Shirin and Salt Man.

By Nilofar Shidmehr.
Oolichan books 2008



No man has died more nobly for love than Farhad the stonecutter. And no man should be loathed more than the heartless news bearer who told him the lie that his Shirin had died.

The poet Nezami tells us that Princess Shirin of fable built a mausoleum for Farhad who shredded mountains to deserve her. 1700 years later, author Nilofar Shidmehr found out that mummified remains of a man were discovered near the mountains where Farhad had thrown himself to his death. There was no mausoleum. Fickle Shirin, undreamable as the morning sun, if love cannot rage then what curse burdens your daughters today?

In Shidmehr’s vastly imaginative novella, Shirin and Salt Man, a modern day Iranian woman named Shirin plans to elope with the mummy of an ancient salt miner preserved in brine and discovered in 1993 in Iran. She is not as fortunate as Nezami’s Farhad. Her insanity is not from love, but from neglect. She married the abusive Khosro, and now remorse has driven her to adultery with the pile of salted bones she imagines to be Farhad.

Shidmehr’s Khosro is not a king like Nezami’s Khosro. Though the romantically obsessed heroine married him for his kingly name, he really just works at the ministry of Islamic Guidance. As Shirin says,

“His job was to censor foreign actresses
who spoke their love out loud.
He was good at chopping images
and changing story lines.
My husband turned prostitutes into virgins
all the time”

The modern Khosro would likely censor Shidmehr. Her imagery mixes anger and sex like mud and blood. Here’s how the author describes the virgin Shirin being raped:

“There was Shapoor
shaking and gnashing his teeth
as though my shame were his.
You showed me your legs.
You stole away my virtue;
cover your body, woman.
Pebbles jabbed into my back,
like a mess of my own dislocated vertebrae.
and when he got up my voice ran silent
as the river through me. Darkness covered
my body, the mud was mixed with blood.”

Shirin had tried to get a ride with the man, who accidentally glimpsed her legs through a split chador. Shidmehr perhaps knows that the Nezami fan would compare this to Farhad’s equally pathological but harmless behavior at his first glimpse of Shirin. He faints!

Even in her humorous moments Shidmeh’s imagery is wet. She says,

“Shir has three meanings, as you know: milk, or the animal,
the lion. Never mind the third meaning.”

It was the meaning between the first and the second that got Abbas Kiarostami’s “The Wind Will Carry Us” in trouble with Iranian Khosros. You see, the director had “no idea” women aren’t supposed to milk cows while men read love poems to them.

Yet Nezami has ducked Islamic censors for centuries. Shidmehr constantly borrows from his sensuality in her free translations of him:

“Call me whenever you drink
from that milky brook
I brought you. Every day
when you sweeten your mouth
please say my name aloud,
for I am bitter here without you”

At one point in the novella the repeated milk imagery suggests an odd possibility to the reader.
“As a newborn
to a mother’s breast,
Farhad spoke to Shirin,
I am drawn to you.”
Does Shirin intend to put the stolen mummy to her breast and nurse him back to flesh? Is the second meaning of shir not lion but lioness taking responsibility for suckling a new pride?

Struck by Shidmehr’s display of literary brilliance, I kept wondering why Shirin and Salt Man is a novella and not a full-length novel. A more culturally aware publisher would not have let her stop at women vs. Islam. Like a lover who can’t get enough, the editor would have begged the author to go places where Nezami’s imagination could only point the way.

For example, she could tell us why Farhad had to die. In Nezami’s time, and doubly so in the Sassanian period when Khosro va Shirin takes place, a princess could never marry a stone cutter, regardless of his merits. Nezami is coerced into feeding Farhad and his pure love to the maws of his social order. The hero was condemned to execution by the tragedy of rigid hierarchical societies.

But modernity changes class paradigms in upheavals that dwarf the political revolutions it inspires. The new consciousness of female oppression rides the seismic waves of a historyquake where dynamic landmasses of meritocracy rub against the stolid ways of autocracy. This is how a modern novel about Shirin and Farhad story can have a happy ending.

Sadly, the Western publishing industry (includes distribution, reviews and other publicity) takes only what it is conditioned to want from Iranian women writers, allowing the rest of their talent to lie dormant. It has frustrated the desirous volcano inside Shidmehr to groan threateningly but not erupt.

Yet love compensates for small dissatisfactions. Shidmeh’r mature romance with our own literature cleans up after many of the carefree Lolitas seduced by the lustful Humberts of Western autocracy. While these writers’ crush on the splendid American Khosro makes them oblivious to our culture’s humble handsomeness, Shidmehr’s devotion to our legacy showcases just what treasures there are to lose if we neglect our heritage. Despite the taste of salt in her lament, Shidmehr’s protectiveness of Nezami forbids the foreigner Alexander to think his sword could defeat a Gordian knot as skillfully tied as Persian culture.

It is fair to acknowledge the complaint of star struck Lolitas, but we need no urging to suffer Shidmehr’s anguish because this writer has made it clear she is of the same body as the rest of us. Or as Farhad said of Shirin, “I cannot say we are of one body because self-worship is idolatry.”

Reading Shidmehr’s resurrection of Nezami in English, I wondered if it is it even possible for the thirty-year-old IRI weed to choke a three thousand years old tree? Shidmehr’s prognosis is not the hope of a mad lover when she says,

“No story is written unchangeably
in stone—not mine
nor Nezami’s Shirin’s,
Shah Khosro’s or Farhad’s:
“Reconfiguring Mount Bisotun.”
I could call Farhad back
to life, be a Jesus
and make Farhad rise
from the dead. He will lift
his head off the stones,
his breath lend its color
to the world I create
around him. He will intuit
that Shirin lives, that the news-bearer
was deadly and dead
wrong. He will raise”

When I see an Iranian writer unraveling our old myths to weave new meaning into familiar smelling wool, I am inspired to wish that for every copy of Reading Lolita In Tehran there would be two copies of Shirin and Saltman, Because inside the pages there
is nourishment , there is power, there is hope.

There is love.



Notes:
1. See Nazy Kaviani’s prose telling of the Shirin and Farhad story, here.
2. See Nezami in the original, here.

The Real Story

The Iran Agenda The real story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis.
By Reese Erlich
2007 PoliPointPress

Journalist Reese Erlich grew up in Los Angeles just south of UCLA. As a child he used to walk up Westwood Boulevard toward Westwood village, past a stockbroker’s office and the Crest movie theater. At the time there was no Tehrangeles. The Westwood legal offices I visited last year to fix my Iranian passport mess used to house the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society. As an aborigine of sorts, Erlich has no grievances against the Iranians who have colonized the Westwood of his childhood. On the contrary, he seems to delight in the cultural upgrade. His latest book, The Iran Agenda: the real story of U.S. policy and the Middle East crisis, should however give the American reader a nostalgic lump in the throat. Not because of old memories of a neighborhood now transformed; but because this seasoned journalist writes in a tradition now mostly abandoned by the US media. Trustworthiness.

Erlich identifies his sources by name, and gives references which independently corroborate his statements. By contrast the average American’s perception of Iran has been largely defined by “unidentified sources.” The Iran Agenda begins in the real Tehran bazaar where Erlich--along with actor Sean Penn and columnist Norman Solomon--had put their journalistic “boots on the ground” to report on the Iran situation. Erlich mentions other American reporters in Iran, but he observes, “Most American reporters I met saw Iran as an evil society and a danger to the United States. While many expressed disagreement with President Bush’s policies, they believed Iran was developing nuclear weapons that threatened America. In short, their views tracked the political consensus emanating from Washington. Rather than proceeding from reality, they filtered their reporting through a Washington lens. When a Washington official makes a statement, even a false one, the major media dutifully report it with few opposing sources.”

Of course this is not news to we Iranians. The value of The Iran Agenda is its usefulness as a tool of argument in discussions with curious Americans who ask us to be their tour guides on the Iran subject. Most educated Iranians carry an overall knowledge of the Iran-US quarrel, from Mossadegh’s overthow, to the hostage crisis, to the US Navy’s shooting down an Iran Air passenger jet. The Iran-Iraq war, NPT, human rights violations, student protests, worker’s union discontent, Ganji, Ebadi, Ossanlou, are all swimming somewhere in our data base. But it takes a professional like Erlich to organize these floating facts into an engaging story with a strong moral. To undo years of skilful propaganda, equal skill is needed. And Erlich is certainly a talented story teller.

While he informs us that the Kurdish PJAK guerrillas are supplied by the US and Israel, Erlich simultaneously evokes a feeling of action and travel reminiscent of the colorful adventures of Tintin:

“The PJAK camps are located in inhospitable terrain. During winter months, the snowy roads are accessible only on foot or by tractor. Luckily the snow hadn’t yet blanketed the area, and we drove up easily—if slowly—over winding dirt roads. Suddenly, young women in green pants in the distinctive Kurdish head scarf were walking along the road. They were female guerrillas. PJAK claims its troops are almost 50 percent women.”

Erlich’s very brief history of the Kurds updated me on some interesting statistics. For example, I was under the impression that Kurds were mostly Sunnis. This is true in general, but in Iran 50% of this minority is Shiite. This figure makes a difference in my thinking on the Kurdish issue.

Erlich goes on to remind his readers of other ethnic minorities, the Azeri, Baluchi and Arab Iranians, who could destabilize the Iranian regime. Little of this is intelligently discussed in the US media. For obvious reasons even the Iranian media tend to keep the lid on news of ethnic unrest.

Not all of Erlich’s criticism targets mainstream media. He has harsh words of advice for Iran’s exile media in his native Westwood backyard. He mentions Amir Taheri’s infamous false report about a Majils law requiring Iranian Jews to wear a yellow stripe on their clothing. “With each phony or exaggerated story,” Erlich warns, “the LA newscasters and commentators [who continued to play the story long after it was falsified] think they are helping the popular struggle against the Iranian government. But repeated over time, the distortions discredit the exile media and, by extension, all exile opposition.” Erlich describes another, bitterly funny incident--the Hakha affair-- as being “something right out of the Keystone Kops.” I can't find a web link that explains this fiasco nearly as well as Erlich's narrative.

Clarifying his own agenda in writing The Iran Agenda, Erlich says, “…I personally don’t trust mainstream politicians, lobbyists, and think tank gurus to resolve anything soon. Nor do I trust the clerics in Tehran to stop their belligerence. A pro-peace, pro-democracy movement exists within Iran. I think people in the United States need to build one as well.” It seems Westwood had earthy, smart people long before Iranians arrived.

Going to Bat for Mossadegh, a books review.

Iranian History and Politics: The dialectics of state and society.
RoutledgeCurzon 2003.

Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran.
I.B. Tauris 1990.


In moments of statistical introspection, I wonder if LA Dodgers fans are generally Pahlavi supporters. The occasional Shah picture posted on huge Westwood billboards, and the handful of TV stations time capsuling pre-revolution Tehran are tempting bits of data. San Francisco Giants fans, on the other hand, are generally pro-Mossadegh, though I lack the evidence of billboards. Needless to say, Giants rule and Dodgers suck, but it is nice occasionally to debate with facts and reason. Two meticulously researched books by Oxford scholar Homa Katouzian hit the ball right out of the ballpark for the Giants.

The first book, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectics of State and Society, develops the author’s theory of “arbitrary rule,” and establishes a foundation for understanding Mossadegh’s uniqueness in Iranian history. The second book, Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran, specifically analyzes the events of the Mossadegh period, demonstrating how he personified a new paradigm in Iran’s civilization.

Arbitrary rule should not be confused with dictatorship, Katouzian says. “The distinctive characteristic of the Iranian state [has been] that it monopolized not just power, but arbitrary power--not the absolute power in laying down the law, but the absolute power of exercising lawlessness.” I believe the umpire is a good example of a dictator. You can’t argue with his decision, but neither can he change the rules of baseball. Katouzian cites the example, Henry VIII of England as a dictator who was not an arbitrary ruler. This dictator had the most unfettered power of any English king, yet he had to use threats, coercion, bribery, and at least one execution to become head of the Church of England, so that he could lawfully divorce his wife (Katouzian does not discuss motivation or methods, just that Henry VIII got the approval of Parliament).

Looking for examples of arbitrary lawlessness, on the other hand, I found this recollection by Farhad Diba of an encounter with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi:

“The Shah asked me what I was doing and I, very proudly, told him about how well NCR [National Cash Register Company] was progressing in Iran. When I reported that to my father the next day, he said "You are a fool. Sure enough, within the year, NCR (which my father had introduced into Iran and, over 25 years, it had grown into a large business) was taken from us and given over to the Pahlavi Foundation.”

In Iranian History and Politics..Katouzian mentions a few of the countless examples of arbitrary usurpation of property by various Shahs. The suspicion that the wealth may have been acquired by unjust means in the first place gives Shahs a certain Robin Hood appeal. But Katouzian’s scholarship exposes the practice as a tragic reason for Iran’s economic backwardness: capital does not accumulate over the generations, making it impossible for any large industrial or financial enterprise to take root.

Under the arbitrary rule of its monarchs, Iran was a “short term society,” as Katouzian terms it, where few social structures were allowed to stand long enough to evolve the sophisticated architecture of modern institutions. In Europe, lords, barons, counts and dukes had the brutal right of ownership to their land, making a feudal system possible. Iran’s khans had no ownership rights, only privileges that could be taken away at the whim of the arbitrary ruler. In such a system even feudalism has no incentive to grow, much less its Western progressions: a powerful merchant class, large scale capitalism, and socialism.

Applying Katouzian’s arbitrary rule theory, I figured out that the spike in the price of oil in the seventies only created the illusion of a modern economy in Iran. This period was in reality little more than a shopping spree by the country’s sole owner, the Shah. In the historic pattern of economic insecurity of the wealthy, nothing had changed.

Applying the simple yet powerful theory again, I realized that freedoms enjoyed by Iranian women and religious minorities during the Shah should not be misunderstood as a modern appreciation of human rights and dignity. True to Iran’s historic pattern, all such freedoms were privileges granted by the monarch, to be taken away at his convenience. The Shah may have been a benevolent soul, but benevolence is no substitute for guaranteed rights under a long term tradition of law. Niceness is a character trait, not a social institution.

The arbitrary rule concept is developed into a solid theory in the book Iranian History and Politics the Dialectic of State and Society. Now the reader is ready for Mussadiq and the struggle for Power in Iran, fully prepared to appreciate this leader’s uniqueness in Iranian history.

The 1906 constitutional revolution was an attempt to put an end to arbitrary rule. At the time Mossadegh was in his early twenties, and for forty-five years he watched as the revolution was torn apart by foreign interference in domestic politics. By the time he became prime minister, Mossadegh knew what to do to piece Iran’s constitution back together. His nationalization of Iranian oil had far less to do with revenue than with eliminating foreign intrusion into Iranian affairs. His recalcitrance in coming to terms with the British should be assessed as serving his grand project—protecting Iran’s newly discovered paradigm of lawful leadership.

Mossadegh himself has been criticized for breaking the law when he temporarily dissolved the majles. “How is that different from the dictatorship of the Shah?” his detractors ask. Katouzian admits the mistake, while explaining the complex mitigating circumstances. Yet his arbitrary rule theory makes it unnecessary to decide whether Mossadegh was a dictator. The reader has already learned that the term “dictator” in the Western sense does not describe our Shahs at all. The Pahlavis were not dictators, but arbitrary rulers. Mossadegh, dictator or not, acted in the modern paradigm of the struggle between various interests of society. For him, the primitive mellat [society]vs. dowlat [state] dialectic was an extinct theme.

As Katouzian explains in Iranian History and Politics..., our numerous rebellions had always been about the mellat overthrowing the dowlat. Everybody vs. the “institution” of the arbitrary ruler. The upheavals led to a period of chaos [fetneh/ahsoub] until a new arbitrary ruler enforced order and began the cycle all over again. In Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran it can be seen that the battles of the Mossdegh era were of a fresh variety. We were fighting over which interests in our society were going to dictate the rules. This gave a totally new texture to the power game, which for the first time could be termed “politics.” Katouzian emphasizes that there was no Persian word for “politics”; the modern connotation of “siaasat” was first adopted during the constitutional revolution.

Though the Shah appeared to win the day after the 1953 coup, he could not hold back Iran’s new paradigm, best archetyped in the Mossadegh drama. In an unmistakable occurrence of Katouzian’s mellat vs. dowlat phenomenon, everyone rose against the Shah in 1979. Not a single major element of Iran’s society defended him. Not the merchants he had made wealthy, not the workers he had created jobs for, not even the women and the minorities he had treated so kindly. This puzzling ingratitude is completely explained by Iranian society’s resolve to put an end to arbitrary rule. An evolutionary force overwhelmed sectarian interests.

Some argue that we should stop dwelling on Shah and Mossadegh. After reading Katouzian, I believe we can safely drop the Shah from conversations, as his species is unlikely to be part of Iran’s political ecology again. The Pahlavis were the last dinosaurs. But Mossadegh was the first mammal. His political genes are alive, evolving and relevant. Iran’s stubborn struggle against foreign dependence, even in the face of sanctions, is straight out of Mossadegh’s book. Western analysts flummoxed by The Islamic Republic’s resilience to regime change should acknowledge the unprecedented symbiosis that now exists between the dowlat and parts of the mellat. The Islamic establishment in turn should consider to what extent the concept of a Supreme Leader contradicts the program that the Iranian nation has set for its long term development. The regime’s leaders should also beware: their power is imperiled whenever they arbitrarily suspend constitutional rights.

The Shahs are dead, but Mossadegh’s legacy remains a colossal factor in Iran’s future. This is why Giants still rule. And the Dodgers? Well, who cares anymore?

Not Quite a Memoir

By Judy Stone
Silman-James Press

In the year 2000 I went to see Abbas Kiarostami receive the Akira Kurosawa award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The famed director thanked the organizers, then surprised everyone by giving away his prize to veteran Iranian actor Behrooz vossoghi. Six years later while reading Judy Stones new book Not Quite a Memoir I was thrilled to see this small yet extraordinary event preserved in writing. For over four decades it seems whenever there has been a quality International film, Judy Stone has been there to create portraits of the artists that created those works of art.

In her treasury of interviews with the world’s leading writers and filmmakers, Stone devotes a dozen or so chapters to Iranian artists. Though the pieces are independent and have been written at different times, the chapters read like the different scenes in a single movie, each contributing to an overall picture of the state of the arts in Iran. One theme in this “movie” dominates all others: censorship.

For instance, among Stone’s stories we find that Bahman Farmanara, director of Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine suffered a massive depression after censors turned down his tenth script.

Director Tahmineh Milani was thrown in prison after her political drama, Hidden Half, offended some fundamentalists. Her case as described in Stone’s exclusive interview with the director and her husband, sheds light on the odd complexities of Iranian factional politics. For instance, Hidden Half continued to be screened even after Milani was jailed. President Khatami expressed surprise at the arrest, and when a judge realized Milani had not broken any laws she was released immediately. So who ordered her arrest? And if Milani was cleared of charges, why was her home invaded and her property confiscated after her release?


Dariush Mehrjui, director of Cow, has his own tragicomic experience with censorship . In his interview with the author he mentions that the only movie of his that Khomeini ever saw was Cow, and the late Ayatollah liked it very much. So despite the fact that Mehrjui is a strong critic of the condition of women in Iran, the censors have called him in only once or twice, treating him politely.

Abbas Kiarostami on the other hand has developed a more subtle relationship with the Islamic regime’s censorship. He incorporates the reality of censorship right into his art. Stone quotes him, “We can’t hide ourselves and say, ‘I would have made a fabulous masterpiece if I didn’t have all the limitations.’ We have to accept responsibility for what we create and not make it sound as if it would have been very different had it not been for outside elements such as censorship. I strongly believe that choice is what we have.”

In the chapter on Kiarostami we learn that a cow-milking scene has kept the artist’s The Wind Will Carry Us from receiving theatrical distribution in Iran. This scene is perhaps Kiarostami’s brilliant joke on the clerical regime. By goading the authorities into making an erotic connection between milking a cow and ejaculation, these guardians of public morality have effectively admitted to having dirty minds. Thus the director makes a harsh artistic statement through the very process of banishment.

Besides censorship there are also many intriguing sub-themes in Not Quite a Memoir . There is passion, perseverance and humor. Majid Majidi, director of Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise told his father he was going to engineering school when in fact he was studying drama. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, director of The May Lady experienced the death of her father when she was only nine years old. Bahman Ghobadi director of A Time for Drunken Horses attributes his love for movies to the sandwich and a Coca-Cola shack that sat next to the ramshackle theater in his hometown.

And there is heartbreak . Kiarostamis’ wife left him for another man. “I’m not sure if a good marriage is when you break it and let the other person have freedom or if it’s when you try to stay together,” the genius wonders from behind his ever-present dark glasses.

Not Quite a Memoir flies around the world to Spain’s Carlos Saura, Chile’s Isabel Allende, India’s Satyajit Ray. At every landing Stone creates a portrait of the artist as a force for social change. Intriguingly, the author backs up her portrait in words by capturing--with unassuming genius—astonishingly insightful photographs of her interview subjects.

No one at the San Francisco International Film Festival in the year 2000 saw Abbas Kiarostami’s eyes when he gave away his Akira Kurosawa award to Behrooz Vosooghi. For medical reasons Kiarostami never takes off those enigmatic sunglasses. Yet in Not Quite a Memoir Judy Stone’s camera flash cleverly shines right through the artist’s dark glasses to give us the first glimpse of eyes that revolutionized filmmaking with how they saw the world. Her short interviews, like that brief camera flash, are just as clever and penetrating.

Let Me Tell You Where I Have Been

Let Me Tell You Where I Have Been:
New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora
Edited by Persis Karim

“Ey khoda een vasl raa hejraan makon,“ says Rumi. God, do not let this union become a hejraan. The Persian word hejraan begins with a sigh and breaks like a sob. It cannot be translated into English. Yet in her poem “Separation,” Iranian-American poet Farnaz Fatemi hints at the meaning:

“…I have learned too much
about movement, not enough about
how the heart can translate
the language of separation into words.”

Let Me Tell You Where I Have Been translates the language of hejraan into English. The result is deep literature sometimes surpassing what could have been said in Persian. Perhaps circumstance has led the writers in this collection to appreciate an extra dimension in the opening verses of Rumi’s Mathnavi:

"Listen to the reed for it tells a story,
complaining of separations"

Rumi too was writing in a land far from his ancestral home. His mystical desire to return to the Beloved is rooted in the earth of his birthplace. Like some of the contributors in Let Me Tell You, Rumi’s exile began when he was just a child. His family was driven away by the Mongol invasion. This thirteenth century social upheaval decimated Iran’s population and gouged deep wounds in the Iranian psyche.

The trauma of Iran’s 1979 revolution has now added another scar. Many of the modern day Rumis in Let Me Tell You have been driven away by the revolution and Iran’s subsequent war with Iraq. How the pain is expressed in writing reflects individual personalities. Gelareh Asayesh is mystical. She says, “With that first trip back [to Iran], I began the long, slow road toward resurrecting a buried self. And vowed I would never suffer that inner shriveling of an isolated core, the immigrant’s small death, again.”

Niloofar Kalaam’s “The Sun Is a Dying Star” seems a rambling Jane Austen dilemma of love and money in marriage, but suddenly snaps into harsh focus as a powerful tale of imprisonment and rape.

Parinaz Eleish makes her lament this way:

"And my brother’s off to war.
How thoughtlessly beautiful the persimmons
Feel in the bloody dusk.
I long to hang from a tree
Watch my grandmother pray in the shade.
For even one more day."

Refusing to board the back of a bus in Tehran, Mitra Parineh’s American-born female character explains to her aunt, “We did this with black people in our country, a long time ago. How can you be serious? I will not ride that fucking bus.”

To which the aunt replies, “Stop it. This is not your country. This is not your people.”

Yet a few pages into the story the ache of hejran begs for reunion:

"Ay Khaleh, she says to me and sighs big. I am listening carefully, hoping she'll say something
and it occurs to me for the first time: why do we do this in Farsi? I call her Khaleh, Auntie, and
she calls me Khaleh back. I think of my father. Baba, Daddy. Baba Joon, he calls me, Daddy
Dear. They reverse the casual term of endearment and it becomes that-- endearing,
affectionate."

Yes “they” do speak with the voice of their beloved, and the effect is more than endearment, it is oneness. It is “they” being “us.”

Michelle Koukhab’s hejraan manifests in her yearning for the tender touch of tradition in the postpartum ritual of the public bath, where

"Sisters wrap my mother’s waist with egg yolk
and chick-peas paste…

[In America] I can have children, but no healing ceremony.
In my healing of parts below the navel, I can only spread

Glue with tongue depressors. This gap opens sometimes
Between the places we are born and the places that we live."

Hejraan in English.

Yet with poetic irony some of the writers protest that their Western refuge is not far enough from tradition. Sheila Shirazi, perhaps after a bitter breakup:

"…The hands of the cultural clock
are closed ‘round my throat…
Are you happy now, Maman, Baba?
No more fucking."

Some have concluded that their Western refuge is no refuge at all. In an excerpt from Funny in Farsi, her best selling panegyric on America, even Firoozeh Dumas manages a suppressed ouch. “My relatives did not think Americans were very kind,” she complains timidly. But the Iranian American writer PAZ is more colorfully outspoken:

"[Before the 1979 revolution] one of my favorite memories is of the time when Becky
showed me how to use a red plastic Barbie golf club to get myself off, and then subsequently
to get her off as well. After we were done playing in the lazy, sun-strewn desert
afternoons we would slip away to Becky’s apartment to eat an early American supper....

[After the 1979 revolution] Becky’s family stopped inviting me over for pork
dinners.TheWright sisters, who were my favorite orange tree pals, were no longer allowed to
come over in the afternoons to play. Their father who was a minister at the Presbyterian
church around the corner, stopped dropping by to have enlightened religious conversations
with my father. And someone—to this day I don’t know who—blew the cover on my sexual
adventures....

It was 1979 and I realized that my whole world has shifted. I was going to have to reinvent
myself so I could belong in America, belong to my Muslim Iranian family, belong to a world
which didn’t like me as I was. I had a long, hard road ahead of me."

For PAZ politics was a slap in the face to wake up to the realities of tribalism, while for Poet Sanaz Banu Nikaein the awakening moment comes every time she looks in the social mirror, "I am an Iranian with terrorist tattooed on my forehead…."

The brilliant Azadeh Moaveni needs no awakening to politics. Her book Lipstick Jihad sometimes dazzles with insight. The excerpt in Let Me Tell You is one of her dimmer moments, but it does reveal an interesting phenomenon—how Iranian-Americans import Western values into Iran. When an Iranian girlfriend seeks advice about a romantic partner, Moaveni offers this bit of naïve American feminism:

"So I tried to explain that like many men, her boyfriend was intimidated by how much he
wanted sex and that it was easier for him to vulgarize intimacy than admit that she (a mere
girl/woman) controlled the supply of the most powerful physical experience of his existence.”

Supply?? Capitalist feminism at its most crass! The politically savvy Moaveni would agree that righting of Iran’s policy towards women is more urgent than any military preparations. Gaining the women’s support is not only a human rights issue, it’s a matter of national survival. Therefore, we look to thoughful people like Moaveni to think out-of-the-box, to discover new, workable solutions that do not trigger Iran's immune reaction to transplantation. Western feminist rancor has proven counter-productive even in the West.

And in return for such Western exports, what have these Iranian-American women writers imported from Iranian culture? Its most valuable treasure—Iran’s literary tradition. Mimi Khalvati’s poem in the ghazal style of Hafez is such an astonishingly beautiful love poem I am tempted to reproduce it here in its entirety. But it feels like sacrilege to put such gentleness through computer hardware. Read it in the book.

Some Muslim Iranian-Americans don’t place the Koran on their Haftsin table anymore. The excesses of the Islamic Republic have inclined them to decorate the traditional spread with a book of Hafez instead. Perhaps Diaspora Iranians should start a new custom. Each year place the new book that has most clearly expressed our hejraan. I nominate Let Me Tell You Where I Have Been as the Haftsin book of the year.

No god but God

By Reza Aslan, Random House

When I discuss Islam with American friends, they often say, “Someday when I have time, I’ll have to read the Koran.” I usually discourage them. It’s not because, as they like to joke, “it isn’t the kind of book a Muslim wants to find in a friend’s bathroom.” It’s because I don’t think it will help them understand Islam. Unlike the Bible, the Koran is not a self explanatory collection of stories in chronological order. The organizing principle of the Koran is not the order of revelation, but the length of the chapter, the shortest ones appearing at the end of the book. Even within one chapter the subject can skip from analysis of a battle to moral injunctions against usury. Without the context, the content is mostly opaque. For example, when the Koran says “When two parties from among you thought of showing cowardice, and Allah was the Guardian of them both,” It helps to know which battle and which two parties are being discussed. The Koran is a book that you learn, not a book you can just read. So to the Islam enthusiasts in the West, I recommend they save the Koran for later, and read instead Reza Aslan’s No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam.

This book has received enough praise from virtually all major reviews and all relevant academic institutions, so here I will just emphasize that its organizing principle is the antithesis of the Koran. It is highly linear and readily understandable to the Western mind. In keeping with its clarity I will list what you will learn by reading this book:

1. An overview of the politics, economy, and sociology of Arabia just before the appearance of Islam.

2. A functional but not excessively detailed biography of Mohammad.

3. A familiarity with the basic story of early Islam and its first battles under Mohammad’s leadership. You will know the major players, whether they were friend or foe, and how they were dealt with.

4. The early post-Mohammad era and the emerging politics, including how Shiites broke away from the Sunnis.

5. The story of the rise of Islamic civilization, including the origins and evolution of Islamic law. Here you will meet some major Islamic scholars and gain insight into Sufis like Rumi and Omar Khayyam.

6. A beginners skill in how to make sense of the attitudes and behavior of modern Islamic nations like Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Reza Aslan is a not only a scholar, he is a writer who is easy to read. All his meticulously researched and documented statements are framed inside stories, anecdotes, and personal experiences. The pages of No God but God go by so quickly and painlessly you will wish your dentist was that good. There’s even a love story.

Funny in Farsi

Funny in Farsi:
By Firoozeh Dumas, Random House.

In this bright and humorous thank-you note to America, Iranian émigrée Firoozeh Dumas demonstrates mastery of a traditional Persian art form, flattery. Highly developed by Iranian court poets, this skillful expression of praise, humility and gratitude is known as madh. Loosely translated as ‘panegyric,’ these flowery words came in handy when an enraged and egomaniacal sultan was about to do something rash. Dumas renders her madh of America in memoir form instead of in verse, but her techniques of appeasement are akin to those used by court poets whose wit sometimes decided between prosperity or ruin for the nation.

To make the sultan America feel warm inside, Dumas begins her tale in the upscale town of Whittier, California, where her family settled in the seventies. Tension builds when soon after their arrival she and her mother get lost in this opulent suburban setting. The tension is relieved when a resident generously invites them in to use the telephone and later drives them home. Dumas tells us, “After spending an entire day in America, surrounded by Americans I realized….the people were very, very kind.” What follows are peanut butter cookies, summer camp, Thanksgiving, Bob Hope, Disneyland, Halloween, and The Brady Bunch.

In her carefully crafted effort not to offend, Dumas recreates the cotton candy America that existed only in Hollywood in the fifties. She resurrects the uncomplicated America of The Andy Griffith Show and Father Knows Best. One can almost hear the knowing laugh track when Dumas replaces the word “hell” with the euphemism “a very bad place.” Eyeballs would roll if such material came from a contemporary American writer, but Dumas insightfully recognizes that, channeled through fresh immigrant eyes, this hackneyed treatment of America still has plenty of play.

Another technique of madh is paying homage to mundane attributes taken for granted by the sultan, revealing their deeper significance. Dumas reminds us of American affluence during a romp through Price Club. Her father and uncle ate enough free samples to feel like they had a full lunch. “In Iran people who taste something before they buy it are called shoplifters,” says Dumas. “Here a person can taste something, not buy it and still have the clerk wish him a nice day." In a wealthy consumer society where advertising budgets are huge, the giving away of food to un-needy strangers is indeed a remarkable consequence, something to boast about.

Pressing her ego boosting charm on the reader, Dumas stuffs America with opportunities. She mentions that her father was a Fulbright scholar. He even got to meet Albert Einstein and was consulted on the subject of Persian cats by the great genius. Her own education at UC Berkeley was financed through scholarships. In a very funny chapter, reminiscent of fifties era sitcoms, her father botches the opportunity to win a fortune in Bowling for Dollars. He comes home with only a pittance, the wiser for his ordeal.

Dumas is an Iranian-American Norman Rockwell. Death and tragedy are not on her palette. Everyone is wonderful--the exception being her intolerant French mother-in-law, which I assume was allowed in the book to please the freedom fries crowd.

Though politics is unwelcome in polite company, when it comes to Iran even Dumas can’t sidestep it. However, she keeps pouring on the syrup until the reader can’t tell a stack of pancakes from a cow pie. Here’s how she describes the abusive British oil policy towards Iran: “In a perfect world, the kindergarten teacher would have stood up before any documents were signed and said, ‘time out for Britain. We’ll renegotiate after a nap.’” When it comes time to confront the CIA engineered demolition of Iran’s home-made democracy, she is too genteel to use the word “America,” opting for “foreign powers” instead. The reader will have to guess for himself who this ‘foreign powers’ was that so bereaved Iranians that they are still shouting “Death to America” in the streets.

In return for her courteous flattery, Dumas invites America to see the positive side of Iranians. For instance, her memoir is soaked in paternal love, obliterating the notion that Iranian fathers do not value their daughters. As a moving example, her father’s inept swimming lessons are hilarious, particularly in the light of his irritation at the girl’s abysmal progress.

Funny in Farsi delivers exactly what the title promises, but there’s also an unfunny side to this memoir. The author’s eagerness to please and be accepted causes her to slip on a crucial point. Too often she takes the opportunity to distance herself from her ruder, more politically outspoken compatriots. This creates the impression that Iranians come in two varieties, gentle America lovers and violent America haters. Her partitioning strategy relieves the stigma on most Iranian-Americans--a great service to the community--but frankly they are not the ones who need her help. It is the other group--those living in Iran—who are threatened with a U.S. invasion. It is this other group whose essential infrastructure and national heritage are menaced by this enraged and egomaniacal sultan, America. Those Iranians are now perhaps in even greater danger because Funny in Farsi is telling Americans their country can do no wrong.