KJ
Selections
Beyond
East and West
Reliving Iran on the road in Burma & Cambodia
By Miro Phanruang
(#59)
About two years ago, as I was preparing to travel to Iran to
see a friend, I read Neither East Nor West — the title
a flat declarative, a double negation that begged the question, If Iran
is neither East nor West, then what is it? The author offered no easy
answers — Christiane Bird was something of a boundary-transgressor
herself, a Western woman who had spent her youth in Iran, and who wrote
of revisiting her childhood home in a travelogue, a form popular for
both Persian and Wester sojourners like 1930s adventuress Freya Stark.
“Neither
East nor West” was not Bird’s own moniker. It was a label
twice removed, borrowed from the Rudyard Kipling poem “The Ballad
of the East and West,” and used by Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries
to describe their rejection of both the socialism of the Soviet Union
and the capitalism of the United States. The expression seemed to signal
both defiance and confusion, natural in a country that had been besieged
by invaders since ancient times, that was now going through the convulsive
turmoil of a revolution. But the question still stood: What was left
after one exploded the simplistic binary of East and West?
The second book was just as intriguing… and puzzling. Persian
Mirrors, written by New York Times correspondent Elaine
Sciolino, offered fascinating chapters on film, politics, religious
debates. But Sciolino also warned of trying to grasp at any single narrative
about Iran, a country that threw off bewildering fragments, fractured
images, glinting light and oblique shadow, in much the way the mirrored
mosaics in the Shah’s palace reflected strange angles and sometimes
only broken shards of one’s own face.
When I landed at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran in late 2002, I finally
met the Iran I had glimpsed in these books — an Iran that revealed
a thousand and one stories of itself to outsiders’ dazzled, blinded
eyes, each of them circling back, somehow, to the writers’ own
secret selves. The Iran I saw held forth a fierce hybridity, passionate
struggles over ideas and over identity. As an Asian-American traveler
who is simultaneously both and neither East and West, I found unexpected
personal resonances in Iran, along with a poetry that was ineffably
and unmistakably Iran’s own.
*
I couldn’t cross the street. I quavered on the corner, as I would
in Phnom Penh a year later, and in Yangon [Rangoon] a year after that.
The Tehran air drew thicker with fumes belched out by dented little
Peykans, diesel trucks, taxis stuffed with two in the front passenger
seat, and a cluster of chador-clad women in the back. One man stuck
his hand out the window and then tore the wrong way around the rotary.
The swirl and crunch of traffic was neverending, coming from every direction,
each driver clearly dealing with a potentially fatal emergency: a wife
in the backseat having a baby, ransom money to deliver, impending explosive
gastro-intestinal distress. Who was I, who merely wanted to look at
some fruit in the market? No one.
The Iranians had a special tactic — they gathered in a clump on
the sidewalk. Then they walked out as one, a school of fish, not looking
left or right. My corner was not drawing sufficient mass. I started,
stopped, gasped, twitched, fidgeted, eyes rolling in all directions,
whimpering to myself… and then a friend came back for me and led
me across by the hand.
I had learned my lesson in Tehran. Eye contact was fatal. Eye contact
with a driver meant that you had seen him, and if he hit you it was
your fault, because you had watched him coming the whole time. Phnom
Penh was easier to navigate. Unlike in Iran, where I saw traffic accidents
every day — passengers hurled from cars, glum and bloodied on
the curb, and one time a chador-shrouded body, pooling blood onto the
highway — there were fewer cars on the streets. The renegade motorcycle-taxi
drivers still had a remarkable disrespect for traffic laws, bombing
through red lights, ripping down one-ways the wrong way. But I knew
I had been in Cambodia for a while when an elderly auntie in a checked
traditional scarf took my arm as I crossed the street.
My hard-earned street-crossing wisdom failed me in Yangon, where there
were scores of cars again, including taxi drivers who thought to conserve
gas by refusing to come to a complete stop. I froze right in the middle
of the street at one point, squirrel-style, forcing my friend to yank
me onto the corner.
“You know, I couldn’t cross the street in Iran, either.
People had to hold me by the hand. Thank God they did, or I’d
still be standing in Tehran right now.”
“Yes, and then I would never have had to hold your hand to cross
the street here.”
*
Amir was chewing through a mouthful of distaste and pizza crust.
“I hate Iranians.”
“What? Are you crazy? I love Iranians.”
“That’s because you’re not Iranian.”
“What’s so bad about it?”
“You get caught up in this web of relationships. You have to do
things for them, then they have to do things for you. There is so much
social obligation. Hierarchy. You’re trapped.”
“Oh, that’s so Asian. Totally. I can’t even tell you,
it’s like there is a scoreboard of debt. Claustrophobic —
but it’s good too, innit? Cohesive social network — and
sometimes it’s really sincere, no?”
“I don’t like it.” Amir paused to snatch the check,
which didn’t even have a chance to graze the table before he grabbed
it.
“What are you doing?”
“You paid last time. And I’m older.”
“No way, dude. I’m a working woman, you’re a grad
student. Let me pay.”
“I’m the man.”
“You’re hideous. But fine, if you want to be like that,
I’ll get you next time. Hey, wait a minute — who’s
being so Iranian now?”
“Ha, ha. Shut up.”
*
Speaking of pizza, Iranians like pizza. They crowd into brightly-lit
little restaurants, sit on red stools, in booths, order their pie. Then
when the pizza arrives — no sausage or pepperoni here, we’re
Muslim, thank you — they squeeze ketchup all over it.
Pizza is sort of the cool and modern thing to do. Hip couples, families
celebrating a special occasion, these are the people who seem to crowd
into the trendy pizza shops.
Thais in Chiang Mai seem to feel the same way about their KFC. Fried
chicken — a perfect date food, who knew? Greasy-faced lovers,
making eyes over the Colonel’s finest. I suppose there is something
exciting about the allure of the West, even its junk food.
*
Iran is an amazingly young country — some seventy percent are
under 30, and these children of the Islamic Revolution are often touted
as the ones who will bring it down entirely. Weaned on satellite feeds
from the States, radio news from Tehrangeles (or Los Angeles, with its
huge Iranian expatriate population), sporting the floppy haircuts of
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Titanic, blogging
about their sex lives, many are looking for “democracy without
prefix or suffix,” according to one of the leading student groups.
While they are steadfastly Iranian, many young people also have a consuming
interest in the world outside their borders, and a bit of a soft spot
for the cultural products of the Great Satan itself, the United States.
In Cambodia, perhaps fifty percent are under 18, and many in the capital
of Phnom Penh seem to be trying to sort through a jumble of Western
and Khmer messages about how to live their lives. My closest friend
in Cambodia, barely 21, protests the restraints on Khmer women —
“The women cannot have boyfriends before they get married. But
the men — ohhhh,” he laughs. “The women have to be
virgins, you know? Stupid! The men should ask themselves, ‘Am
I a virgin?’” He decries the prevalence of the Cambodian
sniff-kiss over the Western lip-kiss, the deplorable state of education
and job opportunities for young women. “I see how foreigners behave,
and some of it seems much better. The women can go anywhere and do anything,
like you.”
Well, it’s not perfect, I tell him. There is still a lot of discrimination
against women, and if sex is so readily available, it can cheapen the
experience.
“Yes, I know. But I want to take some things from Western culture,
some from my own. I want to make a big, big culture.” He leaps
up as he tends to do when he’s excited, spreading his arms out.
“Not just a small one, or else how can we grow?”
*
The tiny bows, hand held over heart, the effusive outpouring of words,
the hand flapping, the vehement denials, pressing forward again, warding
off again, over and over — this is the dance of ta’arof.
A flood of pretty flattery, of frilly etiquette, of saying what you
might not really mean for the sake of being socially graceful. I couldn’t
do it, but I could see it. Aaaah, I thought. How familiar. I refused
gifts until they were pressed upon me the three magical times. I paused
outside doorways and engaged in wilder and wilder gesticulations in
attempts to shoo others in first. There’s even a joke in Iran
about the last…A woman becomes pregnant. Nine months pass, then
years, then decades, as she grows old and exasperated and desperate
— until she suddenly gives birth to two fully grown, bearded twins.
The father howls, What took you so long? And the sons say, We couldn’t
decide who would go first.
I told Marjane Satrapi, a cartoonist known for her memoirs about growing
up during the Islamic Revolution, how familiar ta’arof felt from
my time in Japan and Thailand. She wrinkled her nose and blew out a
puff of smoke.
“My God, I cannot do this ta’arof,” she declared.
“In the market next to my parents’ house, one shoe seller
offered me some shoes. ‘Take them,’ he said. ‘You
are such an august guest, I would be honored to give you these shoes.’
So I said, ‘Really?’ And I took the shoes. No one ever did
ta’arof to me ever again in that market.”
“No way. Could I do that?”
“Maybe for you, I would not recommend it.”
*
Where there is ta’arof, there are elaborate conceptions of space,
of inside and outside. What is ta’arof, after all, but a wall,
keeping one from seeing another’s true feelings?
I stood outside the old palace in Kashan, looking at the door. Plain
enough, with a heavy round knocker for men to use, and a light straight
one for women. They make different noises, so the inhabitants would
know who to send out to answer the door.
Inside was an unbelievable sumptuousness. Light-filled windows and archways
and hallways looking out onto a lush, coiling garden, fountains, flower-strewn
pathways, sculpted with both architectural rigor and poetic expression.
The word “paradise” is derived from Farsi, I later learned,
meaning an enclosed garden, a heaven within high walls.
The contrast reminded me of the fleeting glimpses I sometimes caught
in Japan, through gaps in gateways, down narrow alleys between squat
concrete buildings, of verdant beauty, a serene house floating in sunlight.
The regimentation of space is also something of a survival mechanism
— in Iran, to maintain the integrity of one’s own self,
thought, opinion, imagination against a probing, mercurial and repressive
regime. Some wealthy Tehranis have taken the concept to an extreme,
throwing extravagant parties that have become a mainstay of Western
reporting on Iran — see beneath the austere veil? The wildness,
the wantonness, the masses yearning to breathe free? There is some truth
to the easy image — the social schizophrenia of a devout façade
that masks a freer, more experimental, more hedonistic self. But the
concept of decorum has been a part of Iran long before the Islamic revolution…
and there is a freedom that can be found in restraint — if it
is chosen willingly. A private paradise, all the more precious for the
care with which it reveals itself.
*
We were looking for the Revolutionary Guards. The bearded young men
— often from the poorer and more devout sections of Tehran, or
the countryside — in charge of guarding our morality. Particularly
the morality of young couples who have gathered to flirt in the relative
freedom of the mountains surrounding Tehran, in quiet corners of public
parks.
We looked by the artificial pond, near the park benches, around the
open spaces, on the stairs terracing down from the hills. No one. No
khaki green, no bristling beards, no fierce-eyed fanaticism, ready with
a beating and a verse from the Koran and a hand held out for a bribe.
It scarcely mattered — they patrol inside my friends’ heads
anyway, asserting a Foucauldian control over their behavior, what they
talk about in public, how they tug their veils over their foreheads
in some places, draw them daringly back over carefully heaped hair in
others. The guards are enforcers of the ever-shifting “red lines,”
the demarcations that govern allowable behavior and that change according
to who is in political power and has the upper hand. In the early, bright,
hopeful days after the election of reformist President Mohammad Khatami
in 1997? More crooning couples in the parks, veils drawn back, an explosion
of films and reformist journals and newspapers. And after conservatives
seized control of the parliament again? Darker clothes, shuttered publications,
protests to safeguard women’s morality. In a place where the rules
change every day, and shift according to where you are, people have
become accustomed to heeding their own internal monitors, their inner
Revolutionary Guards.
*
She stops to see if I’m lost, this young Burmese woman, trim,
neat in her patterned skirt, thanaka powder on her cheeks, eyes bright
underneath her hat. She parks her motorcycle, and tells me a bit of
her life – she makes a living selling her husband’s paintings.
Although the life is difficult, there aren’t so many tourists
at the temple where they are stationed. So why not go to a different
one? “Oh, we cannot,” she says cheerfully. “We have
to ask the government and pay a lot of money, and if we go and do not
tell them, we will maybe go to jail. They do this often.”
I am aghast. Really? “Oh, yes.”
We chat a bit more about her life and mine. Her children, living in
the beauty of Bagan, the thousands of temples tucked along this bend
in the Irrawaddy river. She is so lovely that I want to remember our
conversation by taking her picture. She smilingly agrees, but after
I snap her photo and ask her name again, her brow begins to crease with
worry. “What I told you about the government, it is not so true.
It is not a problem. Just a small story.” She repeats this over
and over. I’m confused by the change…and then stunned by
my thoughtlessness.
“Oh no, please don’t worry… I understand.” Sweat
begins to trickle down my hairline. After much persuasion, her face
begins to unclench. She smiles again, and hops back on her motorcycle
to get back to her stall before the sunset rush.
I trudge off to a stupa, clamber up and gaze over the silvery arm of
the river, mist hanging over the golden spires and crumbling towers
of Bagan. I am totally alone, watching the flashbulbs pop from a more
popular lookout point. I talk to myself a bit, and to the setting sun,
and then sit, soaking in the silence, the solitude, the feeling —
now tinged with bitterness — of being free and unseen.
*
What is so subversive about reading in a room by yourself? Or reading
with a bunch of women? A great deal, according to Azar Nafisi, author
of Reading Lolita in Tehran, about a “book club”
the former Tehran University professor created with some of her brightest
and most engaged female students.
Reading in the private theater of the mind — how daring it is
to imagine things, and to dream of scripting one’s own narrative,
writes Nafisi. Lolita could never represent herself — her image,
her form, her sex, everything about her is described to us through the
eyes of her tormenter, Humbert Humbert. We have to struggle to read
against the grain, to find the hidden traces of her, her resistance.
She fights back in the text the same way that, Nafisi argues, Iranians
fight for their right to self-determination and expression against a
censoring, controlling government.
The Iranian regime is not alone in its contentious relationship to art,
its multiplicity, its slipperiness, its subversiveness, how it can open
to many different interpretations. “The Khmer Rouge hated what
they could not control,” says Delphine Kassem, the vice president
of the Cambodian theater group Sovanna Phum. “And who can control
a performance, how people understand it?” Attempting to eradicate
the arts was a move to destroy the relations established in their teaching
— from master to student, from relative to relative. Enemies were
“pulled out at the root,” killed with their entire families,
kinship broken, individuals forced to align themselves only to Angkar
— the organization, as the Khmer Rouge called themselves —
like spokes on a wheel radiating out from only the center. At a dance
school, I watch an elderly woman — a famous dancer who survived
the Khmer Rouge years — bending to teach a seven-year-old. Only
a dance lesson… and the work of weaving together their world again.
*
Tea in shadow, tea in light.
Trading the choking smog of Tehran for the clear night of Shiraz, we
paid a pilgrimage to the tombs of the beloved poets Sa’adi and
Hafez, arched structures curving over the graves, thickly clustered
with flickering script. Young couples rested their fingertips on the
poets’ graves, recited precious lines, eyes closed in concentration,
in rapture. A teahouse was attached to one of the sites — a reverie
of dappled darkness, the aroma of night-blooming jasmine and apple-scented
smoke.
We drank tea the Iranian way, a sugar cube clenched in the mouth, puffed
on a water pipe. Burnt, fruity sweetness wafted through the air, lifted
on the breeze like the poetry a singer was reciting over a loudspeaker.
The words of Hafez in particular are thought to be so beautiful and
true that they can point the way to the future, divination through poetry.
Young men and women whispered together on carpeted platforms, the singer’s
long liquid vowels unreeling the filament of their lives and loves as
they sat in moonlight and shadow.
The jangling light of Yangon, the street curb caked with dust and mud,
the tea made thick and bitter, with only a slick of sweet condensed
milk at the bottom to cut the strength. We are talking of film and faith,
of literature and art and love and loss between sips of tea growing
cold, so searingly intense that everything drops away — the howling
naked baby and the loogie-hocking grandfather behind, the vendor shouting
in the street, the cars roaring past — and I realize I have traveled
halfway around the world to finally be here, here, here.
My friend asks me impossible questions like, What do you think is good
governance? I fumble, struggle, say that my country’s leaders
are providing less and less of a good answer to that hard question with
their estrangement from reality, their attachment to their internal
visions. His thought — first, the government must really see the
people. Ah yes, I say. Marjane Satrapi often draws the Islamic fundamentalists
of Iran without eyes. And the chief film censor for many years was nearly
blind. His response is silence, and a sudden, sharp smile.
We talk of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, those great books
about letters and loneliness and the bitter-almond scent of cyanide
and the fate of unrequited love. He draws a diagram of those who stay
and those who go — a dot anchoring the center of a circle, explaining
his attachment to his country, as I talk of my wanderlust. The man who
cannot go, the woman who cannot stay — it is an unlikely meeting,
with its own karmic congruencies and paradoxes and portent, writers
both, one whose passport is worn out with visas, the other whose curiosity
about the unseen world has fueled an endless appetite for its art.
I later realize that I’ve had my own neither East nor West moments,
talking of Iran in Burma, hearing songs of transcendental love in the
axis of evil, sitting in the noumenal space of tea in light and tea
in shadow, watching life — a love told in books, a tender dance
— unfolding. “Neither East nor West” — the phrase
is still defiant, a strike against those who would pit us against each
other in a simplistic clash of civilizations — but it is also
brushed with a nearly ineffable sense of possibility, with the ways
we remake ourselves when we read and write of each other, when we can
finally meet even though we “come from the ends of the earth,”
as Kipling says, to do something as simple and eternal as talking over
tea.
Miro
Phanruang is a pseudonym. This piece is for K and PK, whose names she
cannot write, but will never forget.
Copyright
held by the author
Back to Selections
Subscriptions
