Abnousse Shalmani

Khomeini, Sade and Me

Translated from the French by Charlotte Coombe

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London

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Copyright © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2014

English translation copyright © Charlotte Coombe, 2016

Cover design Multitude

Image credit JF Paga © Grasset

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Khomeiny, Sade et moi in France in 2014 by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-052-3

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To my father

‘I desire the freedom to scorn or mock all religions; the people who gather in some temple to invoke the Eternal in their fashion should be seen as stage actors, whom everyone is permitted to laugh at. If you do not view the religions in these terms, they will reclaim their serious character, and then their importance (…).

I cannot reiterate it often enough: no more gods, Frenchmen, no more gods, if you do not want their catastrophic dominion to quickly plunge you back into the horrors of despotism; but you will destroy them purely by deriding them; all the dangers in their wake will promptly resurface in throngs if you fight them listlessly and take them too seriously. Do not topple their idols in anger; pulverize them while playing, and public opinion will tumble of its own accord.’

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade,

‘Frenchmen, some more effort if you wish to become Republicans’, in Philosophy in the Boudoir*

* Philosophy in the Boudoir, Marquis de Sade D.A.F. Penguin Classics Paperback (2006).

Tehran, 1983

When I was a little girl, I felt a strong desire to get naked in the school playground. It wasn’t because of the intense heat: it was an act of provocation. The same kind of provocation that made me play leapfrog in the school mosque. It was physical.

I don’t want to wear that thing. It’s so ugly! No way! And with the logic that is so unique to children: okay then, but just you wait and see. I’ll get my revenge! I will wear that tight, suffocating grey headscarf, but you’ll see. And lots of them did see. My arse.

I don’t want to wear the veil, but I have to put it on to go to school, and sometimes when I go out in the street, go shopping or see my friends. I do it. But as soon as the bell rings at the end of the day, I take it off. Not just the grey hijab, but also the regulation dress and the equally regulation and equally grey trousers. I hide in the stairwell or take refuge in the toilets, just before my classmates make their way out of the school gates. I take it all off, or sometimes I keep my knickers on, depending on how the mood takes me. Then I ball everything up and stuff it in my schoolbag, and off I go, sprinting at full pelt toward the main gate, dodging the Crows who spring into action at the sight of my naked bottom. I score points: half a point for one Crow dodged, one point for two Crows dodged, three points if a Crow trips up over the hem of her chador[1], and so on.

I win every time: they don’t know how to run in a chador. I end up in the car that is waiting for me with the driver—who is also the gardener—of the big house in Tehran where my great-aunt and uncle live along with my two younger aunts. My parents live just down the road in an apartment—my father hung on to his independence—but we spend most of our time up at the big house. I put my knickers and white T-shirt back on; there’s no point being naked in the car. The driver-gardener will tell on me, I know it. The last time he did that, I chased him round the garden with the watering hose. There is a mutual dislike between us; he hates my cats that live in the garden and ruin all his handiwork; and I hate the fact that he’s the only one who doesn’t laugh at my crazy naked dash. If he complains—again—to my great-aunt, I swear I’ll pull up all the tulips he has just planted.

Why did I find such pleasure in exposing myself time and time again? Above all, it was fun. It is always amusing for a six-year-old child to make adults run around. Those adults in particular, more so than others. Bundled up in their black chadors, the Crow-women chased and hurled themselves at me. It’s surprising, the hysteria that a naked child provokes. I had fun, I amused my classmates, I enraged the Crows, and I worried my family. I had become the centre of attention for lots of people; I had become a hero among my schoolmates, even the older ones. And nobody that mattered, not my father, nor my mother, not my aunts nor my uncle had ever punished me for it.

I’m sure they thought I might be slightly unhinged, because each time I was suspended from school I did the same thing again, reducing my mother and the driver-gardener to nervous wrecks. But after witnessing one of my ridiculous chases, my family’s laughter outweighed their concerns about my mental health. As the Crow-women carried on with their duties, painting my city and my childhood black, I carried on getting naked.

I wasn’t the only one playing that game. Nudity was on everybody’s minds, just before and after the Revolution of the mullahs. To this day I can still hear the questions, the uncertainty and tension over a skirt that revealed too much ankle, or a blouse that was too low-cut for dinner at the So-and-sos’. A full-body inspection was an essential ritual before leaving the house. ‘You’re crazy! You can’t go out like that!’ was the standard dressing-down you received before you faced the outside world. The morality police and their ‘guardians of the Revolution’ kept a close watch on every street corner. They scrutinized the men and women passing by, observing them with an unhealthy interest, a self-appointed voyeurism, a systematic ogling, trying to spot the slightest sliver of skin that might have escaped the family’s vigilance. The way the Beards and Crows look at you is anything but discreet. Despite firmly advocating the disappearance of the body and insulting anyone who dares to raise their eyes, they let their own eyes wander freely over the terrified crowd, undressing them, in the name of the law.

I did not understand how I was the only one getting naked. Every day I observed the ritual of my mothers and aunts putting on their hijabs and I was revolted: meekly they covered themselves before going out—even though, every time, like some kind of incantation, they cursed Khomeini and all the Beards the world over. But children need heroes. And it would be an understatement to say that the Beards were not exactly heroes for me. My mother and my aunts had not even tried to remove, rip or trample their veils, as I had done when they made me try on the headscarf for the first time. Their lack of revolt was revolting to me.

I do remember one morning, though, when my mother had woken up in a strange, agitated sort of mood. My little brother had just been born and she was totally exhausted. She was holding my hijab in her hand, when suddenly she flung it to the floor and pulled a different scarf out of a drawer. It was bright red with an Indian pattern on it, and moreover it was see-through. She fastened it round my chin. Of course, I did not pass the clothing inspection at the school entrance. I was sent straight home. Though she never used me like that as a form of rebellion ever again, I remember her mischievous smile as she saw me getting out of the car, just twenty minutes after I had left for school. Perhaps she had simply wanted her oldest child at home with her that day, or perhaps it was the absurdity of the swathes of grey covering her little girl that had impulsively made her dress me in red. Either way, I was incredibly proud of my mother that day.

And the men? How did they protect their identities? They didn’t! They all looked the same. They didn’t dare to bare their arms or legs either, and it was rare to see someone without a moustache or a beard. If women dared to wear a colourful scarf, or men dared to wear a tie, if women wore lipstick or men attempted a flowery Hawaiian shirt, they would swiftly be whisked away to the local police station or to a shop—formerly a tea shop—which was now used as an office by the morality police. There, morality was dealt out to them in the form of shouts and insults. Or worse. But in those cases, you were sent to the cell. A real cell in a real prison. If the Crows and Beards were to be believed, a bare forearm or manicured nails were tantamount to a rejection of God and an act of treason against Ayatollah Khomeini—it was always about him. My bare bottom was therefore a supreme insult, the ultimate act of revolt. Nowadays, although I do understand the mechanism of ultra-contagious fear, I cannot come to terms with it. The ease with which everyone is made to look like everyone else is still a strange source of anxiety for me. What if everyone had taken all their clothes off, like me? What if all the random passers-by in the streets of Tehran had suddenly whipped off all their clothes? Would Khomeini have sent in his army to open fire on a crowd of naked people? The Revolution might have ended right then and there.

The guardians of the Revolution were the lords of the street, and it would have been impossible for me to take my clothes off there. They were far tougher than the schoolyard Crows; convinced of their righteousness, victorious. I not only couldn’t, because I was always with someone when I went out; but I also didn’t need to, because the veil wasn’t actually obligatory in the street for little girls under the age of eight. It depended on which neighbourhood you were going to. In the bazaar or the administrative districts my mother always covered my head, while in the more affluent areas of northern Tehran we could leave my hair uncovered. Everybody was obsessed with the body, or rather with the absence of it. Tehran had become just a sea of faces.

My youngest aunt—my favourite one, the one with the ample bust—was in Paris during the Revolution. She returned to Tehran just afterwards, on ‘holiday’. For a long time she was the most optimistic of her sisters, before caving in to bitterness too. On the flight back to Tehran, she covered her head. As soon as she got off the plane and came face-to-face with a zealous soldier of the new regime—among the ordinary travellers, baggage handlers, customs officers, the secret and less secret police, hidden agents—she felt naked. She was covered head to toe and remembers how she was sweating in her closed shoes, which were far too hot for wearing in a Tehran summer. Even so, she still felt naked. In the eyes of those ‘Mr. and Mrs. Morality’ types who were everywhere, her lips were too well-defined, her eyes too almond-shaped, her body too accustomed to moving freely. And for those ambassadors of morality, she was an insult to decency, to religion, to Khomeini. Later on, in the street, in restaurants, and even in the doctors’ waiting room, everywhere that—whether you liked it or not—men and women had to be in the same space, and so women had to be covered, she still felt naked. Victimized. She returned to Paris post-haste, where she could even be chatted up without feeling that same naked feeling. For it was that, above all, which led to the veiling of women: pervasive sexual desire.

One of my older cousins told me how he was totally shaken up when as a young man he had inadvertently touched the finger of our first cousin, a girl of thirteen who wore the veil. He had never thought she was beautiful, in fact she was far too young and incredibly pious, but this unexpected contact had aroused something in him. To this day, now as a forty-year-old man living in Europe, he still remembers the sensuality of that little fingertip.

As soon as a man entered the stairwell, the supermarket, the bus, the headmistress’s office or the lift, there was always that little gesture which had become automatic: adjusting your headscarf. And of course this gesture caught the eye, fanned the desire. For the majority of veiled Iranian women, it was a form of flirting disguised as extreme piousness. But I know one woman who did not play the game of false modesty. She was a friend of the family, famous for the sensual way she adjusted her headscarf: it was the dance of the seven veils, albeit in reverse, but every bit as mesmerizing. I recently found out that she has remarried for the fourth time in Miami. In 1960s Tehran she had taken over the family business from her father, a pastry chef by trade. She successfully developed the business from a regional to a national level. As a child she had fascinated me, just as she enthralled my father, who would spend entire nights drinking and debating with her. She was easily in her forties and never left the house without make-up on, neither before nor after the Revolution, and her regulation clothing was such a pale grey that in the sombre streets, all you could see was her. She said she was too old to be afraid. Every time she got arrested, she managed to get herself freed thanks to her numerous contacts. She was not easily deterred. But in 1982 she decided to go to San Diego to join the Iranian community there, living as they did in Tehran before the Revolution. I know that she still plays cards every night, sometimes all night, and that she often has to wake her son up at 4 a.m. to get him to lend her the money to finish her game. I remember how she used to laugh at all the gossip and how she had such vulgar language that my mother would blush before she had even opened her mouth. This friend of the family was the only woman who openly congratulated me for baring my bottom. She leaned in toward my mother and whispered in her ear, ‘You should be thrilled to have a daughter like that, despite the poker you and your sisters have up your arses.’ This family friend was the only other woman I knew who also exposed herself to people.

On the bus, people avoided looking at each other to get a better look at each other. It was so weird: you should never, and I mean never, meet the eye of any unknown man: any man who was not your father, or brother, or husband, or son. Your eyes had to be fixed on the ground. You had only to forget for a moment, to be daydreaming, staring off into space, to accidentally make eye contact with a man, and suddenly you were as ruined as a woman of the nineteenth century would have been for surrendering her virginity to a man out of wedlock. One day, my mother was followed by a man she had inadvertently looked at on the bus. He had taken it as an invitation. The more she fled, the more offended he became. He ended up calling her a whore. My aunt’s wonderfully shapely breasts were not to blame for her being sexualized by men. Even I, a mere child, was effectively assigned breasts by the ‘old man in black and white’ and was seen as a sexual object.

In this context, for a child who was a woman in the eyes of the law, the fact of getting naked symbolized a return to innocence: the exact opposite of the sexual desire caused by the veiling of women. Everybody had started to look out for visible traces of the body in public spaces. In the streets, in cafes, supermarkets, everyone became like furtive animals, constantly keeping an eye on everyone else. The guardians of the Revolution were already redundant.

[1] A large cloth worn as a combination head covering, veil, and shawl usually by Muslim women especially in Iran.

Paris, 2013

If Ayatollah Khomeini had not decided, one fine day, to politicize his faith, he might have had better things to do than transform little girls into women. Although I was still utterly a child, wearing the veil elevated me to the same level as women. Real women. Women with breasts and hips, with make-up and children. Since they no longer had the right to appear in public, the nape of my neck, my hair, my ankles, and my wrists all suddenly had the same impact as those of real women. By covering my head and body in grey, black, brown, or navy (the only colours permitted by law) the ‘old man in black and white’ decided to stop making the distinction between women of different ages. And it didn’t stop there. Little boys and girls were no longer seen as children, but treated as men and women. All of them were swallowed up in the sinister, anonymous crowd, which was supposed to be nothing more than a single shout, a single people, a single faith. How can I describe the complete transformation of both the physical landscape and mental attitudes that took place with the veiling of Tehran? How can I capture that totally unique atmosphere? Even calling on photographs, films or archives that clearly show the before and after, there is something missing: the feeling. And this feeling, which was an inextricable part of the social landscape after the Revolution, is something shared by us, women and girls, who experienced it from the inside. I allow myself to say us because we all disappeared at the same time. All of a sudden there were no more children, adults or teenagers. There were no trendy young men or well-to-do women, good little girls or fine arts students. There were men, and there were women. These days you can see a variety of clothing on the streets of Tehran again. Coloured scarves are permitted—or at least there are no guardians of the Revolution hunting for any wayward lock of hair—and women no longer have to fasten them round their face and under their chin. They drape them lightly over their tinted, blow-dried, styled hair. Tehran does not look the same as it did in my childhood. But after the Revolution it was important to hide anything that made you stand out from the crowd. It was dangerous. The bourgeoisie drank alcohol, and had a western and therefore debauched lifestyle; students were bound to be unruly; pretty women out walking in the street could only be whores; men wearing ties must have been traitors to their country; the mother of a family coming out of a supposedly deviant (communist) bookshop instantly became a suspicious element.

In order to instil the Revolution in people’s souls as deeply as possible, a reign of total fear was necessary. It was the era of suspicion. There was something in the air that made pedestrians cling to the walls. Quite literally. The street no longer just belonged to the guardians of the Revolution, the militants, and the madmen. Young, charismatic Beards were also suddenly making proclamations in the street, in the midst of the passers-by. The words on everyone’s lips—the return of the Shah to stand trial, the liberation of this or that prisoner, the closing of the cinemas, the destruction of the United States, the murder of a famous singer—passed from mouth to mouth until they swelled into a spontaneous demonstration. And if you defected by not chiming in with the crowd, there was always someone nearby ready to cast you a dirty look, and if the words were clearly not coming out of your mouth, that somebody, thrown into a panic by what he was unable to control, would raise his accusing finger and call for your head. Then it was you that everyone was talking about.

Try and picture a crowd of people shouting, sinister, aggressive, and above all, terrified. What made this post-Revolution crowd so dangerous was the fear. Going outside was always risky. Tensions ran so high that even children did not chatter away idly or look around inquisitively, or smile up at whoever walked by. How can I describe the way the veil makes you invisible, makes sure you disappear into the crowd? You no longer exist. Yet the great paradox of the Beards’ Revolution of 1979 is that the more women were covered up, the more they were sexualized. The more the crowd swallows you, the more you sink into it, and the less eye contact you have—or worse, physical contact—the more it causes an outpouring of sensuality to which nobody is immune.

My guerrilla nudity as a child shaped me, carved out my personality and sowed the seeds of my future passions. This childish nakedness that would always oppose the veil and the hiding, denial and exclusion of the female body, was something that has obsessed me to this day. There is also a real relationship between Khomeini and me. He embodies everything related to my femininity. I fed Khomeini with my reading and my life choices; I kept him close to me so that I never forgot that morning in February 1979 when an ‘old man in black and white’ completely turned my life upside down; I know that he is my greatest enemy. Years later, Khomeini is still there. With his swathes of cloth, his black turban, his sexual apartheid. Khomeini lies in wait; he is there in smiles, in a bared breast or in the veil’s sinister fabric.

Years later, I realize that getting naked was the only visible way of defending myself against Khomeini. I was drowning in grey fabric, and my mouth was sealed shut by the law. Taking my clothes off was my way of showing him that he was way out of line. I was just a little girl. I look back at the images—the archives, but Khomeini has not yet become an archive for me: he is still too alive—and the most striking thing is the long layers of clothing covering him. Several long embroidered robes in fine matching fabrics, and of course the turban, black or white, depending on the genetic standing of the wearer. For only the descendants of Ali are permitted to wear a black turban. Khomeini wore his black turban proudly. Khomeini was the Mahdi: the hidden Imam of Shia Islam who would come to save the Muslims. Many people believed this and many are still convinced of it to this day. The black turban of the sole descendants of the first of the martyrs. Ali and his sons and his descendants. And all the other believers. Iranian Shia Islam is mystical martyrdom. It is beautiful and dangerous. Beautiful inasmuch as it is the culture, but dangerous when it becomes a political slogan, entrenched in law. The Beards of my childhood are there, covered from head to toe. Not content with being covered up, they wanted to see the rest of the world swathed in fabric too. And just as any child pulls off anything that smothers it, I ripped off the fabrics that were suffocating me.

Years later, one morning, there it was: the photo of Aliaa Elmahdy. The nude photo of Aliaa Elmahdy, the Egyptian student who wanted to be free. In stockings and red ballet pumps. No bra, no knickers. She was not yet twenty years old and there was no malice in her nudity. Paradoxically, despite the stockings, despite the flower in her hair, despite the pubic hair and nipples on display, she looked like a little girl. I had already started writing Khomeini, Sade and Me three or four months earlier. And there was that photo of Aliaa Elmahdy, right in front of my eyes, as if taking my hand and leading me back through time and space. From the little Iranian girl who got naked to the Egyptian student who gets naked to claim the right to have a body, the female body is always the issue; a body both risqué and at risk. How a woman’s body is perceived is a good indicator of the state of law, equality, and education. Each woman’s body carries the history of her country. Looking at that image of Aliaa Elmahdy naked gives me hope. Thirty years later, she hasn’t managed to find a better answer to Khomeini either.

Tehran, April 1979

I would never hug my mother—or any other woman—until she had taken off her grey outdoor clothing. She was anonymous like the others; she wasn’t my mother when she was covered head to toe in grey. I needed to see her hair and skin to recognize her. Naturally, I was also afraid of disappearing—like her—beneath the influence of the veil. The exact feeling goes back to my second birthday. My mother had come home and ripped off her headscarf as if tearing her hair out. She threw the newspaper down on the table in front of my father, and before he could say anything, my aunts arrived, one after the other, each pulling off her headscarf, each with a newspaper tucked under her arm. My father read aloud, and they all kept saying over and over again, ‘We’re screwed.’ My mother cried. One of my aunts got drunk with my father and spent the rest of the night vomiting. My uncles kept very quiet. As communists, it was a worrying time for them. I did not want to be like my aunts, tearing out their hair and being sick while making awful noises. I did not want to be like the women that I watched fearfully from the window of my parent’s living room, when the ink was barely dry on the new regime’s official daily newspaper publishing the new Constitution. It had been voted in, proclaimed, recorded. Religion had just celebrated its unhealthy union with the law. An unnatural marriage that would issue forth a prolific and troubled progeny, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the port of Algiers, the prisons of Tunisia and the poverty-stricken streets of Cairo.

It was 1 April 1979: the date of the referendum that sanctified the Beards as the new government. In an ironic twist of fate, it is also the date of my birthday. Ever since then I have been doomed to share my birthday with that of the proclamation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I have only three terrible Polaroid pictures—all of them far too dark—of that birthday. That 1 April is the first historical date I can remember. The Islamic Revolution had already deeply affected me as a child by giving me an impressively accurate memory at an early age. I had an uncontrollable urge to visualize and recreate things in my mind because there was too much noise, too much movement, not enough normality, not enough consistency. There was only one thing that was more stable and constant than Khomeini, and that was history.

There were four years between the end of the Shah and when I started to wear the veil. Four years when I still looked like a little girl. Since 1 April 1979 I had known that sooner or later I would have to look like all the others. When the time came for me to go to school and wear the veil, it was tragic in a typically Iranian way, with much sulking, silent tears rolling down my cheeks, my eyes huge and moist. The veil was the end of the world to me. My first historical moment became the litany of my despair.

Perhaps all children of history who are flung out of their everyday lives—by forces that seem sometimes like the wrath of unhappy gods—are more sensitive when it comes to the past. When it comes to history. As if those in exile have an instinctive familiarity with the past. Exiles hold the key to yesterday because they are sealed shut to the future; they are the victims of an almost divine movement that is more powerful than they are; they are unable to imagine a future. Perhaps that is why I find it so easy to travel back in time to be with the likes of Diderot, Sade or Boyer d’Argens: I have always felt close to the past because it is so easy for me to sneak away back into it. The present has its limits; only the past can open the floodgates of hope so you can cling to something that is more solid than your reality. And there is nothing more solid than the historical past. Some call it identity, others integration, and others call it loss of the self. Personally, by studying the past I’ve found the best way to understand my childhood and to share a common memory with the country I became a part of after exile. I was born several times. Once on that day in April, again when I removed my veil and asserted my nakedness, a third time when I set foot on French soil, and again when I opened a book by Zola and discovered eighteenth-century French libertine literature. Each birth was like the story of a new love. Exiles have huge hearts.

From 1 April 1979 onwards, all dates are indiscriminately etched in my memory. I memorize the markers of Time to reassure myself. Dates are my tranquilizers. There are key dates and there are timeouts, there are glorious, poetic, and terrifying dates. That’s how I remember the exact day when West Side Story, in the form of a miraculous VHS, burst into my life, or rather into the video player that my mother had saved from the clutches of the morality police by cleverly hiding it inside the mattress. As all the other video players in the building had been taken away by the police, my parents used to connect theirs up to their neighbours’ TVs via the fire escape. We therefore had to agree on the evening movie from everybody’s VHS collections—quite a meagre selection that arrived in dribs and drabs from the United States, Germany or France via family, or sometimes via the once-thriving black market. I can no longer remember if it was in the clandestine bookshop/grocery store/bar belonging to one of his army friends that my father had found George Chakiris and Natalie Wood, or if it was my American uncle who had sent it via a thousand intermediaries, along with a plethora of chocolates and cinnamon-flavoured chewing gum. But I remember that I jumped around all over the place, dancing and clapping my hands. I was seven years old and I had never seen a musical. I decided to become a dancer: the dancing body was yet another weapon that could be used against Khomeini. Body language is an entrancing, unknown sort of gibberish to the Beards and Crows. They hate it. And so because they wanted to hide everything like that, for no reason other than out of fear, my immediate reaction was to want to put my body on show. I took classical dance lessons but it had nothing to do with red blouses and high heels, ruffled dresses and sensual swaying. From that day onwards, my long-suffering family and friends had to sit through my endless dance routines—whose only redeeming quality was the determination I put into making the enjoyment last as long as possible. As soon as I got home I would rush over to the VCR and put on the film, then I sang and danced along with all the numbers. Or rather, massacred them. The neighbours could not turn on their TV sets without having to endure ‘I Feel Pretty’ for the gazillionth time.

My passion for dance led to my expulsion from school. Not content with dancing alone, I started a dance troupe with my classmates. We were caught in the middle of a dance show in the school toilets, and I was sent home. My arguments that we were not naked and we were simply practicing a cabaret show only seemed to make things worse. My dance troupe also dumped me in it, unfortunately. The girls cried, saying that I forced them into it. My parents were called in. I still remember the things they were told. According to the headmistress I had a problem that went far beyond disobedience: I was ‘possessed’, because I had absolutely no modesty. She pushed my parents over the edge by giving them the contact details of an exorcist. I kid you not. That’s what a harmless VHS could lead to under the reign of the Beards and Crows.

I have never been able to rank dates in order of importance. While 1 April 1979 will always be etched indelibly on my mind, 19 March always makes me hum ‘Tonight’ ... These are the two sides of the same story. My childhood filled my life with contradictions: the anonymization of women and the doomed love affair of Tony and Maria; the invisible body and body language; ugliness and art. And I already knew that one could fight the other.

Paris, 2013

What can you do if the past sticks to your skin like a plaster? Ripping it off might tear your skin. You have to subtly pull at it, neither ignoring it, nor pursuing it. You have to pick carefully around the edges: if I know how to do that, then I will know why, and the past will no longer overwhelm me. There will be no more precise dates, no more befores or afters. It will be tamed by the power of knowledge. The past became history on 1 April 1979. I decided at that moment that I had not been born in 1977, but in 1979 instead. That is when my first clear memory dates from. I felt like I didn’t exist before then because I didn’t remember anything before it.

However, the irony of this power struggle is that the Beards are also obsessed with the past. In their desire to impose their ancient prejudices, they have the same compulsion to go back, to return to earlier times, the times of the prophet and his victories, the times of the conquests of Islam, which was an empire. They want to go back in time, to repeat the course of history, back to where they think they can control it.

Here we are, the Beards and me, face-to-face, quarrelling over a shred of memory, over a historical reference, to stall for time. Perhaps the difference between us is that I am looking for something to understand and they are looking for something to emulate. Perhaps they are stuck in a past that they feel is reassuring, and that’s why they want to cling on to it as long as possible. Because—and this is certain—one day, modernity will conquer all. While we wait, we must help those who want to carve little niches of modernity into the labyrinth of prejudices and we must look to the past—and not just Islam’s past. We must provide the keys that break the code, that open up new pathways and enable us to stick two fingers up at the Beards. I think I have one of these keys, which I discovered in the past, in the heart of history. The French Revolution must have had a heart.

We are face-to-face, the Beards and me, and I have a burning desire to show them my arse and shout at them that their identity is not in the distant past they appear to be stuck in. That their truth is here, today, in the change that begins with dusting off faith before hiding it away inside—where it belongs—and occupying the public space. Not just with bodies, but with words as well. Dirty words.

Here we are in confrontation, the Beards and me, face-to-face; each of us is waiting for the other to lower their eyes. But I have already lowered mine and they did not suspect a thing. I lowered mine to read the words of a book, a book born out of my imagination and my disobedience. I won the first round. And ever since that day, I have outwitted them in the stare-down. I looked down, and without them suspecting anything, I read. I won the most important battle of all: that of art against stupidity. I read. There is yet another irony. The first order of the Revelation, the first words uttered by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad who heard him, were: Read. In the name of your Lord, read. It’s crystal clear. I did as I was told, but I purposefully chose the wrong book.

I did not leave the Iran of my childhood unarmed. This desire to rummage about in the past, to understand it, is perhaps the best weapon for fighting all of the world’s Khomeinis. It is crucial to study history, but one can only shed light on history by studying mores and private life. Having knowledge of social organization, relationships with death and with the body, knowing how men see women and how women see men, means never taking the easy route of prejudice. Taking the details into account helps you to pre-empt. And to talk less bullshit. I will never forgive Michel Foucault for supporting the Beards rather than the nasty Shah. Even though Michel Foucault was obliged by his political choices to support a movement of supposed emancipation of the masses against Western domination, and the acculturation that entails, he screwed up. He knew nothing about the moral fabric that held Iranian society together, he knew nothing of the Beards’ horrifying lack of culture and he neatly forgot that Iran had never been colonized. He did not even try to understand what Iranian society was all about and why Khomeini should not have any part in it. It was possible to be against the Shah’s dictatorship without falling into the arms of the Beards, just as it is possible to be against Islamism without being a xenophobe. But to achieve that, you need to know what you are talking about and exactly what you are fighting for.

What I am fighting against is a series of prejudices that imprison women under the veil, which is just the visible part of her inner prison. I am fighting against the Beards and Crows who see a dangerously powerful woman in every little girl. I am fighting against anything that submits women—and men—to the dictatorship of the eye. I am fighting against the awrah[2] to reduce its sphere of damage to the minimum—to its appropriate size, which is no bigger than a fig leaf. I am not fighting against men or women but against concepts, unhealthy traditions, and the violence of prejudice.

We must accept that moral history is intimately linked with political history. It is not a question of reducing history to important dates and important men, nor to stories of intimacy, but about exposing the things that connect them. History is linked with human relations: how we make love, how we eat, whether we close our door or not, how we pray, how we take drugs, how we fantasize, how we sleep with one another. Khomeini is nothing more than a concept that I turn over and over in my mind as if trying to unravel the mystery. He ceased to be a man a long time ago. Understanding how that man got there, understanding what was so relevant in the things he said that it resonated so strongly in the Persian psyche and still does, even thirty years later. That is what will prevent him from being reborn again and again, ad infinitum. An interest in human interaction is what is lacking in all intellectuals, who feel they are superior to men they know nothing about. It is in that dimension that one witnesses women unable to remove their veils without breaking the dictatorship of fathers. And mothers.

[2] The Arabic word Awrah is a term used within Islam that denotes the intimate parts of the body, for both men and women, which must be covered with clothing. Exposing the awrah is unlawful in Islam and is regarded as sin.

Tehran, 1979–1985

Of the six conscious years that I spent in Tehran after the Revolution, between the ages of two and eight, I have terrible memories of women. No man ever made me suffer like the Crow-women of my childhood. I still hold it against them. If a woman so much as raises an eyebrow and tries to say that another woman is a whore, I get angry. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I snap. Either way, it is always the Crow-women of my childhood who come back to me. I will never forgive them.

The first was an enthusiastic activist, with crazy, aggressive eyes and clinical movements. She stridently vilified any woman who didn’t wear the veil. The Revolution was underway and the Left were still cheerfully demonstrating, always in the company of the Beards and Crows. It was all about being against the Shah (who was an absolute dictator), against the Savak (the political police who tortured with a vengeance) and against censorship (which was widespread). The Beards and the communists joined forces to bring down the worst of the monarchs. Very soon it became clear that women should wear the veil during the demonstrations, as they were now clamouring for Khomeini to return (he was in exile in France). The Revolution succeeded in achieving a reign of fear by using fanatical Crow-women like her to constantly accuse and debase women while making them feel guilty. The fact that it took my mother and aunts until that day to realize that their leftist Revolution was at a serious impasse, never ceases to amaze me. They had to wait for hysteria beneath black veils to notice that for some time already, democratic ideals had ceased to exist in that hateful crowd, fuelled by its vibrant nationalism, screaming out their hatred for anything that wasn’t pain and ugliness. It was a crowd of martyrs already preparing themselves to send their children to the front line. That Crow-woman made me fear the crowd. Nobody in the family took part in the demonstrations against the Shah any more, as they came to understand, thanks to my first Crow-woman, that their long hoped-for Revolution had passed by under their noses.

There was another one, the ‘moral supervisor’ of the playground. She loathed me for getting naked every time I was out of her sight (following several successive nude episodes, she began to come and find me at the door of my classroom and escort me to my waiting car). One morning she noticed that my nails were too long. Hygiene was an obsession of the Islamic Revolution. Some vague history of purity and whiteness. Every morning all of the students would line up to have the cleanliness of their hands and the decency of their Islamic garb checked. I have always hated white. Nothing frightens me more than a deserted snow-covered plain. That day in May, the ‘moral supervisor’ was overjoyed to find my nails were too long, as this gave her an excuse to take me to the infirmary and cut them right down to the quick until they bled. That day was the first time I saw her smile. I was so surprised by the smile that I even forgot the pain. She was fired but then rehired—she knew a lot of important Beards—but this torture scene rang alarm bells with my parents. They knew that I could never live in Iran. I wasn’t able to adapt, I didn’t want to look like everyone else; I wanted to be naked. By cutting my nails to the quick, that Crow shaped my parents’ destiny.

There was another one who grabbed my mother’s arm and kept calling her a whore because her headscarf was not covering her hair properly. My mother couldn’t give a damn, since she was holding me in her arms and I was crying because I had mumps. My mother—consumed by that absolute love that affects some mothers more than others—only cared about one thing: getting me to the doctor. The three guardians of the Revolution, including the Crow-woman, had arrived at the precise moment that my mother, holding me in her arms, her headscarf askew, came rushing out of the house to jump in a taxi. The Crow grabbed her roughly by the arm. My mother couldn’t care less, but she ended up at the police station where a charming Beard phoned my father and told him to come and pick up his ‘whore of a wife’. That Crow-woman made me love whores. The way she shouted made me realize how a whore can be delicate and sensitive. She taught me never to use the term ‘whore’ to insult a prostitute. To that woman, I owe my attraction to the great courtesans of the eighteenth century, the horizontal beauties of the Second Empire and the Belle Époque. I owe my passion for Ninon de l’Enclos to that Crow-woman.

There was also a cousin of my parents who became a Crow because she was ugly. The Revolution gave her the chance to turn her ugliness into a strength. She was the first in the family to wear the chador; she was the first to feel the change coming and the only one who stopped associating with future undesirables such as writers, singers, journalists or even the seamstress who used to visit us who had married a German. She was the only one who adapted perfectly to the new era that was dawning. She met her husband at one of the demonstrations. Her ugliness was a measure of her purity and he quickly married her. Even quicker still, he became the head of the Basij[3] in his neighbourhood, then of his district, and finally he ended up in an important international position. The ugly woman became rich and respectable and took her role as a ‘muse of the Beards’ very seriously. The last memory I have of her is very specific: it took place in her huge house, which was devoid of any decoration; white, sad, immense. Inside it, our voices echoed. We were visiting her precisely because she was a threat to us. They explained to me a thousand times that I shouldn’t say anything about the wine my father made at home (and even less about how I crushed the grapes under my feet as I recited my lessons), and that I shouldn’t take off my headscarf—or my dress for that matter—and that I definitely should not recite the funny anti-Beard ditty that my father had made me learn by heart to liven up the dull evenings. I should keep quiet and most importantly, never answer a question with anything other than a saintly smile. As soon as we arrived we were separated into two groups: men and women. Sitting with the women and feeling utterly bored, and despite being forbidden to say anything, I dared to ask for some colouring pencils and paper so that I could do some drawing. Big mistake! The ugly cousin told me that we should not draw human figures. I replied that I only drew cats. This was true. She refused to believe me. I asked again, and promised, hand on my heart, to only draw cats. I promised that I would hide under the table, behind the sofa, in the toilets, if I could just draw some cats. She flatly refused. I was a whisker away from kneeling down and making the sign of the cross—I was a big fan of making the sign of the cross ever since I had discovered the film The Song of Bernadette, which was on TV every Christmas—when my mother told me to sit down, casting me a dark look. The cousin took the opportunity to stop me from asking again, by assuring me that God saw everything, everywhere. I wish she hadn’t said that! I already knew that God did not exist because my father did not believe in him, but I had never considered the idea that God might be everywhere and might be able to see everything. I did not say another word. But when I went to the toilet, I couldn’t help thinking that God was watching me. It was paralysing, yet liberating. That same Crow-cousin later sent the morality police round to my parents’ house and forced my father to burn a bathtub full of banned books, or else they would send him to prison. It was the most difficult experience of his life. My mother was screaming that books would be the death of us—they had already got my brother imprisoned under the Shah—and that I would never see them again, and I would have to look after my little brother. She forbade me from continuing to love books. That Crow-cousin taught me that God was everywhere and that I should stop looking for him and just leave him the hell alone.

One day—and this memory could be real, or fantasy recreated later by the combined forces of memory and fear—there were hundreds of Crow-women (and Beards as well) passing by, holding the charred body of a prostitute above their heads. Demonstrators had locked some prostitutes inside one of Tehran’s brothels and set fire to it. They waited for the bodies to be roasted alive and then they passed them out over their heads, with hands stretched to the sky; the hands of people who in normal times would be incapable of hurting a fly. I still don’t know if this is a memory recreated from a photo by Abbas, or if I really saw it. My mother remembers the scene but doesn’t know—or doesn’t want to know—if I was with her that day. I think I remember it perfectly—as if I had experienced it, with the smells, the exact blue of the sky, the noise, and the blackened corpse frozen in an almost absurd defensive position, blending with the black chadors. Sometimes I close my eyes and it is the photo taken by Abbas, the same setting, the same depth of field, the same faces that come to mind. Those Crow-women—who thought that God and the Revolution were in danger as long as the city’s prostitutes were still breathing—were no longer women. They condemned themselves by trotting along proudly with the tortured corpse of their liberty held high above them. Whether I saw this rabid hatred of the female body with my own eyes or whether I recreated it after seeing the photography of Abbas is of little importance: either way, that sequence of the Revolution was real, those murders were collective, and the joy that followed the procession of the corpses was chilling. The Crow-women taught me that you should never place your confidence in morality, that it is often just an excuse for letting women be killed.

There was one more Crow, the one who I thought would be the last in my life. She was a Crow-soldier. She was responsible for the female body searches at Tehran airport. She had black hairs sprouting from her chin, which she sported proudly like a symbol of her virtue. She had searched me roughly and with a look of utter disgust on her face because we were leaving for Paris, in the West, or in other words, we were jumping ship. She did not ask questions; she barked them. And when, spitting with rage, she asked my mother why we were leaving to be with ‘foreigners’ when the country was at war, my trembling mother replied with her eyes fixed on the ground that we were going to visit her sisters who were studying there. The Crow-soldier asked if they were married. My mother told her they weren’t, and the Crow lost it: it was a disgrace to leave girls alone in a city full of vice, it was shameful to let them prostitute themselves and my mother would never have enough tears to wash away the shame that had been brought on our family. Then the Crow-soldier pointed at me and asked my mother the million-dollar question: ‘Do you want a whore for a daughter?’ Voila. I was already a whore, and Paris was an immense brothel where my aunts plied their trade. The Crow continued to hurl insults about foreign lands, Paris, whores, my aunts, our cowardice, her own greatness, until another Crow-solider cut her short by asking her to hurry things up a bit. It was over. There would never be any more Crow-women in my life. There would only be whores. And perhaps this was the sole reason why I left the country of my birth, the paternal grandparents and cousins that I loved so deeply, without a single tear or regret. I knew that I would not see them again right away, not even in a month or in two years. I knew that something was lost, there in that unfriendly airport. But there was a promise: there would never be any more Crows making me cover my head. That Crow-soldier, who should have been the last, taught me that Crows know no borders. And that they often have hairy chins.

[3] (The name of) a volunteer militia founded in Iran in 1979.