"I was born in Palo Alto, California, into the lap of an Iranian diaspora community awash in nostalgia and longing for an Iran many thousands of miles away. As a girl, raised on the distorting myths of exile, I imagined myself a Persian princess, estranged from my homeland ... by a dark, evil force called the Revolution. I borrowed from the plot of Star Wars, convinced it told Iran's story. Ayatollah Khomeini was Darth Vader. Tromping about suburban California, I lived out this fantasy. There must be some supernatural explanation, I reasoned, for the space landing of thousands of Tehranis to a world of vegan smoothies and Volvos, chakras, and Tupak.
Growing up, I had no doubt that I was Persian ... It was the term we insisted on using at the time, embarrassed by any association with Iran, the modern country, the hostage-taking Death Star. Living a myth, a fantasy, made it easier to be Iranian in America.
As life took its course, as I grew up and went to college, discovered myself, and charted a career, my Iranian sense of self remained intact. But when I moved to Tehran in 2000 -- pleased with my pluckiness, and eager to prove myself as a young journalist - it, along with the fantasies, dissolved. Iran, as it turned out, was not the Death Star, but a country where people voted, picked their noses, and ate French fries. Being a Persian girl in California, it turned out, was like, a totally different thing than being a young Iranian woman in the Isalamic Republic of Iran. In hindsight, these two points seem startlingly obvious, but no one every pointed them out. ... So I learned for myself, as I endured a second, equally fraught coming of age -- this time as a Californian in Iran. I never intended my Iranian odyssey as a search for self, but a very different me emerged at its end. I went looking for modern Iran, especially the generation of the revolution, the lost generation as it is sometimes called -- the generation I would have belonged to, had I not grown up outside.
For two years, I worked as a journalist for Time magazine, reporting on the twists and turns of Iranian society, through high politics and ordinary life. Since 1998, the revolutionary regime's experiments with political reform -- a brief flirtation with democracy -- had captured the world's attention. The cultural rebellion of Iranian youth against the rigid, traditionalist system fizzed with unknown potential. As a journalist, I arrived during these times with urgent questions. Was Iran really becoming more democratic? What did young people want, exactly? Did demographics (two-thirds of the 70 million population is under thirty) make change inevitable? Would there be another revolution, or did Iranians prefer this regime to secularize? Were Iranians really pro-American, or just anti-clerical? Often there was more than one answer, maddeningly contradictory, equally correct.
I came to see Iranian society as culturally confused, politically deadlocked, and emotionally anguished. While the vast majority of Iranians despised the clerics and dreamed of a secular government, no easy path to that destination presented itself. In the meanwhile, revolutionary ideology was drawing its last, gasping breaths. Its imminent death was everywhere on display. You saw it when the Basiji kids, the regime's thug-fundamentalist militia, stopped a car for playing banned music, confiscated the tapes, and then popped them into their own car stereo. You saw it when the children of senior clerics showed up at parties and on the ski slopes, dressed in Western clothes and alienated from their parents' radical legacy. It was there outside the courthouse on Vozara Street, where young people laughed and joked as they awaited their trials and lashings, before brushing them off and going on to the next party.
Iran's young generation ... is transforming Iran from below. From the religious student activists to the ecstasy-trippers, from the bloggers to the bed-hopping college students, they will decide Iran's future. I decided I wanted to live like them, as they did, their "as if" lifestyle. They chose to act "as if" it was permitted to hold hands on the street, blast music at parties, speak your mind, challenge authority, take your drug of choice, grow your hair long, wear too much lipstick. This generation taught me how to unlock the mystery of Iran -- how nothing perceptibly alters, but everything changes -- not by reading the newspapers but by living an approximation of a young Iranian's life. That is why I cannot write about them without writing about myself. That is why this is both their story, and my own.
Today, in a quiet room in a country not far from Iran in space, I am finally unpacking the boxes from those two years in Tehran. As I sort through the clothes, peeling veil from veil, it is like tracing the rings of a tree trunk to tell its evolution. The outer layers are a wash of color, dashing tones of turquoise and frothy pink, in delicate chiffons and translucent silks. They are colors that are found in life -- the color of pomegranates and pistachios, the sky and bright spring leaves -- in fabrics that breathe. Underneath, as I dig down, there are dark, matte veils, long, formless robes in funeral tones of slate and black. That is what we wore, back in 1998. Along the way, the laws never changed. Parliament never officially pardoned color, sanctioned the exposure of toes and waistlines. Young women did it themselves en masses, a slow, deliberate, widespread act of defiance. A jihad, in the classical sense of the word: a struggle."
that comprised the introduction to _Lipstick Jihad_.
I am not sure why Dabashi disses what she's saying in this book and the second. I am really curious to learn more, to read another perspective about what is missing from what Dabashi describes as an opportunist memoir.
For me, and I'm eager to be correct, it seems that his heroine can exist right alongside the women she writes about, above. It was their daily practice of resistance and subversion that might just have created the habits of daily resistance in the small things that might have prepared them for what is going on today.
I ask because I was surprised such vitriol was seemingly sent Moaveni's way when Dabashi wrote the following:
"lease take a good look at her and keep a print of her picture and the picture of other women participating in these demonstrations in your files before some other charlatan comes and crops it for the cover of the next edition of Reading Lolita in Tehran, or else puts together a collage of it for yet another book on "Sexual Revolution" or "Sexual Politics" in Iran. Whoever has won this particular presidential election, lipstick jihadis, career opportunist memoirists, obscene and fraudulent anthropologists on a summer "field work" in Iran, useless expatriate "opposition," and comprador intellectuals in general are among its main losers."
I was nodding along with everything he said, because everything about Moaveni's books supported precisely what he was saying, in the article, and on your radio interview with Dabashi. So, as I said, I'm very curious how I should parse the above, to lend a critical perspective on Moaveni's opportunism and what appears to be Dabashi's assessment of a faulty analysis summarized in the introduction.
Thanks!
scb
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08