Lipstick Jihad (5 page)

Perhaps the only person more offensive than Mr. Savaki was Mrs. Bazaari—a vulgar rug merchant who prowled the complex in search of
adam hesabi
to terrorize into having tea. We secretly thought she was pleased with the revolution, because her husband could stay in Tehran and sell rugs to the newly rich revolutionaries, while she attempted to social climb among the old guard abroad. Despite the fact that she was now working at Woolworth's, Khaleh Farzi stood her ground; our transplanted circumstances might make us vulnerable to every sort of indignity, but nothing could force her to consort with
bazaaris.
Occasionally the cunning Mrs. Bazaari would find pretexts to gain a foothold in the house, kidnapping Agha Joon in the neighborhood, driving him home, and then claiming she had found him lost, wandering miles away. Khaleh Farzi would wordlessly serve her a cup of tea, in silent protest against the transgression.

That we lived near two immense highways, and could go days without seeing anyone we knew at the grocery store, didn't diminish the tribal and village customs native to Tehranis. Namely, being nosy about the personal lives of people we did not deign to know. For weeks Khaleh Farzi had watched a parade of lovely young women enter and exit the house of an unkempt Iranian man, who lived in the building next door. Baffled that someone
so
bireekht,
so ugly, could attract such company, Khaleh Farzi investigated, and learned that he dealt cocaine. It was upon making such discoveries that Khaleh Farzi would lapse into a deep funk, and try not to care that the Pakravans were buying their eleventh columned home in Los Altos. Observing all this as a child, I had the impression that if life in Iran was anything similar, society must be one vast sieve, with everyone trying to catch the people they wanted and filter out the rest.

This émigré political salon convened each Sunday at the condo complex's Sunday brunch, over donuts and coffee. The discussions became engaging enough that soon Iranians from around the city began showing up, and until well into the afternoon—after the last rainbow sprinkle had disappeared—they would debate the state of the country. The Sunday coffee was the ideally neutral space for an inclusive discussion; here the social regulations governing laws of interaction ceased to apply. There was no consensus on anything at all, except the fact that the country had been ruined; No one agreed on whom to blame: Jimmy Carter, the Shah, the CIA, the British, the BBC, the mullahs, the Marxists, or the Mujaheddin?

Sometimes the intricacies and exoticness of this inner Iranian world made me feel lucky, as though I'd been granted an extra life. There was Azadeh at school, who managed to look and sound like the other kids, barring the occasional lunchbox oddity; and there was Azadeh at home, who lived in a separate world, with its own special language and rituals. More often, though, living between two cultures just made me long for refuge in one. Maman's attempts to fuse both worlds, instead of compartmentalizing them, complicated everything. She didn't want to sacrifice anything: neither her Iranian values, nor her American independence. She refused to abdicate one side for the other, not even for a time, and it made our life together harrowing and unruly.

Next door to us on Auburn Way, two blocks from my grandparents' place, lived a single mother with two young girls. Unlike Maman, who had seemingly taken a vow of celibacy after her divorce, the single mom next door went out on dates all the time, and when she decided to stay the night with the man of the week she'd leave her daughters home alone. One night the younger one began to cry, emitting keening howls of fear, which Maman listened to for about half an hour, and then could no longer bear it. She went next door, invited them over, and made peanut butter sandwiches.
We watched cartoons, while she set up little beds in our living room, and finally drifted off to sleep in front of the TV. Early in the morning a loud knocking woke us—their mother, still dressed in her evening clothes, was pounding on our door, shouting, and waving the note Maman had left her. She was going to call the police, she screamed, how dare we take her children—kidnap them—out of her house? Maman turned pale, and tried to invite her inside for tea. She explained that the girls had been scared, but that they were fine—see, all snuggly in their pajamas. I could already anticipate my father's angry recrimination come Friday, when he'd come to take me for the weekend, and she would recount the savagery of American mothers, abandoning their children and then terrorizing a neighbor who showed them kindness. “Fariba jan,” he would say, “you can't do that sort of thing here. This is
not
Iran, you can't just take people's kids out of their house in the middle of the night.”

When it served her purposes, Maman embraced America and lovingly recited all the qualities that made it superior to our backward-looking Iranian culture. That Americans were honest, never made promises they didn't intend to keep, were open to therapy, believed a divorced woman was still a whole person worthy of respect and a place in society—all this earned them vast respect in Maman's book. It seemed never to occur to her that values do not exist in a cultural vacuum but are knit into a society's fabric; they earn their place, derived from other related beliefs. Maman thought values were like groceries; you'd cruise through the aisles, toss the ones you fancied into your cart, and leave the unappealing ones on the shelf. When I was a teenager we constantly fought over her pilfering through Iranian and American values at random, assigning a particular behavior or habit she felt like promoting to the culture she could peg it to most convincingly.

Our earliest battle on this territory was over Madonna. Maman called her
jendeh,
a prostitute, which I considered an offensive way to describe the singer of “La Isla Bonita.” On what grounds, I argued, was she being condemned? Was it because she flaunted her sexuality, and if so, did that make out-of-wedlock sexuality a bad thing? My defense of Madonna seemed to infuriate Maman; her eyes flashed, and her bearing radiated a grave, ominous disappointment. It was the same disproportionate reaction she'd show when I would forget which elder in a room full of aging relatives I should have served tea to first, or when I'd refuse to interrupt an afternoon with a
friend to take vitamins to an elderly Iranian lady who couldn't drive. Certain conversations or requests, unbeknownst to me, would become symbolic tests of my allegiance to that Iranian world, and the wrong response would plunge Maman into dark feelings of failure and regret.

At the prescient age of thirteen, I realized our Madonna arguments signaled far more serious confrontations to come. Maman's contempt for Madonna seemed like sheer hypocrisy to me. Was this the same woman who thought it regressive and awful that Iranian culture valued women through their marital status, and rated their respectability according to the success or failure of their marriage? The woman who denounced a culture that considered divorced women criminals? She believed it was only modern to consider women fully equal to men, independent beings with a sacred right to everything men were entitled. Somehow, it became clear through her designation of Madonna as whore, that she also thought it fully consistent to believe premarital sex (for women) was wrong, and that women who practiced it were morally compromised. The men she forgave, offering an explanation worthy of an Iranian villager: “They can't help themselves.” Women, it seemed, were physiologically better equipped for deprivation. Often our fights would end with me collapsing in tears, her bitterly condemning my unquestioning acceptance of “this decadent culture's corrupt ways,” and my usual finale: “It's all your fault for raising me here; what did you expect?”

In Maman's view, America was responsible for most that had gone wrong in the world.
Een gavhah,
these cows, was her synonym for Americans. She'd established her criticisms early on, and repeated them so often that to this day they are seared on my brain: “Americans have no social skills. . . . They prefer their pets to people. . . . Shopping and sex, sex and shopping; that's all Americans think about. . . . They've figured out how corrupt they are, and rather than fix themselves, they want to force their sick culture on the rest of the world.” Since she mostly wheeled out these attitudes to justify why I couldn't be friends with Adam-the-long-haired-guitarist or why I couldn't go to the movies twice in one week, or why I couldn't wear short skirts, I wondered whether they were sincere, or tactical.

Her restrictions were futile, and only turned me into a highly skilled liar with a suspiciously heavy backpack. Every morning she would drop me off at a friend's house, ostensibly so we could walk to school together. Once inside
I traded the Maman-approved outfit for something tighter, smeared some cherry gloss on my lips, and headed off to class. Knowing I could secretly evade her restrictions helped me endure the sermons, but sometimes the injustice of her moralizing would provoke me, and I would fling jingoistic clichés designed to infuriate her: “Love it or leave it. . . . These colors don't run. . . . No one's keeping you here.” At hearing these words come out of my mouth she'd hurl a piece of fruit at me, dissolve into angry tears, and suddenly the fact that I was torturing my poor, exiled single mother filled me with terrible grief, and I would apologize profusely, begging forgiveness in the formal, filial Farsi I knew she craved to hear. In the style of a traditional Iranian mother, she would pretend, for five days, that I did not exist; thaw on the sixth; and by the seventh have forgotten the episode entirely, privately convinced that my rude friends, who didn't even say
salaam
to her when they came over, were responsible for ruining my manners.

When we encountered other second-generation Iranians at Persian parties, I was struck by how much less conflicted they seemed over their dueling cultural identities. I decided my own neurotic messiness in this area was the fault of my divorced parents. The only thing they agreed on was the safety record of the Volvo, and how they should both drive one until I finished junior high. But when it came to anything that mattered, for instance how I should be raised, they didn't even bother to carve out an agreement, so vast was the gulf that separated their beliefs. My father was an atheist (Marx said God was dead) who called the Prophet Mohammad a pedophile for marrying a nine-year-old girl. He thought the defining characteristics of Iranian culture—fatalism, political paranoia, social obligations, an enthusiasm for guilt—were responsible for the failures of modern Iran. He wouldn't even condescend to use the term “Iranian culture,” preferring to refer, to this day, to “that stinking culture”; he refused to return to Iran, even for his mother's funeral, and wouldn't help me with my Persian homework, a language, he pronounced direly “you will
never
use.” When I announced my decision to move to Iran, his greatest fear, I think, was that something sufficiently awful would happen to me that it would require
his
going back. That he had married Maman, a hyper-ideologue, a reactionary as high-strung as they come, was baffling; little wonder they divorced when I was an infant. Daddy was the benevolent father personified; he couldn't have cared less about curfews, dating, a fifth ear piercing, or whether my hair was purple or not.

There were few times during my adolescence that he intervened, but Maman's attempt to make mosque attendees out of her and me was one of them. Iranians, by and large, are subtle about their piety, and identify more closely with Persian tradition than with Islam. Faith is a personal matter, commanding of respect, but it does not infuse our culture in the totalizing way I have witnessed in certain Arab countries, among many Sunni Muslims. Westernized, educated Iranians are fully secular—they eat pork, don't pray, ignore Ramadan—and so it had never occurred to the exile community to start up a mosque. Hiking groups, discos, political soirees, definitely, but a mosque would have been in bad taste; the revolution had made Islam the domain of the fundamentalists. But Maman was one day struck by worry that I'd grow up ignorant of Islam, and decided some formal religious training was in order. Every four years she seemed to choose a new religious avenue to explore, convinced our lives were lacking in spirituality, and since we had already done Buddhism and Hinduism, and briefly toyed with Mormonism, it was Islam's turn.

That was the summer she enrolled us in a Sunni mosque. It was called the San Jose Islamic Association, but it was really an enclave of super-pious, Sunni Pakistanis who had dedicated their experience in America to avoiding their experience in America. A shabby pink Victorian housed both the mosque and the Islamic Association; bearded men led the sermon, and the women in the back, dressed in
salwar kameez,
dashed off at the final
“allah akbar”
to heat up the
naan.
The sermons were boring, and the Pakistanis were cliquey, but the afternoon morality class was the worst.

Brother Rajabali (or somesuch pious name), a dark, spindly man whose unenviable job it was to make the harsh Sunni morality applicable to our lives in California, had dedicated the afternoon's lesson to sex, and how its only purpose was procreation. Maman nodded gravely, the Bosnian girls scribbled notes to one another, and I sat wondering whether all Sunnis were so narrow-minded. Eventually, I convinced a coalition of relatives the mosque was run by fundamentalist, radical Sunnis who were trying to brainwash me. My grandmother interceded, afraid I would be turned away from Islam forever, and we never set foot again into the sad old Victorian with its angry believers. They still send us their monthly newsletter, full of ads for
halal
meat grocers we never frequent.

The civil war in our house—heralded by the Madonna fight and the
weekly doses of Brother Rajabali—erupted unexpectedly on a fall afternoon, during a placid walk around the neighborhood. By that time I was well into high school, and envious of friends who had co-conspirator mothers, always ready to help them primp for first dates, delighted to follow the twists and turns of their teenage romances. I deeply hoped that Maman and I were ready to transcend the don't-ask-don't-tell policy we had been driven to by the ceaseless arguments of my early teenage years. As we walked, she turned and with the kindest smile said to me, “Azadeh jan, I want you to know that if you ever decide to become, ahem, close with your boyfriend, I'm here for you, and want to know about it. Not to lecture you, but because I want to be your friend and advise you. There are so many important things you might not be thinking about, and I'm in a position to help.” Maman was devoutly into meditation, yoga, and all the other spiritual hobbies in California that teach a person, even a displaced Iranian, how to sound far more open-minded, sensitive, and tolerant than they actually are.