings and it is Maryam, who has gone ahead of us into the plain brick building with drawn curtains. On her cue, Julie and I scurry across the street with our equipment hidden under our layers.

We are buzzed through the first giant white metal door and into a bleak off-white foyer reminiscent of 1950s institutional architecture. The first door clanks behind us and locks with a not-very-customer-friendly
thud.

“So ‘Women of Cell Block H,’ ” I whisper to Julie.

“I know. In the name of God, who knew beauty was criminal?”

Another startling buzz; the sound of a cascade of locks; a second door opens slightly and a set of eyes peers out at us.

We’re in.

The shop owner wears a blue smock and pauses from the hot iron to hand us glasses of tea and a plate of cookies. Someone flips on the sound system, and upbeat Persian music fills the parlor. The room is filled with smiles and chatting and not a trace of reserve. As we have discovered repeatedly in Iran, once behind closed doors the famous Iranian hospitality and warmth come forth. The coverings and scarves that draw the line between public and private hang on a row of pegs on the wall.

I start shooting.

“You can only film from the neck down,” reminds Maryam, which strikes me as somehow ironic. Customers are poised under stunning 1950s pink egg-shaped hair dryers, finger- and toenails becoming fuchsia and cherry red and purple. Hair is being worked over with a vengeance I haven’t seen since the mid-eighties, and even then usually reserved for local TV anchors. A bin of pastel-colored hot rollers flanks every beauty station.

“Why go to all this trouble if you just have to cover up?” I ask Persheng.

“But our faces are not covered, and that explains all the makeup—often heavy makeup—not to mention the nose job craze. And the scarves get pushed back enough to show off the highlights on the hair,” Persheng says. The bits that do show become ever more important. And of course, women are often unveiled in private homes.

Manicures, pedicures, and a deep commitment to hair removal animate the parlor’s landscape. I walk around shooting b-roll of body creams, hair products, and an impressive range of “muscle massagers,” which look suspiciously like mid-century vibrators. Julie is getting the fuzz on her upper lip removed using a Middle Eastern method called threading. A long white cotton string resembling dental floss hangs around the beautician’s neck, and the strands cross in front of her chest. The beautician finesses this intersection of the threads, twisting them together at a rapid-fire pace, creating a friction against the face that pulls out the hair.

“Islam,” she says with a nod toward her handiwork, meaning “this is how we do it here.”

“Look Iranian,” I say to Julie as I zoom in on her full-blooded Italian upper lip, which is magically going bald.

“Does it hurt?” I ask, wincing for her.

“Uh-huh,” she responds in a slightly higher than usual pitch. “It’s like a row of fire ants is mowing its way across my lip.”

We go down a metal spiral staircase into a basement full of a dozen gurneys, the ladies on them in varying degrees of repose. The two chatty beauticians in the room go from woman to woman, carrying out procedures with the speed and levity of Trapper and Hawkeye in the M*A*S*H operating room.

“Your turn,” Julie says, grabbing the camera. I drop my drawers and climb up. A five-foot-three-inch, kindly, unveiled Iranian woman hugging a small bucket of what looks like gurgling crude oil comes my way. I prepare to be waxed, Persian style. The woman cuts five-by-seven-inch swatches of translucent cellophane-like material, which will affix to the wax. I sense a silent flinch from across the room, and prepare myself as she ladels gobs of hot copper-colored wax onto my legs.

“If you ask a woman in her twenties,” Julie says, “what one thing she would want to have if she were stranded on a desert island, the answer is—”

“Yooowww,”
I screech as my gentle waxer rips out all the hair on my right inner thigh. I am part Greek; we give the Middle Eastern women a run for their money when it comes to fur.

“Lipstick,” says Julie, “and if you ask a woman in her thirties . . .” Julie continues.

“What? What?” I say, clenching for the next sear of pain.

“Tweezers.”

Understandably, none of the Iranian women would agree to be filmed getting waxed. Julie and I climb back up the spiral staircase, dazed and hairless, debating the ethics of passing off an American thigh for a Persian thigh in the show. When we emerge from downstairs Persheng tells me that when we send a tape of this show back for the Iranian divas to see, it can’t include the waxing sequence. Otherwise it will never get through the censors.

“Oh,” Persheng says, tapping her watch, “we’ve got to get going to meet Pooran,” reminding us of our meeting with an Iranian poet and scholar. With that, we throw on our manteaux, cloaking a half-day’s worth of hard-earned beauty, and trade beauty politics for poetry.

“Poetry for Iranians is religion,
a religion as powerful as Islam,” writes Elaine Sciolino in her book
Persian Mirrors.
Even the pious in Islam may have a volume of poetry on their coffee table next to the Qur’an. In Iran, poetry is revered, and poets (especially talented, dead ones) are rock stars. People flock to the graves of poets in Iran the way Americans go to Graceland. We first learned of this phenomenon in Shiraz, when we visited the tomb of the fourteenth-century lyric poet Hafez. Here in Tehran, we’d heard people, especially women, go to the grave of Forough Farrokhzad.

Forough has come to represent the creative, rebellious, self-determined life and is an icon for many Iranian women. Imagine a cross between James Dean, Sylvia Plath, and Eve Ensler. Her legendary status grew when in 1967 she was killed in a car crash at age thirty-two. We will visit Forough’s grave, but first we will go see her sister Pooran, who’s less well known than Forough (except among intellectuals), but is reportedly just as independent-minded.

We arrive at Pooran’s house in central Tehran, carry our equipment through a fenced-in garden, and buzz the door. Pooran is portly, with abundant brown hair pulled back into a bun, and she wears a long dark gown. Her face has loads of sparkle and a paradoxical heaviness. In addition to being a writer and editor, Pooran is the keeper of her sister’s flame. Pooran immediately warms to us. (“I like Americans,” she would tell me later, “they are simple.”)

She leads us to a comfortable couch and we drink coffee and chat as Orlando sets up the camera. Pooran’s house is Westernized, like many in Tehran, in a style circa 1952.

The inscription at the front of Hafez’s tomb in Shiraz said that “the grave of a poet is a place where you can smell love.” So I dive right into the love thing. “As a scholar, and the sister of a beloved poet known for her sensual writing, you must have some insight about the Iranian approach to love.” Pooran responds without hesitation (and Persheng translates).

“In general all Iranians are in love, in other words,
hot-blooded.
The reason is the sun that shines directly over Iran. And when the sun shines so strongly the cells move more rapidly. And when they move more rapidly, love is more passionate,” Pooran explains emphatically, with her soul, as much as her voice and hands. And here I’ve been complaining about the heat. “And when love is more passionate, it gives rise to poetry.”

“In reality most Iranians are poets,” Pooran continues. “Even those street peddlers who during my childhood sold beets and ice cream, their chants were rhythmic and they spoke with poetry. If you pay attention you can see that Iranians can come up with poems instantly and the reason for it is love that is inside them.”

“Your last book is about poetry, isn’t it?” I ask.

“Yes, it is about the path of poetry by women from the fourth century [the tenth century
A.D.
*
 
³
] until my sister Forough. I have studied how women poets lived, because the male-dominated society did not allow women to speak at all so the women were forced to live behind closed doors and would compose poetry. The fact is, we only had around four hundred women from the fourth century until Forough who were able to write poetry but, because women had no identity, most of them wrote the poetry from the words and perspective of a man. Women had not yet gained their historical identity so they did not have the audacity and bravery to write poetry in their own words,” she explains.

“And where does your sister fit within the canon?” I ask.

“My sister Forough in reality started a new school of thought, meaning that for the first time in Iran she wrote from a woman’s perspective. Forough speaks plainly and simply and is frank and sincere. She is brave and candid.”

Forough is widely regarded as a charismatic genius, an artist answerable to her own ethic. She urged her sisters to rise up and “uproot the roots of oppression,” and she made some unconventional personal choices, including divorcing her husband and giving their son to his father so that she could pursue her poetry. She shed light on the oppressions endured by Iranian women, and urged them to take action to change their situation. Forough’s poetry was banned for years for its sensuality. Case in point, an excerpt from her poem “Another Birth”:

Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette

in the narcotic repose between two love-makings

or the absent gaze of a passerby

with a meaningless smile and a good morning.

Pooran smooths the lap of her black gown and goes on to explain the culture in which her sister created. “Eastern people—not just Iranians, but Easterners in general—always live under a kind of mask. They never show their true selves, but rather, like an onion with many layers,” she says, miming the act of peeling, “you have to keep peeling away layer after layer to uncover the real person. Forough was just herself; there are no skins.”

All that Pooran is saying jibes with the experience we have had here. The onion explains a lot, actually. For example, Americans hear that Middle Easterners “lie,” but it’s more like they tell you what they think you want to hear. It almost falls into the category of a courtesy. But this is a communication dance that plain-spoken Puritan-bred Americans have a hard time following. The reason Pooran likes “simple” Americans is that no onion peeling is necessary.

“What do you think are some of the myths about the East that the West has?” I ask, noting that Pooran, like her sister, communicates with unusual directness for an Iranian.

“When people from the West come to interview me I’ve realized that they look at us from a different perspective, as if they have come to visit a woman from a thousand years ago. This is not the case at all. We have certain rules here, and naturally owing to our upbringing we have learned to accept those rules, but the truth is something else.”