My two Iranian mother-in-laws
and Forough Farrokhzad, feminist writer, filmmaker and poetess
Iranian women
Strong, proud, elegant, sumptuous, mothers, lovers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, diligent, forceful, soulful, lamenting, kind, fierce - conflicted and conflicting.
“She just did not want to be a revolutionary. The revolution made her ugly. It covered her. She had pretty hair that she had to hide. She had pretty legs that she had to cover up.”― Moniro Ravanipour, شب های شورانگیز
“The nurse is suddenly taken aback. She does not want to remember the past, which has not yet passed. She does not want to believe that she is a nurse’s aide, that she did not finish her studies, that in the second year in the College of Nursing, the revolution happened…
She does not want to go back to the past, even though nowadays most people do not have a now, and they are constantly tossed from the new platform into the past…”
― Moniro Ravanipour, These Crazy Nights
“The greatest gift I ever received. And the greatest gift I ever gave to this world was you. I love you, my daughter.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish
This Substack is a story about three women,
all very different and who have influenced my life, enormously.
A housewife, a business woman and an artist. They are my two mother-in-law Saffora and Muma Roue, and the poetess Forough Farrokhzad. (R.I.P)
This story starts with the traditional
Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud which was made famous by Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh in 1921. “Once there was a time where there wasn’t a time …”
I fell in love with Siavash in India, many, many years ago. It was on the spur of the moment. Just was. It happened. This is what I wrote in my Indian diary.
India, 1989, Calangute Beach.
A Coleman lamp swings gently at the portal of a hut in the Goan jungle while the smell of raw opium seeps into the heady night where river toads groan under clusters of shooting stars. A groan for a star. A young slender man sits in the hut, by the open window, with another man, white sheet covering their heads, like a tiny tent. At first, I think they are kissing; then realise they are fiddling – what Iranians tenderly call opium smoking as you have to pass the metal skewer with the hot opium smouldering, up and along, like a fiddler. The sheet keeps the gentle breeze at bay. The fumes enclose.
I lean against the wall watching them. Finally, the slender one turns and asks me if I want to join them. I move over the large mattress which takes up the entire dirt floor - a common sight for the jungle-dwellers. We share the pipe till the coals go out, flickering amber-brown, then black like the night. Opium. Touching the senses like silk. Gliding along the body, warm and safe. The time, traditionally to tell stories…Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud
My name is Sivash, he says …
And with those words our love was sealed and I held him in my soul, till he died, years later, in Montreal, Canada.
With many lives lived.
Our love affair
moves over years, of absence, to re-meetings, through the Iran-Iraq war where Siavash becomes a political prisoner, to my marriage to my daughter’s father, another Iranian, to finally, fifteen years later, I walk up the stairs to his parent’s apartment in Baba Tahir avenue, Tehran.
I am a divorcee, I have a daughter, now with her father’s family in Hamadan, and have just come over land with Alyosha, from Turkey. This is not, I am told, how new daughters-in-law do things.
She sits there, the empress of her house, on the top stair. Her name is Saffora.
She is an invalid, no longer able to walk on her legs, legs which have crumbled under her, yet her eagle eyes make up for her lack of mobility. Daring dark and dangerous eyes, eyes that cursed my father, Siavash tells me. Beguiling and fierce eyes. Eyes of a woman of Azerbaijan, born the day that Lenin died - 21 January 1924.
Saffora was born in a bakery, and her swaddling cloth was a bread cloth as all shops and public services were shut. Her parents were not Russian, just lived on the Russian side of Azerbaijan, so this legacy was given to her, and she likes, in moments of argument, to remind people of her closeness and importance with Lenin. Lenin’s child.
Saffora sits on the top step rocking, this is what she does when she is angry, nervous and testing her ground. She stares at me. I am chilled to the bone, and then she shouts to one of her daughters, Aziz to take me to the Hammam. I understand one word - dirty - kasif.
Gracious Aziz, tall and slender, like a desert gazelle with warm and sweet-smelling breath. She is married to a doctor, her life is affluent, and her English is gentle and soft. As she scrubs me down, in and around my body, like I am a child, her child, she whispers to me:
As long as you keep quiet, as long as you do not argue with my brother, and as long as you agree with my mother, even if it is hard, then, you will do well in Iran.
Food,
first things first, this is my new job to help in the kitchen, and I have to learn fast. Go to get it, find it and queue for it. Since the Iran-Iraq war, curfews and sanctions, and Betty Mahoody’s Not without My Daughter have done irrefutable damage to Iran. We queue for everything.
There are food tokens for sugar, oil, butter and meat. I am quick, and learn to hustle the bazaars, and soon become Saffron’s left hand, right eye. Going off to the market to buy food, bringing back more than she expects. Soon, I grow in her esteem.
Her Persian is terrible, and so is mine so we speak with a mishmash of words, our made-up words; darling, dear and devilish Saffron who makes me stir the stew as she prays, a great honour; to each stir, a sacred verse…
And I do as I am told,
I refuse to argue with her, even when she calls me a useless foreigner, I smile, my smiles driving her to curiosity, she wants to know me more. So I sit long hours next to her preparing the green vegetables every Iranian household eats for lunch and supper. She still curses me when I peel the vegetables, and curses me more when I peel off too much potato skin. Yet, we eventually form an incredible bond, eventually. And she sees how I love her son, and actually she knows, I am no threat.
No one in the family understands, as no one is supposed to like their mother in law… (interesting reading from a site from Iranians about family affairs.)
Saffora begs Gholam her husband, a tall and good-looking man, a clergyman who does a lot for his community, for money. This she puts under the carpet for Siavash for his opium. We three, are a house gang. We protect Siavash, and protect each other.
She cries for days when we plan to get him out of Iran and to Canada. We all know if Siavash stays in Iran he will be sent back to prison. We strike a deal, and make it, well he makes it, the last time I see him for years is when he leaves on a flight to London, then on to Toronto. I weep at the border gates at Merhabad airport, my Chardour covering my fragility, hiding me from the anguish of life. It becomes my refuge.
I stay on, and legally am divorced by his father, in the courts. With Sharia law a women can divorce her husband if he disappears without telling her for more than 48 hours. This was our story. Interestingly, the judge does not let Gholam speak for me, I need a translator just in case my voice is not understood. By the time Siavash vanishes into the vapour of the new world, I walk out a free woman. It is stamped on my Iranian passport.
I am a free woman, and I can go.
I kiss Saffron; I know I will never see her again. I take one thing with me, the Noruz candle - the New Year Candle, which has been in the family for more than fifty years. Lit once a year for half an hour, a symbol, now half a stub. That is a mighty present to give me. Her plump face in my hands, the daughter of Lenin cries for me too.
I miss her tenderly.
I do.
I take the bus from Tehran
to Hamadan, to my daughter’s family, the famous Shahbazian family, an archaic clannish tribe with Mumma Roue the breadwinner, and very much a woman of the post-revolution. In the Shah’s time she was an Aroosi: - a wedding planner and made lots and lots of money.
She comes from a small village on the edge of Kurdistan near, Malayer. I had the longest hair in the world, down to my ankles, that’s why Medi Agha (Dear Medi) fell in love with me. She was married at fourteen years, and Bahram, Alyosha’s father was, growing up, often mistaken to be her very young brother.
Mama Roue
is forceful and determined, with her famous hair now tucked under her hijab. She tells me very quickly: For the first week you are my guest, the second week our family, this means, you work! Unlike Saffora who, despite her rough edges was easier and domestic, she had never worked outside the home, only inside, and did a mastery of a job. Roue is ambitious. And Medi, just a little bit lazy. His custom is to go and smoke his opium pipe each night from 6-8. Older Iranians say it is good for their health.
He dislikes the new regime and has been to prison. Roue on the other hand, when she was no longer able to dress the sensual bodies of her Shah’s brides, switched from the modern 70s women to the revolutionary worker, changing her job to become a hairdresser and teacher for women, an exclusive female salamoni. She had to retrain and would drive from Hamadan to Tehran three times a week - 600 kilometres - for two years to qualify. She tells me, speaking so quickly as she has so much to say: You have to be flexible in this life. This way you succeed!
And she did
I enter this household as she is now an accomplished educator and is also learning a new trade, dealing gold in the bazaar with the hard-lined hagglers - all men. She’s the best, they tell me when I go with her, she tastes the metal, and she can tell the type by her tongue.
She refuses to talk about my divorce, Siavash does not exist, his name is never spoken, I am back with the family, and I fall in love, again, not with Bahram, Alyosha’a Papa, (who remains my friend to this day), but Hamadan and this large and loud family. The cold mountain Alvand air, Muma Roue’s country house where a Kurdish family of mainly women ride horses, and let me ride with them. The long nights and days of dancing, and dancing and eating and eating, and sleeping, the favourite pastime of the Hamadani.
I live here for 6 months where I learn more Persian, teach English in a small school down the road and begin my Iranian journals writing my first piece about Saffora which I found the other day - The Line Between.
And it is here, in the ancient capital of Ekbactan, one night Shiva, a Shahbazi cousin, gives me an English-Farsi book of poetry by Farough Farrokhzard, Iran’s rebel poetess.
Another Birth
My whole being is a dark chant
which will carry you
perpetuating you
to the dawn of eternal growths and blossoming
in this chant I sighed you sighed
in this chant
I grafted you to the tree to the water to the fire.
Life is perhaps
a long street through which a woman holding
a basket passes every day
Life is perhaps
a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
life is perhaps a child returning home from school.
Life is perhaps lighting up a cigarette
in the narcotic repose between two love-makings
or the absent gaze of a passerby
who takes off his hat to another passerby
with a meaningless smile and a good morning .
Life is perhaps that enclosed moment
when my gaze destroys itself in the pupil of your eyes
and it is in the feeling
which I will put into the Moon's impression
and the Night's perception.
In a room as big as loneliness
my heart
which is as big as love
looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness
at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase
at the sapling you planted in our garden
and the song of canaries
which sing to the size of a window.
Ah
this is my lot
this is my lot
my lot is
a sky which is taken away at the drop of a curtain
my lot is going down a flight of disused stairs
a regain something amid putrefaction and nostalgia
my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories
and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me
I love
your hands.
I will plant my hands in the garden
I will grow I know I know I know
and swallows will lay eggs
in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.
I shall wear
a pair of twin cherries as ear-rings
and I shall put dahlia petals on my finger-nails
there is an alley
where the boys who were in love with me
still loiter with the same unkempt hair
thin necks and bony legs
and think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
who was blown away by the wind one night.
There is an alley
which my heart has stolen
from the streets of my childhood.
The journey of a form along the line of time
inseminating the line of time with the form
a form conscious of an image
coming back from a feast in a mirror
And it is in this way
that someone dies
and someone lives on.
No fisherman shall ever find a pearl in a small brook
which empties into a pool.
I know a sad little fairy
who lives in an ocean
and ever so softly
plays her heart into a magic flute
a sad little fairy
who dies with one kiss each night
and is reborn with one kiss each dawn.
For those who understand Persian, here is an interview with Farough Farrokhzard presented by Iraj Gorgin - Journalist; Director of the News Division of National Iranian Radio and Television Organisation (NIRT) 1971-1975; Director of NIRT.
Farough
does not live long, dies in youth in 1967, leaving her eternal beauty stamped in picture frames. She is killed in a car crash, some say it was planned, whatever is the truth, she is still mourned today. Is always the voice of Iranian feminism not matter how they have tried to ban her.
These are the ones
who embody all I feel for Iranian women, those people who saved me from my deepest woes, fed me with laughter, even when their own hearts were breaking. There is an expression in Iran: Patience is bitter, but it has a good result - بزرگیبه عقل است،نه به سن.
My Iranian women are the patient ones, my memories are of the gentle cooking pots and Hammam days, listening to Shiva read Farough, going to the bazaar, finding foodstuffs, sharing my money with the family, learning how not to do things, and getting it all wrong, meeting Saffora in the early morning for prayers and watching the slice of sun coming in and kissing the sun. Watching Muma Roue comb out her stunning hair and, time to dream in the far off land…
Muma Roue died this April,
a few days before my birthday. This story is for you and dear Saffora and to the memory of Farough.
khodāhāfez - goodbye - may God be your Guardian
Thank you so much for spending this time here. I enjoyed writing this, we took so few photos in those days, which in many ways is lovely, so words need to convey the memories. And Muma Roue’s death prompted me to write this. I had loved her deeply, and thank both her and Saffora for accepting me into their homes, and treating me as family.
To know more about Farough - here is a website in her honour.
Here is her seminal work on a A leper colony - THE HOUSE IS BLACK. A remarkable piece of work.
Have a great, great month.
Jeanne
Here is my latest Podcast with Sonia Edwards who advocates for migrant women
