Adventure Divas (39 page)

I wonder how many layers Pooran will pull back.

“The intellectual aspect has always been more important to me. It is always during the hard times, under pressure, that growth takes place. The women in Iran have gone through an amazing period during this past twenty-five or so years. They have taken an intellectual journey. In spite of the destiny that may have been decided for them, they went in the opposite direction and have achieved tremendous growth.”

Pooran shows me around her house. The walls are covered with framed photos of her late sister and of their brother Fereydoun, also dead. Fereydoun was killed a few years ago, allegedly by fundamentalist Islamicists in Germany for being bisexual and outspoken against the Islamic Republic.

“My brother was the love of my life and his sorrow is always with me; it’s always alive with me.”

The untimely loss of two of Pooran’s siblings has not made her cower but, rather, has made her pursue all that is poetic in life.

“I am not afraid of anything. I am traveling a path,” she says, arcing her hands into the air in unison, as if daring fate to double down.

“We create fear, it doesn’t exist, it comes from our own weakness. I’m not weak, not at all,” Pooran says, her chin slightly lowered, slowly moving side to side, creating emphasis. “Not even my brother’s death scared me. I grieved, but I wasn’t frightened. I
never
fear.”

Cameras and veils fall by the wayside, and Pooran serves us a meal of
shormeh sabzi,
a delectable feast of lamb, herbs, and lemon. I watch her pretty young brunette assistant flirt with Orlando; Julie and Pooran dance a bit to Kurdish folk music, then meander through Pooran’s vast library of books. As we leave, Pooran gives me a pair of bear hugs. Before the first she looks me in the eyes and wishes me well with my work; before the second she says warmly, “Yes, I like Americans.” And then she writes down directions to her sister’s grave for us.

Unlike the tomb of Hafez, visiting Forough’s tomb is discouraged by
them.
Every day people sneak into the cemetery where Forough is buried and light candles and recite her poetry over her grave. The wrought-iron front gate of the cemetery is locked with a thick, rusty chain. A small, stooped old woman comes to the gate and denies us entrance.

“Emrooz ta’tile,”
she says, crankily. Go away. Closed.

I pull out ten dollars. I’ve never greased palms to get into a cemetery before, but the woman snatches it with a speed that indicates she is clearly well versed in this quid pro quo.

“Doorbin nemish,”
she says. But no cameras. We return the DigiBeta camera to the van and tuck the PD 150 under Persheng’s manteau.

We walk through an old, wooded cemetery and weave between flat tombstones in various degrees of disrepair. We amble through windy, overgrown paths until we spot a small cluster of people gathered deep in the cemetery. “Must be Forough,” I say to Persheng, who slides the camera out from under her wrap. We approach the women and a man who are gathered around Forough’s grave, which is marked by a large white marble slab lying flat on the ground, covered with beautiful Farsi engravings. The women ladle water from a bucket and wash the tombstone with their hands. One of them lays six red roses on the fresh, clean surface.

A woman with dark hair, wearing a mint trench coat, white headscarf, and fresh lipstick, begins to read from one of Forough’s volumes.

I shall wear

a pair of twin cherries as earrings

and I shall put dahlia petals on my fingernails

there is an alley

where the boys who were in love with me

still loiter with the same unkempt hair

thin necks and bony legs

and think of the innocent smiles of a little girl

who was blown away by the wind one night.

The next morning,
back in our hotel’s restaurant the instrumental theme to
Titanic
bleats on for the seventh time in the last two hours.

“If I had to work here and listen to this incessant tune I’d go nuts,” I say to Julie, scratching my temple with a pinky under my gray scarf.

While in Tehran we’ve stayed at this hotel and, naturally, we’ve bonded with the proprietors. Tired of the
Titanic,
I ask if we can put a few of our CDs on the hotel sound system. The men agree and point us toward the stereo cabinet. Julie slides in a CD and presses play: when Suzanne Vega comes on—maelstrom.

“Nemishe! Ejazenadareem!”
(“Oh my, not allowed! It is illegal!”) the men yell as they run for the sound system. Waiters come dashing from the restaurant; cleaning ladies freeze wide-eyed. We have been actively looking for a woman who will sing on camera, and know full well that women’s voices are not to be heard publicly in Iran, yet we still inadvertently transgressed. Honest to God, it was an accident. We hadn’t even connected
that
rule with
our
Suzanne Vega.

“The police may come. Bad. Very bad,” says the manager, yanking the CD out of the player, his discomfort eclipsing his kindness for the first time. He has met so many of our requests—Internet access, bottles of water, black coffee—and here we have put him in jeopardy. We apologize over and over again.

The Suzanne Vega incident illustrates that it’s not just hair but a woman’s voice that can be dangerously tempting. Julie and I want to find someone who can explain the laws about women singing, and maybe even sing on camera.

We have two days of shooting left and, realistically, only one chance at landing such a singer. Pari Zanganeh. Zanganeh is an icon in Iran. Her performing career thrived in the seventies but then was practically stopped dead by the revolution. Yet her popularity as a folksinger remains strong. Zanganeh maintains a sort of phantom career; her fans play her old records behind closed doors, and she is recognized as if she has a televised concert every Saturday night.

I was initially reluctant to put her in the show because she is famous, wealthy, Shah-associated, and, according to Jeannie, who met her on the scout trip, she has a tiny white fluffy dog with a jeweled collar. But aristocracy would do in a pinch. She’s agreed to meet us for an hour.

The whole truth is that Pari could have easily left Iran with the revolution and continued her skyrocketing career in the United States, what with its large expat community. (In fact, Pari does frequently tour the United States and sings to huge crowds.) But Pari chose to stay in her native Iran because she loves her country, and she loved her mother, and her mother wouldn’t leave.

Julie, Orlando, Persheng, and I walk through a tall metal gate, step onto the manicured grounds of the Zanganeh estate, and marvel at the white-columned mansion in the foothills of the Alborz. The small white fluffy dog comes tearing toward us, yapping. We walk up the stone path, past a pool, and under a white latticed arch and knock on the front door. The door swings open and Pari stands there, looking very sophisticated in dark glasses. Pari was in a car accident in her twenties that left her blind. In addition to her singing career, Pari has raised loads of money for blind children, and she writes kids’ books that are published in Braille. She is wearing a black-rimmed hat atop coifed sandy-brown hair, a white linen blazer, black skirt, and pearl earrings, and her lips are topped off with a cinnamon shade. The big, black, square sunglasses give her a slight Jackie O look.

Pari greets us with a smile and gracefully ushers us into an elegant living room with parquet floors, white furniture, and a piano against one wall. Framed photos of herself and other unveiled women adorn the house. We have been in Iran long enough to feel how risqué this is. As we set up the cameras it occurs to me that Pari is the first person to be interviewed without a head scarf; she just wears the hat. I wonder if this will get her in trouble with
them,
and what kind of power protects her when she bends the rules.

Over tea and sweets Pari begins by telling me, in English, about a series of small concerts she has recently been allowed to perform.

“So you’re saying you can perform as long as it’s only for women and it’s in a private space?” I say.

“Yes, since four years ago we have been allowed to sing for ladies, which is a great occasion for me. We go step by step in Iran.”

I’ve got an understanding of how stifling the rules can be for women here, but I want Pari’s take. She lives in such a different world than, say, Mokarrameh Ghanbari or Zahra Rahnavard. I want to know how the public quelling of women affects the heart and soul of a performing artist.

“Well, it has been like this since the changing of regime in Iran. The women are a little bit . . . how can I say . . . the activities of the ladies are restricted a little bit.”

A bit? A lot is more like it. Clearly, even Pari must be judicious when choosing her words.

I tell Pari about our hotel lobby incident. “Can you explain the thinking—the philosophical defense—behind women not being allowed to sing?”

“It is hearing the voice of women singing solo that is forbidden. One thing is, I think the government—even if they themselves have discovered that it doesn’t harm the human behavior—they are somehow trapped with this idea that the voice of women is tempting. Tempting towards the sexy feelings of men. By seeing my hair or hearing your voice they just go crazy, huh?” Pari laughs at the absurdity of this.

Fear of voice seems to stem from the same place as uncovered hair. Iran’s president in the nineties, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was considered a moderate but that did not stop him from saying, “It is the obligation of the female to cover her head because women’s hair exudes vibrations that arouse, mislead, and corrupt men.”

“They do everything they can to protect themselves against sex and women,” Pari adds with a good-natured snort.

Whether she is performing abroad or at home, Pari tells me, she prefers modest dress. The Islamic restrictions may go too far, but the other extreme—sex-obsessed—can be just as oppressive.

“In the United States, my God, they advertise for cheese, even for cheese, chairs, tables, I mean handkerchief, dress. If they want to make it appealing: ‘sexy cheese,’ ‘sexy dress,’ ‘sexy chair.’ Everything is with the word
sexy.
How to sit sexy, how to talk sexy, how to wear sexy,” she says with an exasperated laugh, crossing her sexy stockinged legs.

“You’ve got our number,” I concede lightheartedly.

As a parting gift, Pari goes to the grand piano and belts out a rousing operatic number, tempting the world with the full-throated voice of a diva.

During our time in Iran
I asked one of the women we interviewed (I won’t name her here as her comment was dangerously frank) if she would be willing to go without head-covering while we filmed. I knew the answer would be no, but I was curious what her response would be. Perhaps it was unfair of me to ask.

“
They
will kill us,” she had responded with a look of terror. And like every diva, with the exception of Pari (who wore a hat), as the cameras went on, she donned the veil. Fresh flowers and hospitality, humor and intellect dominated our private interactions in Iran, but that spirit was often obscured by veils and cameras and fear.

As a “simple” American
who best understands the syntax of straight talk and the premium of individuality, I was confused by Iran (oh, that onion), humbled, but, most of all, struck by the many women who are indeed anything but shrinking violets.

Whatever its reforms, the theocratic regime creates a fear-based atmosphere, in the face of which publishing articles about patriarchy, appearing on camera in a hat instead of a veil, or expressing the artistic vision within you represent exponential acts of courage.

On our last day in Iran, Vresh drives us forty minutes outside of Tehran so we can capture an image that three weeks ago would have struck me as incongruous, but now seems plausible: women hang gliding. A half dozen gliders are congregated on the top of a plateau, choosing their own covering; tossing aside old-fashioned shoes for heavy black boots, strapping on thick helmets. The yellow sails lie on the ground behind them, separating us, occasionally whipping up in the wind and obscuring our view of one another.

I’ve tried to see through the veils, peel back the layers of good manners that hide more complex sentiment, lift the scrim of public discretion that implies complacency. Beyond the docile, shrouded image of Iranian women, there is passion: women who live by poetry and sing behind closed doors, and whose risk-taking bears great consequence.

One by one the hang gliders sprint toward the cliff, thick-heeled boots still peddling in those first moments of takeoff. I watch them sail off the cliff, like so many Sky Prancers blazing through the air, exhilarated, the ironies fluttering in the wind like the chadors, revealing blue jeans underneath.

“
Veil
may be a four-letter word,” I say to Julie, “but so is
diva.
”

We shoot film until we have nothing left and Tehran begins to light the sky in the distance; then we call it a day.

EPILOGUE

Hatching vain empires. . . .
. . . Who shall tempt, with wand’ring feet
The Dark unbottom’d infinite abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way . . .

—JOHN MILTON,
PARADISE LOST, BOOK II

TO:
J
EANNIE
FROM:
H
OLLY
SUBJECT:
B
OA CONSTRICTOR

hey Mom,

I’ve decided Adventure Divas reminds me of the first page of
The Little Prince—
remember?—the simple drawing of the “cowboy hat” turns out to be a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant. Don’t know what our next step should be, business-wise. Let’s just tread water for the moment. It’s nice to be at a booty-appreciating latitude, the caipirinhas are perfectly bittersweet, and at some point in each day the surf is always up. More soon. love, Hol

We returned from Iran knowing that our footage held great importance. The tectonic shift after September 11, 2001, created a culture of fear and reactionary politics; our footage held the opportunity to put a human face on a region increasingly characterized as “terrorist,” and we jumped on it.

The planes hitting the towers of the World Trade Center was a dramatic, deadly meeting of the fundamentalist and imperialist camps—camps our pilgrimage had set out to ignore in search of an alternative (if sometimes subliminal) empire, divadom. But ash from that cloud of fear settled on us, too.

The adventure travel industry, where much of our money came from, dried up overnight. Our little Adventure Divas empire, built on halter tops and hope, foundered along with the rest of America. We had been standing in still water for months when I fled to Brazil.

Right now I am writing these words in a blue spiral notebook, sitting cross-legged on a boulder just north of a sleepy fishing village in the Brazilian state of Bahia. After years of crossing the globe in overdrive, I’m holed up—free from obligations, deadlines, or film crews—trying to finish this book, learn to surf, and decide if our enterprise can continue.

“Surfing is work, so we don’t surf on Sunday,” said instructor Benjamin yesterday. Bahia’s tropical-paradise setting has been a salve, but the magical image of surfing that first caught my attention was manifesting as rote work: sore shoulders, an infected toe, a bruised hip and ego. So far the week had been one of hard knocks, each tough lesson built on the previous day’s wipeouts.

Last week, in preparation for surf camp (and for sitting on this boulder in one of Brazil’s physics-defying bikinis), I, driven by my
when in Rome
zeal and somewhat forgetful of the agonies of Iranian wax, found myself spread-eagled in a beauty parlor. A squat, white-smocked woman named Gabriella plopped down a small metal bucket. Towels protected her hands from the heat.

“Relaxa. Respire,”
she said, and ladled on thick wax, then began to search out and uproot virgin hair from places that theretofore had received little depilatory consideration, most notably . . . My Package.

    
riiiiip

sssseaaar . . . ahhhh!

peeeelll tugggg

“Terminado,”
she declared after an hour.
“Americanas. Demoram muito. Sao muito peludas,”
she said, and shook her head. Americans. Take long. Lots of hair.

I looked south:
Bald, bald, bald—bald as a Ping-Pong ball.
Except, that is, for one exquisitely carved, perfect strip of glimmering copper hair, perched atop my mons, proud, like a tiara.

A friend had written down a question for me in Portuguese; I leaned over and handed it to Gabriella.

QUAL EH A COISA MAIS IMPORTANTE EM DEPILACAO?
(What is the most important thing to know about waxing?)

Gabriella stopped and considered the question for a moment. Then she said,
“Saber o que quer tirar antes de colocar a cera.”
Know where you’re going before you put the wax down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this advice, as I try to make sense of the last few years. Did I know where this was going before I put the wax down with Adventure Divas? Not really. We jumped in and began to root out, and uproot, with no assurance of a final result and little idea how daunting, and exhilarating, our task would be.

Sometimes in life a confidence, or runaway idealism, or just-the-right-time-of-month hubris presents itself and leads to pure action; that was the genesis of Adventure Divas. We were laser-focused on our goals. Before we snuck into Cuba, I put it in a speech: “We’re sort of in that no-man’s-land of developmental wisdom—too young for hindsight and too busy for foresight—but we have been around enough to trust our instincts.”

With divas in our sights, we did succeed in exploring cultures through the eyes of people whose independence, talent, and vision are transforming lives, communities, and political landscapes in their respective countries. We were inspired by a new brand of role model: the self-determined woman who grapples with fear, lives passionately, and, in doing so, improves the world around her. We tried to put a face on the accepted (but yet-to-be-fully-acted-on) socioeconomic fact that the progress of nations depends upon the empowerment of women.

But did we measure and map global feminism? Our data would probably not satisfy the Academy. Gathering empirical evidence to prove something as elusive as a tidal change on the horizon is tough, and not something Adventure Divas was built for. But divadom—that global realm of potential inhabited by so many of the women we met—does exist. It speaks many different languages and doesn’t (thank goodness) gather in a circle to sing ‘Kumbaya.’”

And by broadcasting divadom’s stories, I hope, in a small way, we helped light that rocky path between imperial grasping and fundamentalist entrenchment—illuminating the way not with a hundred-watt flood lamp but with the flashlights and votive candles of individuals who work to slay darkness, ignorance, and fear, and chase—as Keri Hulme put it—life’s updraft.

“Um, dois, tres, quatro, five, six, seven.”
Jumping jacks on the soft white sand have been surf camp’s morning ritual, and the exercise inserts a much-needed dose of visceral to the stasis of writing.

“Center yourself, paddle, paddle—now—turtle dive!” instructor Adriano has encouraged as I’ve practiced balancing on the longboard. I wish like hell I’d not skipped so many yoga classes, which I’d been taking, whenever possible, since the India shoot.

Day after day
“Abaixa mais”
(stay low) wafted across the din of surf (usually right before I tumble off my board) as I tried to learn surfing’s fundamentals “on the inside”—that is, on the already broken whitewater waves near shore. But even on the inside, I’ve been struggling.

“You need to pay attention,” Adriano imparted kindly as he bandaged a cut on my foot.

Today, on this welcome day
of rest, I sit cross-legged and scribbling. The buxom, green South Atlantic, like a crisp mountain range at dawn or the infinite Sahara, is a siren that commands my attention, and I hope it will deliver some 20/20 vision with which to make decisions about the future.

What of this television business? Nefarious opiate of the imperialist transnationals or underutilized power tool to be co-opted? “Master’s tools will never bring down the Master’s house,” said the poet Audre Lorde. Perhaps. The jury is still out.

And what of me? Desk jockey turned nomad. A transitional nester like our cousins the orangutans. In the end, all journalism is subjective and all pilgrimages are personal. I set off to make documentaries and spread divavision, but what I took away was a deeper understanding of individual agency around fear, templates for happiness in service, tutorials on courage in the face of oppression. More often than not, it was the wanderings off the path—into a staring contest with Bornean snake, or into a contest of wills with a glistening twelve-pound Cuban bass or an alpine abyss—that locked in these lessons from the divas.

I also found out that road life is not simply a means to an end; it’s who I am. Most countries have their nomadic people and maybe I’m among them. Every night spent shivering under a scratchy wool blanket, every rat I ate in the name of cultural sensitivity and “that TV moment,” every bittersweet parting of ways confirmed my suspicion that I am one of those visceral learners (who sucks at bubble tests). I have to lay my hands all over something to understand it; burn myself to know it’s hot. I need to feel the fear of a gut-wrenching drop to see the summit clearly. Being in motion, not knowing what’s going to happen next, not only suits me, but has become an unlikely vehicle for faith. “Salvation is being on the right road,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., “not having reached a destination.”

And so it goes. If there’s one thing the divas have shown it is that to indulge your passions fully is to know yourself completely. Only then can you treat the rest of the world—its people, its ecosystems, its politics—with proactive wit and compassion.

That, you might say, is the nutgrab.

Ah, the nutgrab. When I got back from Iran I explained to Jeannie that although the shoot had been a logistical challenge—what with the Big Brother government and itchy fabrics that got in the way—we had successfully found the nutgrab.

“The what?” she said with a laugh.

“You taught me the term—y’know, the TV thing. The most important ideas crammed into one concise notion.”

“You must mean
nutgraph—
the journalism term. I like that though
—nutgrab—
gets ’em by the balls, you know.”

What?
Nutgrab is nutgraph?

Oh my. I’d trotted around the world feigning credibility, all the while bandying about a locker-room perversion of journalistic jargon. One could draw a profound Buddhist
What-you-think-is,-isn’t
lesson from this. Or perhaps one should simply know where she’s going before she puts the wax down. In any case, the nutgrab snafu seemed an apt example of the working relationship my mother and I had developed over the past few years—an odd, loving, highly functional miscommunication.

“Did you hear the big news?”
Adriano asks as I meet up with my surfing comrades on my last day of camp. “The fishermen caught three massive tiger sharks last night,” he says, enthusiastic (and tells me I can get some for dinner at the fish stall down by the water).

“Yeah?” I say, only mildly concerned as there are never shark attacks in these waters. (And one doesn’t have to be a child of karma to know a surfer should not eat shark. I decline.)

We tie down our boards on top and pile into a van to drive to a beach called Engenhoca, which means “genius machine.”

“It’s called that because the waves are always working,” says Benjamin, moving the long VW gearshift into third. This is a graduation day of sorts for me. Today I get to go “to the outside”—that mysterious area beyond the break that elicits hushed murmurs of “tubes,” “curls,” “positive adrenaline,” and “serious drops.” Surfboards tucked under our arms, we walk half a mile down a winding dirt path through playful, swaying clusters of palm trees. We strap on our leashes, which will anchor us to the surface should we get thrashed about, and make our way out beyond the break.

Benjamin quizzes us on wave-break direction, and for a while we half-heartedly paddle toward unpromising swells. The waves
are
working today, but quietly. Nearly an hour passes; I am happy to bob and watch the waves roll into the divinity-kissed beaches.

Benjamin yells something I can’t hear over the lively ocean.

I turn my cheek and rest it on the wet board, and look over the expanse of water. Usually I’d be scanning for fish, wanting a glimpse of a sleek fin darting about, but, funnily enough, right now it seems to be enough just to believe they’re there.

Benjamin hollers again, louder and excited this time, from under his floppy khaki hat. “Ready to catch some green?” This time I hear him. He nods toward a fast-gaining set for which I am perfectly positioned. A wash of fear surges through my shoulder blades into my gut.

But then, my heart springs into gear.

I turn the board, wave now at my back, and paddle fast and hard. Faster and harder and stronger than I ever have. For two strokes strange, hulking synchronicity overtakes me.

Upward dog, then, measured and quicklike, I fling my feet perfectly into position. I am up!
One. Two.
Awkward and thrilled to be riding the power of the wave.
Three. Four.
Magic seconds.

I sssssurf.

—Just as fast, the moment is gone. I hurl off the board into the sea and am churned around for what feels like minutes, but is not. My right hip scrapes along the rough bottom; it hurts, but I know it will only bruise—not bleed and bring the sharks. All goes oddly quiet and calm; then I am pushed up, up, up, with the happy inevitability of a cork easing from a wine bottle. When I breach the surface my eyes sting at the salt and fresh light. I fumble for the board, grab the rails, haul myself, ungainly and panting, onto the fiberglass, and paddle out to practice some more.