Lipstick Jihad (44 page)

My agent, Diana Finch, nurtured my embryonic ideas with great patience and steered me as expertly through the creative process as she did the world of publishing.

At PublicAffairs, Peter Osnos and Kate Darnton came up with the idea of memoir and then gave me the chance to write one. Kate edited the manuscript with a friend's insight and a diplomat's tact. Her ideas were routinely
brilliant and she deserves credit for everything that works. Lindsay Jones and Lindsey Smith pointed out the rough spots and Nina D'Amario's cover ideas were truly inspired.

Many thanks to Conn (Ringo) Hallinan, Laurel Elmsey, Elahé Sharifpour-Hicks, Gary Sick, and Michael Slackman for lending me counsel along the way. My friends in the Middle East and in America were the anchors that helped me live in between. They include Sarah Weigel, Geoffrey Smick, Matthew Gould, Shweta Govindarajan, Jeffrey Gettleman, Rana Boustany, and Kim Ghattas. Joe Logan endured me with special forbearance and kept me sane. Ranwa Yehia and Ali Shaath gave me second homes in Beirut and Cairo. Ramy Shaath taught me to be honest about the place of country in my psyche. Without Scheherezade Faramarzi, I might never have moved to Tehran at all. And without Anthony Shadid, I might never have finished.

Finally, I must thank my parents for the fascinating clash of their politics and personalities—growing up with two radically different versions of the same tale left me, among other things, curious about the truth. My mother, Fariba Katouzi, passed on a bottomless, passionate affection for our culture that has made my life incomparably rich. Her example is a source of great strength and her acute sense of justice is more a part of me than she knows. From my father, Sassan Moaveni, I inherited the Iranian hobby of politics, a healthy suspicion of ideology, and an allegiance to secularism. I am enormously grateful to him for being the most un-Iranian father in the best way possible and for not giving me too much hassle when my elephant remembered India.

Excerpt from the poem “The Tragedy of Narcissus” by Mahmoud Darwish. In
The Adam of Two Edens: Poems
. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press and Jusoor, 2000.

 

Excerpts from the poems “Our Tears Are Sweet,” “O Box Within Box” and “I Sing in Your Voice” by Simin Behbahani. In
A Cup of Sin: Selected Poems.
Translated by Milani Farzaneh and Kaveh Safa. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

 

Excerpts from the poems “Let Me Think” and “You Tell Us What to Do” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. In
The Rebel's Silhouette.
Translated by Agha Shahid Ali. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Reprinted with the permission of the Agha Shahid Ali Literary Trust.

 

Excerpt from the poem “Abu Nuwas,” by Adonis. In
The Pages of Day and Night.
Translated by Samuel Hazo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994.

 

Excerpts from the poem “Someone's Coming” by Forough Farrokhzad. In
An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry,
translated by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Westview Press, 1978. Reprinted with the permission of Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak.

Azadeh Moaveni grew up in San Jose and studied politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She won a Fulbright fellowship to Egypt, and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo. For three years she worked across the Middle East as a reporter for
Time Magazine,
before joining the Los Angeles Times to cover the Iraq war. She is the co-writer of Iranian Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi's memoir,
Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope
(Random House: May 2006). She is now a contributing writer on Islamic affairs to
Time Magazine.
She lives in Beirut.

 

We talked to Azadeh by telephone while she was visiting family in Tehran.

 

Q:
This is your first book. You were 24 years old when you embarked upon it. Did you hesitate to write a memoir at such a young age? What made you do it?

 

A:
It felt very presumptuous to write a book before the age of thirty and call it a memoir, which carries all these connotations of conclusion and summing up. Iranian friends especially raised their eyebrows because the concept of an ordinary person's memoir, as opposed to that of a statesman or a historical figure, doesn't really exist in modern Persian nonfiction. I had to keep reminding myself that it was a personal account of a childhood and a journey—that made the whole project easier to swallow.

As a journalist I was trained to almost surgically remove myself from
my stories. That always felt strange to me, that sort of dishonest ghost narration. It was a great relief to give up that pretense and to honestly include all my own reactions and biases in a reported portrait of Iran. Take, for example, the story of young Iranian hedonism. I think no Iranian journalist can write that story without admitting what hopes and disappointments she brings to her perceptions. In
Lipstick Jihad
it felt so liberating to be able to narrate my own process as a reporter and a thinker.

In the end, what most compelled me to write in memoir form was my certainty that an American audience needed a personal story and voice to connect to. Given the ugly history and hostage crisis memories, most Americans think and deal with Iran on a very charged and emotional level. My ultimate aim was to dispel misperceptions and portray the reality of Iranian young people. I wanted to move my audience into reconsidering their thoughts on Iran. I knew dry journalistic reportage would not only never cut through the American psychological fog, but would also quickly become dated. The voice had to be personal.

 

Q:
Was it hard to come up with the title for the book?

 

A:
Absolutely arduous. My first list included really awful ideas like “Khomeini's Daughter” and “Fast Times in Tehran,” and my friends razed all my suggestions but offered none of their own. I wanted an evocative and edgy title that would sting a little. A sting captures attention unlike anything else; a sort of good shock, I thought, one that would start a conversation. I was having lunch at the beach one day, trying out “Fashion Jihad” on my tongue, when a friend and I decided to brainstorm other nouns. That's how “Lipstick Jihad” was born. My mother was convinced it would elicit a fatwa or at least a hate crime against me, but I think it just took everyone close to me a while to adapt to such an in-your-face title.

 

Q:
Do you have a writing method? How, when, and where do you write?

 

A:
I can only write first thing in the morning, before my mind is cluttered by all the minor irritations and distractions of the day. Unfortunately, my writing process is not really conducive to a social life. I go to bed by ten, wake up at the obscene hour of four a.m., and write until the quadruple espresso wears off, usually mid-morning. I definitely believe in the discipline of staying behind the glowing screen, even when nothing is coming. Since my life is pretty peripatetic, I write anywhere, often in hotels, at the homes of friends and relatives, in coffeehouses. The early chapters induced a certain weepiness, and that limited where I could write.

Q:
Why weepiness?

 

A:
Well, growing up I was so busy dealing with the tensions of being an Iranian daughter raised in America, I never paused to think about what my parents and grandparents had gone through in the process of emigrating—my grandparents in their dotage in an alien place, my father and uncles trying to support families in the face of prejudice and displacement. They never spoke openly about the pains of assimilation, and I imagined simply that disappointment, confusion, a sense of loss, were a part of their characters. Writing about my childhood meant trying to view exile and immigration through their eyes, and I became conscious of everything they had gone through for the first time.

 

Q:
Speaking of your family, the portraits of your family members are not always the most flattering. How has your family responded to the book?

 

A:
Fortunately, the family member I insulted most energetically cannot read English and lives in the far-flung religious city of Mashad, so at least I've been spared her backlash. The rest shocked me with the sheer unpredictability of their reactions. What I've learned is that it's impossible to gauge how people will respond to a portrait or a mirror. Certain family characters who I imagined would never speak to me again were gracious and even thanked me for a small insight into their biography. Others—throwaway characters whose appearance was scarcely developed—were furious at the inclusion of a seemingly innocuous detail. Taking care of people's feelings after publication is in itself a part-time job, especially since people's responses change in reaction to
other
people's sense of their portrait, so the emotional files are perpetually open.

I compared notes with my friend Tara Bahrampour, who wrote
To See and See Again
, and then felt better, as at least my family in Iran didn't end up threatening me over the book. Tara and I want to do a panel one day on the fury of relatives. Both of us also felt, though, that our books reflected a youthful fearlessness or audacity. I, for one, know I probably wouldn't write such a candid memoir about my family now, when I'm in my thirties.

 

Q:
What about your friends? Do your Iranian counterparts feel that you have captured their world faithfully?

 

A:
The audience I really looked to for that sort of feedback was Iranians who emigrated to the United States or Canada as young adults, fluent enough in English to get through the book but exposed to the changing
atmosphere I describe. In a way, we often had the least to say to each other at readings because they would just tell me, “You got it,” and we would start talking about other things. It was the Iranians who grew up outside, who have never been to or lived in Iran, who often resisted a portrait of an Iran that is not categorically dark and hopeless.

 

Q:
Has the book been published in Iran?

 

A:
No.

 

Q:
Could it be? How do you imagine it would be received?

 

A:
There is no way it would make it past the government censors, unless perhaps it was annotated so extensively that the footnoted criticism would be a text in itself. It would more easily find its way to Iran translated and posted on the Internet. How would it be received? Without sounding condescending, I think the American scrutiny and openness with which I write about post-revolutionary sexuality and romance, for example, would find a receptive audience in Iran. Given how curious Iranians are about the material and emotional lives of the diaspora, I think the book would be read with curiosity, if with a certain discomfort at being put on the examination table.

 

Q:
Has Iran changed since the writing of the book? In what ways? Do you still feel that your country is “sick”?

 

A:
Although the hardliner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is busily ruining the economy, daily life has not altered very much. I do sense a palpable loss of hope that the country will become functional or healthy in our lifetime, and I see more young people than ever conniving to emigrate. On the road to the countryside north of Tehran, where young people go to smoke hookahs by the river, there are now giant billboards for emigration lawyers to the West. You didn't see that in the era of President Khatami.

I used to think Iran was just sick, but now I'm starting to wonder if the illness is terminal. The last election depressed me. On top of refusing to take any responsibility for the state of the place, it seemed that Iranians hadn't even learned from their own hard-survived lessons. The more time I spend in Iran at an age where I'm beginning to think about having children, the more I question whether all the reasons that pull me back here can sustain themselves against the degenerating culture of anarchy. Iran
does seem to be getting worse, not necessarily at a public or official level, but at the street level. Hiking in the mountains north of Tehran, for example, is one of the few things you can do there outside for fun. On the weekends, the trails are so overrun by poor, angry men from south Tehran spoiling for a fight, that it is dangerous. The atmosphere of the city, the lawlessness that is legitimized by the system itself, feeds this.