Lipstick Jihad (24 page)

For most of his first term, from 1997 to 2001, Khatami was a speck of light in over two decades of revolutionary darkness. The millions of Iranians who had lost a relative or several to exile, to war, to prison, to firing squads, projected their hopes for change onto this mid-ranking cleric with the sweet smile. Young girls showed up at campaign rallies as though for rock concerts, decked out, breathless, and screaming his name. When we traveled to the provinces, wizened old women, clutching their
chadors
close, came out to see him.

Once, when the press traveled with him to Khorramshahr, a desolate town on the western border that was bathed in the blood of young soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War, I saw just how far and wide his appeal extended. Under the crushing assault of the summer sun, a group of hunched, ancient women swathed in black, who had been unable to approach his motorcade, came up to me, and pressed their wrinkled, hot hands against mine. You're a good girl, you came here with him, you'll talk to him for us, won't you? And they sat there for the whole of his speech, hanging onto my
roopoosh
all the while, stuffing letters they had written him into my pockets, and detailing their troubles—water shortages, daughters widowed by the war struggling to raise sick children. A little girl in a white head scarf, who couldn't have been more than six, trotted over, and cupped her hands around my ear. Can you tell him, please, my baba needs a job.

I thought of all this, as I leaned back in the metal folding chair, waiting
for him to start. It had become clear, by the twilight of his first term, that he was neither a leader nor a strategist. By nature, he was risk averse and deferent to clerical authority, the last person capable of the ruthless jousting that regime politics demanded. His notes fell to the table, and he began to speak freely, abandoning the speech.

“If I had it my way, I would try to serve Iran outside government,” he began, his voice low without a microphone. I lifted my eyes from my notebook in surprise. “My assets are limited. I have a tiny bit of capital, and that's people's regard for me.” Mullahs rarely spoke like this, clearly and proudly. They usually lost themselves in whorls of rhetoric, and atmospheric, labyrinthine thoughts empty of meaning.

Khatami's voice was scratchy, and tears welled up in his eyes, then overflowed down his cheeks. When he came to office in 1997, he infused his speeches with visions of an Islamic democracy, tributes to freedom, and the civilizing force of art. With bright eyes and his head held high, from podiums around the world, he repeated his belief that the revolution could be rescued, its nobler sentiments resurrected. Now, four years later, his body language radiated defeat. He had put on weight, and his face looked puffy and tired. It was as though he was acknowledging—internally and for the first time—a double failure: that of the revolution and his attempt to salvage it. On that day, the day he registered (against the urgent advice of many he respected) for re-election, he did not campaign so much as grieve.

“The road ahead is difficult, but as long as I feel a step forward can be taken, I will be at the people's service. When I feel that is no longer possible, then I prefer to serve them, and the revolution, elsewhere,” he continued. As he uttered these words, it was evident how scarcely he believed them, and a moment later he began crying in earnest. I found myself crying too. For all the pain and sacrifice—the families torn apart, lives wrecked and a generation traumatized, a diaspora permanently displaced—that had achieved nothing, arrived at no place more significant than this moment. Khatami stepped away from the podium.

Embarrassed to be brought to tears by a mullah (what would my father say?), I pulled my head scarf forward and lowered my head. Looking side-long and back, I saw that most of the women in the room were also crying. The men stood rooted, staring into space in shock.

I fumbled in my bag for a pack of cigarettes, and hurried to the back of
the room, where Mr. Abtahi, the president's chief of staff, stood against a wall, all trace of his usual merriment wiped from his face. I flashed him a look of I told you so, and crossed my arms, waiting silently for an answer. I always teased him that a tsunami could wash over Iran, and he would predict a sunny outlook for reform. Mr. Khatami messed up, he said. He's too emotional. He gets carried away with himself.

Finally, the week of the election arrived. It would be the sixth presidential election since the Shah was toppled in 1979, and unlike most countries in the region—where elections were such shams that they passed with little remark—people actually discussed whether or not they would vote. The question was on everyone's lips, though, ever mercurial in their political outlook, most would only really decide the morning of the election.

I felt no such ambivalence. To vote in the presidential elections, it seemed to me, would be committing treasons against my family, and a lifetime of principled exile. The cat-shaped country my father taught me to draw was our Iran—secular and proud—not the Islamic Republic, and the sanctity of that distinction was the foundation of our lives in the diaspora.

Why else would we choose to be strangers in American and European cities? There was something bigger at stake than patriotism—the desire to live freely. In honor of this value, the diaspora had abandoned Iran. In opening myself up to accept this Iran, in the implied legitimacy that voting entailed, would I not be turning my back on my own community? Did I want to normalize my relationship to this regime—reduce it from the Death Star of my childhood imagination to a regular country whose citizens showed up on the appointed date and checked off boxes on ballots?

I had not been in the country in 1997, when Iranians first elected Khatami. Many who had voted for him the first time around were voting again, despite the disappointment of his first term. Friends and family unanimously said I should, and that en masse, it would be registered as a protest vote. By voting for Khatami, you're not really voting for
him;
you're voting
no
to the Islamic Republic, most people said, when I solicited advice. I suggested to Khaleh Farzi that we go vote no to the Islamic Republic together, but she was busy buying
sohan
and
gaz
and other Persian sweets
to take back on her visit to California, and her head was already at the Starbucks counter.

As election day approached, the question ballooned in significance, and I was still undecided. The thought that I might, with a check of a ballot, help legitimize the system, help wash away its evils, made me feel dirty and complicit. But so did holding myself apart, declining to be a part of the decision because I had an American social security number. Not voting meant drawing another line in the sand, separating myself from the Iranians who were part of my world, and who would vote because this was the country they would spend the rest of their lives in. They didn't have the option of leaving; their lives were entangled in the system and dependent on its stability. They had prepaid for cars, bought apartments, made investments, and they had a stake in its evolution.

For them, voting was not a sign that they accepted this regime, but that they were stuck with it and had to make do. These charged, absolutist attitudes—never shall I vote, never shall I taint myself—were forged and held mostly in exile. They weren't wrong so much as irrelevant. At least to daily life in Iran. Who was I to sit here, absorbed in my private doubts, arguing with my outraged inner secularist? Really, who cared?

I tilted back and forth for days, until the afternoon I visited the atelier of a painter I knew, Khosrow, down near the old parliament building in the center of town. He worked in the cool basement of an aging, old-style house that smelled of cool old
lahaf
(quilts), cigarette smoke, and paint.

Khosrow had fought in the eight-year war with Iraq and, like most of the soldiers who returned alive, was bitter and cynical about the regime. He channeled all his pain at the carnage into art so haunting that it could not be exhibited in Tehran, where the official myth of war martyrdom still held that the sacrifice was glorious, that the hundreds of thousands of slain young men were happy martyrs, thrilled to give their lives. Khosrow painted body bags as ghosts, abstract cemeteries with rows of war dead—unflinching, raw renderings of how the war devastated a generation of young men. Looking at his paintings was like looking into the face of a sixteen-year-old who had just watched his best friend blown up on a mine. He served me a cold glass of sour-cherry juice.

After sipping its dregs, we locked up the studio and went out into the alley. I needed a ride to my next appointment, and Khosrow nodded his head
toward a motorcycle parked outside. I don't have a car, he said. I hope you don't mind. He turned on the engine, and I sat behind him, wrapping the folds of my abaya tightly around me, so its ends wouldn't catch in the spokes.

A minute later, we were careening through the streets, darting perilously through unruly traffic, and I buried my face in his back, terrified that we would be mangled (motorcycle riders routinely lost limbs all over the city), trying not to think about how strange it was to be smushed up against a man in public, in broad daylight, but invisible.

Driving through the city one could sightsee the puzzling inconsistencies in the policing of gender relations. Motorbikes were cheap and a popular way of getting quickly through horrible traffic, and Tehran was full of them, their riders often couples, sometimes whole families who seemingly fell outside the social code by virtue of being on a bike. Even though buses were segregated, even though there were separate lines for men and women at the passport office, no one thought twice about women flying through the city with men of indeterminate relation literally between their legs. The further north we drove, the stranger and stranger it seemed, passing buses, passing policemen, slicing through lanes unobserved, utterly inconspicuous, in this public embrace. My thoughts turned to the strangeness of a system that permitted such contradictions, a system that was so fixed, yet flexible.

When I finally got home, I grabbed a pomegranate from the refrigerator, slipped the dust-covered
abaya
off on my way down the stairs, and stepped straight into the shower. I sat down in the tub, my back against the cool spray, and popped the ruby seeds off one by one, watching the water wash the crimson juice off my skin. When I was little, my mother used to bring pomegranates into the bath—because the juice would stain everything otherwise, but also because when she was little, they used to serve pomegranate in the public
hamam
she went to with her grandmother. Since then, whenever I'm struggling with a decision, I take a pomegranate into the bath, and mull the issues over as I pop and chew the tangy, glittering seeds.

Buoyed by my thoughts during the afternoon's ride, I was more willing to believe in the possibility of change; not in the simple, facile way I had imagined before—that a heroic president would work miracles overnight—but a
longer process, unpredictable, but made possible by the fact that the regime had cracks, and that social momentum would one day broaden them.

And the more I thought about it, the more the decision to vote resonated with the person I was discovering myself to be. When I first showed up in Tehran, brimming with assurance that I was just as Iranian as the next person in line for pastry, I figured assimilation would take a month, at most. Eventually I saw that my character had developed in response to other challenges, not the Islamic Republic's special perversions. I hadn't done what so many of my Iranian peers were doing, retreating into the mountains to make out with boyfriends, numbing myself with drugs because a chemical haze was more bearable than the stark reality of daily life.

As my sense of Iranianness simultaneously diminished and altered, my American consciousness grew—not in proportion to anything, or larger than before, but in my awareness of its existence. The more I tried to superimpose my Iranian identity on Iran, on the distresses and contours of my life there, the more I saw that it did not match up. In unguarded moments, the knowledge worked its way into me, until finally it became shiningly obvious: Of course I was partly American. It was strange, how this question of once agonizing importance became unremarkable.

Ironically, it was my American side that was helping me cope with Iran. As an American, I believed in unconditional love, not the contingent affection one had to earn as an Iranian woman. Iranian-style love, though extravagant, poetic, and intense, came with a prenuptial agreement. You had to promise to adhere to tradition, respect boundaries, pretend a great deal, and keep yourself decently coiffed at all times. You were not entitled to love, it seemed, simply by being who you were; but by fulfilling expectations. Or at least pretending the substance of your life until that point had been an accident, and that deep down you really wanted to be married to a software mogul named Payman, driving your Ralph Lauren-baby-line-clad children around the suburbs in a BMW SUV. If you strayed too far, dropped the pretense of harboring such wants, you risked perpetual criticism.