Lipstick Jihad (45 page)

 

Q:
Lipstick Jihad
is about the search for a home and a cultural identity. You now live in Beirut. Is that your home? Do you think you will ever return to Tehran?

 

A:
Beirut is my home now, during a time in my life when I feel equally disinclined to live in either the United States or Iran, a time when my surroundings and lifestyle are particularly important to me. Beirut is a city of exiles, from its Palestinian refugees to the intellectuals and dissidents from the region and beyond who've taken up residence here. Beirut offers me French bakeries, seaside lounges, and intellectual café life in a city where I can still go interview Hezbollah and report on the region. The Shiite connection between Iran and Lebanon is also very strong, and it is possible to have this vibrant life with some Shiism in the backdrop, which on a cultural level feels very familiar.

I've been spending more time in Iran lately, and I am seriously considering moving back. Beirut is, to an extent, a city of transients, even for the Lebanese themselves. I'm moving into a stage where putting down roots is more important for me, and I cannot imagine permanent roots in Lebanon, at least as a single woman, because I need a bit of family around me to feel rooted.

 

Q:
Has writing the book changed your life in any tangible way?

 

A:
The book turned me into an overnight expert on Iranian young people, with the implicit expectation that I could—and therefore should—speak on their behalf to the West. That made me very uncomfortable. I think too many Iranians and Iranian-Americans take on that mantle of spokesperson for an Iran that cannot speak for itself, with all sorts of problematic political implications. I found
Lipstick Jihad
inserted me into a policy debate on Iran in America, where it became quite challenging to retain an independent voice without any pretensions of policy analysis or prescription. Lots of policy-makers and thinkers try to recruit someone like me to validate their own agenda on Iran and I found that very disturbing.

On a personal note, I've found it disconcerting making friends or meeting people who think they know me already through my persona on the page. Whether it's confronting a small detail someone already knows, or a judgment they've made, I never imagined I would contend with a pre-existing self. I'm hugely relieved my boyfriend only read the book long after we met!

 

For the sheer beauty of its storytelling, I keep returning to Marie Arana's
American Chica
, an elegant memoir of belonging to two cultures with a subtle theme: We are what we make of the mix, not what the mix makes of us.

Anahita Firouz's
In the Walled Gardens
is one of the few graceful treatments of revolutionary Iran in novel form.

 

The interplay of language, personality, and identity have preoccupied me for years, and Eva Hoffman's
Lost in Translation
offers a mannered, intellectually unsparing exploration of how language shapes how one both thinks and feels about the world.

 

Christopher Hitchens's
Letters to a Young Contrarian
deals with the knotted ethics of thinking about and observing authoritarian places. I relied on this slim volume extensively when I faced difficult questions about my book and whom it ultimately served.

 

Ryszard Kapuscinski's atmospheric, passionate snapshots of the revolution in
Shah of Shahs
are emotionally definitive. He captures the spiritual turmoil that makes Iranian politics so capricious and intricate.

 

The intimacies and bonds of traditional cultures are captured by Fatimeh Mernissi in her
The Harem Within
, all deep insight and delicious storytelling, as she recounts her Moroccan girlhood.

 

Roy Mottahedeh's
Mantle of the Prophet
tells the story of a young cleric's intellectual and theological journey through the world of Qom and beyond. It's gorgeously written and brilliantly conceived. If I wanted to understand Iran and Islam seriously, this is the book I would read and reread for years.

A rare collection of contemporary Iranian literature, both poetry and prose, in translation, Nahid Mozafarri's
Strange Times, My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature
showcases how Iranian writers have processed the last century's upheavals in their art. The strength here lies less in the translations than in the stratagems some writers use to evade censorship—well-observed in the West through Iranian cinema, but less noticed on the page.

 

Afshin Molavi's
The Soul of Iran
takes you to Iran's most distant corners. It is a wise guided tour that expertly reminds us of the wide-ranging desire for a different society.

 

In
My Uncle Napoleon,
Iraj Pizishkzad spins an epic tale around an Iranian patriarch who, like most Iranians, believes the country's destiny lies in the hands of the British. It is a window onto both a devastating Iranian tendency—the deferral of responsibility for one's prevailing condition—and a native response to autocracy: satire.

 

Salman Rushdie's allegory of Pakistan,
Shame
, is one of the two books I have kept at my bedside for years. It's a reminder that we can purge our disappointment at catastrophic events and countries through literature—and hopefully move on.

 

Marjan Satrapi's memoir-in-comic-strips,
Persepolis 2
, captures the absurdity and pain of coping with the place Iran has become. Her stark graphics are exhilarating in their originality, wrenching and fearless.

 

In
In the Eye of the Sun
Ahdaf Soueif takes up, in decidedly long form, the quest of an Arab woman to find emotional and sexual fulfillment while swinging between the deceptive openness of the West and the cloying intimacy of the East.

1. In the introduction to the book, the word jihad is translated as “struggle.” Why do you think the title of the book is “Lipstick Jihad”? Do you like the title? Why or why not?

2. Most of Azadeh Moaveni's family arrived in America just before or with the 1979 revolution. They view themselves as exiles rather than immigrants [p. 28]. What effect does this sensibility have on their sense of identity and their need to assimilate?

3. At the beginning of the book, Azadeh is in many ways a typical teenager, trying desperately to fit in with her peers. She is embarrassed by her Iranianness, especially in the wake of the hostage crisis. She feels caught between two irreconcilable cultures—those of her Persian home and her American school. By college, however, she sheds her efforts to cultivate a certain “ethnic ambiguity” [p. 10] and instead embraces “the joys of my own private Iranianness” [p. 28]. How does her sense of her own identity change once she moves to Iran?

4. Upon arriving in Iran, Azadeh realizes that growing up on the “outside” came with many complications: “You grew up assuming everything about you was related to that place, but you never got to test that out. . . . You spent a lot of time . . . feeling sad for your poor country. Most of that time, you were actually feeling sorry for yourself, but since your country was legitimately in serious trouble, you didn't realize it.” [p. 32] To what extent do hyphenated Americans use questions about cultural origins as a cloak to conceal deeper uncertainties about themselves and their values?

5. Azadeh decides that in order to portray Iran's young generation faithfully, she needs to live among them and like them. “I cannot write about them without writing about myself,” she writes [p. xi]. If an author becomes part of the story she is writing, does she lose her ability to report objectively? Where in the book does the tug between objective reporting and Azadeh's subjectivity as an Iranian woman reveal itself?

6. Azadeh describes the rebellion of Iranian youths as various “as if” behaviors [pp. xi, 55, 62]. What does she mean? Do these behaviors have “real” effects?

7. Throughout the book, Azadeh's perceptions about Iran and its future shift dramatically. In one moment, she calls Iranian society sick, “spiritually and psychologically wrecked,” [p. 101] while at other times she discusses the revolution's accidental achievements, including the higher literacy for women and the growing secularism of the middle class. What does this see-sawing in tone between despair and hope reflect about Iran?

8. The Iranian diaspora in America is enamored with an Iran that is no more. As Siamak tells Azadeh: “If you are a nostalgic lover of Iran, you love your own remembrance of the past, how the passions in your own life are intertwined with Iran.” [p. 45] How does this nostalgia and sense of personal grievance affect what Iranian-Americans teach Americans about their changing country?

9. In Chapter 3, Azadeh writes: “Made neurotic by the innate oppressiveness of restrictions, Iranians were preoccupied with sex in the manner of dieters constantly thinking about food.” [p.71] How does the culture of the revolution affect relations between the sexes in Tehran? How does Azadeh respond to the gender gap she observes around her?

10. At a press conference for President Khatami at the U.N., Azadeh struggles over her decision to wear the veil. [pp. 169-172] Why is the decision so difficult?

11. In “Love in a Time of Struggle,” Azadeh writes that romantic relationships between men and women “served a far more vital purpose: taking a fragile identity and anchoring it in a situation or person.” In Iran, one has to find a partner who wants “the same sort of Islamic Republic experience.” [p. 179] Whom does Azadeh look to to help anchor her identity? Do they share a vision of their Islamic Republic experience? Why or why not?

12. How do the twin stories of Mira and Fatima reveal the restrictions women face in Iranian society? Since the traditional Fatima lacks the opportunity to establish her independence and ultimately gives up her job for an arranged marriage, was she truly served by the education the revolution made possible for her? In the end, does consciousness of her rights enhance her life, tied as she is to her conservative family, or does it make its limitations more painful?

13. How does the beating that Azadeh receives during the riot of “the summer of the cockroach” affect the way she sees Iran? How does the ever-looming prospect of violence affect the populace of Iran in general?

14. What finally pushes Azadeh to leave Iran?

15. After Sept. 11, Reza tells Azadeh, “There's no outrage in the West when we die, no one talks about civilian deaths, because by now our loss of life is ordinary.” [p. 224] Even though Iranians are described throughout the book as markedly pro-American, do the reactions Azadeh describes to Sept. 11 suggest a deeper ambivalence about America's intentions and presence in the Middle East?

16. Young people are described as changing Iran from below, when “at some historic moment impossible to pinpoint, around the turn of the millennium, Iranians' threshold for dissimulation and constriction sank, and people simply began acting differently.” [pp. 61-62] At the same time, Azadeh chronicles young people's apathy at the failure of the reform movement. How important can young people be to Iran's future once apathy has set in? Can a society truly be changed through how people live daily life, from the bottom up?

17.
Lipstick Jihad
is about the search for home. At the end of the book, where is home for Azadeh Moaveni?

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Lipstick Jihad
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