RICH POSSIBILITIES AS I WORK ON MY PERSIAN WORLD BOOK PROJECT

A lovely November sunset this evening to the west, as I pedalled home in the dusk, with car headlights bright on the streets and people hurrying home from work along the sidewalks.

It’s an exciting time of year, but days are so short that each moment of daylight feels precious. I thought it would be easy enough to get work done here in Toronto in November and December, with no warm sunshiny days to tempt me outside to play. But in fact it doesn’t seem to work like that. As long as it’s not pouring rain or wildly windy outside, I find I yearn to catch a little sun and air, not just a little but a good dose, rather than diligently working away at the computer. Hmmm

Perhaps this is just another expression of procrastination. I think though that it’s a lifelong urge in me, to be active and moving, to be outside rather than inside, and that weather (and obligations) have only a small influence. When I was a kid my mother used to say, “It’s such a beautiful day; why are you inside reading/studying/sitting around when you could be out in the sun and air?” Perhaps that’s part of the origin of my deep-seated guilt at staying in or sleeping in when the day is beautiful.

My kids say to me (when I start talking like my mother about not wasting a beautiful day): “That was your mother’s line, because she was raised on a farm, where a beautiful day was an opportunity to get necessary work done outside. It’s not relevant to us”. I feel fortunate to have the push-back from them; it helps keep those still-active mother-inspired feelings of guilt at bay.

(AND THREE DAYS LATER, ON A MONDAY MORNING)...

I was interrupted right after finishing those first paragraphs and then the weekend swept me up. Here it is now a windy blustery Monday morning, not cycling weather, for sure.

The week is starting well: Lillian is visiting from Grey County and that’s a treat. But also in the last ten days, including on the weekend, I have managed did get a lot more recipe work and writing work done. Each bit, however rough and approximate, is a necessary part of constructing this complex thing that is a book. And each bit of progress makes the rest feel less difficult.

Why is that? I wonder, each time. Part of the answer of course is that each bit of work or recipe tested or reading or travel adds to my understanding, sheds a little more light, and makes my footsteps surer. But the other, arguably more interesting reason lies in the whole process of starting out, or initiating any new project. Those early decisions set the tone, and the course, of what comes after. They are an embarkation in a certain direction. And so they feel very determinative of what follows.

Hence the procrastination, hesitancy, fear, frozenness, paralysis - there are many words for this state – that afflicts me intermittently at the start of each project. I’m talking about book projects here, but in fact a milder version of “starting-out-paralysis” strikes when I go to plant the garden in the spring for example…the first decisions, or optings, eliminate some options right away and narrow the possibilities. There’s thus a big pressure to “get it right”. That is the negative view.

But there’s another much more positive way of thinking about each project (book or garden or whatever): to see it not as a task directed at achieving a perfectible goal but instead as a process of engagement. Each decision then, or each bit of progress, generates its own new insights and possibilities, enlarging the field of vision. I love this mindset. I love the idea of the process being the source of creativity and pleasure. It means that there are huge possibilities awaiting, just around the corner. My project will not be limited to just what I can imagine now. It will take on its own life and become bigger and richer than I can possibly know in these early stages.

Strengthened by this more generous idea, I’m pumped by the ideas and insights I have gained from work I’ve already done. And I am moving forward into the rest with enthusiasm rather than anxiety.

It feels like a kind of rebirth, this new attitude. It certainly is life-giving in all kinds of ways.

POSTCRIPT: What recipes? I can imagine you asking. Well I've made three different soups, the word is "ash" in Farsi, all of them easy thickly satisfying, loaded with green herbs and other greenness, one vegetarian (ash-e-reshteh) and two extremely light on meat. And I've made a delectable grilled eggplant dish that's flavored with raw shallot/onion, dried mint, and loads of pomegranate seeds. I learned it from a home cook in Shiraz. Last week I also made a roast chicken Azeri-style, stuffed with tart fruit and walnuts and glazed with saffron water, and to go with it a classic herbed Persian rice. Some of these need another test-drive, but they're all good additions to the book.

AFTER-TRAVEL REFLECTION & CREATION

A week ago today I was on a flight from Istanbul to Toronto, having flown out of Tabriz (in northwestern Iran) two days earlier. In my checked bags I had a kilo of honey, some dried apricots, halvah, a selection of sweets from Yazd, sour pomegranate fruit leather (called robb in Iran), fresh pistachios, a second-hand Farsi-language cookbook, and a bundle of small kilims, as well as my well-worn clothing. My other luggage weighed next to nothing physically, but was a rich load: memories, emotions, early understandings, jam-packed notebooks, and digital photos.

I’ve been thinking about this process of travel, memory, and story. People have different ways of remembering. Mine tend to be visual: I have pictures in my mind after a trip. They’re not so much of actual events. Instead they are images generated by my thoughts about events or people or places. I would call them secondary images of events. At the same time I also have hundreds of photos, moments preserved, you could call them.

Because my memory works with past experiences, digesting and processing them in sometimes surprising ways, in the weeks right after a trip I like to keep that set of mental pictures uninfluenced by the “reality” of the photos I have taken. Once that digesting and processing is well underway, many memories have reshaped themselves as stories or vignettes that are informative or tell a small story in themselves.

When I then look at the photos I often notice the gaps between my (processed) “memories” and what I see in the details of the shots. The differences between them interest me. Sometimes they are due to the fact that I failed to notice certain elements of a scene, perhaps because I was caught up with other details, or with an emotional context that kept my focus elsewhere. Sometimes the differences are because I have subconsciously “forgotten” inconvenient, or ugly or uncomfortable details…

At the moment I am still early on in the digesting process. Stories and cross-connections, ideas about place and people, food and attitudes, are still taking shape, and will be for the next month or two. I’ll try to help that process along by doing recipe work. I find that as I draft recipes and shop and prep and cook, I often become more sure about the importance of particular details, or I get a flash of memory or insight.

This is why I am such a believer in developing and testing my recipes on my own to start with. It leaves me with a free head and imagination…so that unbidden thoughts can surface freely.

All of this probably sounds rather abstract and perhaps unreliable or fabulist to you. After all, am I not, in writing cookbooks, supposed to be transmitting information rather than invention?

Well, yes and no. I am not a journalist, digging out “the truth” in a factual literal sense. Yes I want to get the recipes right and to give them full honour and respect. But there are other truths that story-telling and imaginative reconstruction and reflection can elucidate. The aha! as I realise what anxiety or concern lay behind a comment someone made to me, may take me weeks to arrive at. But when I am able to understand the human, emotional, and social dimensions of a situation, then I think both the story-telling and the recipes gain strength and reliabilty of a deeper kind.

I hope that those of you who have had the stamina to read this far can make sense of what I am trying to say. I’ve been thinking about the connections between the “facts” on the ground, be they in Burma or Georgia or Iran, and the emotional reactions I feel or sense in a place. I admit that they are complicated.

It’s here, in the human complexities of place and perception, that I find the juiciest excitement and the largest potential for creative understanding. The trick is to not worry and to not force the pace. Sometimes at this stage right after a trip I begin to get impatient. I want to be further along in synthesizing my understanding. But things take the time they take.

And so, in the meantime, I plan to try making Tabrizi kofta, and sangak (bread baked on a bed of pebbles) and dizi, and more. I’m trusting that the same process of subconscious story-shaping that has happened before, most recently with the Burma book, will take over and allow me to create a rich and reliable set of stories and recipes in this new book of mine.

All I need is some tolerance and understanding from friends and family as I look or act a little dazed or distracted…

THIS WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ON BEING A FEMALE PERSON IN IRAN

NOTE: I wrote this last night, but had no way of posting it until I arrived with my aged laptop in Istanbul a couple of hours ago...

Well here I am on the last evening of my time in Iran. I’m in a rather basic hotel room in the historic trading city of Tabriz, in the northwest corner of Iran not far from the borders of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. Tomorrow morning I have a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul, and two days later a direct flight to Toronto.

As you probably know, Iran still has substantial firewalls to block access to social media like Facebook and Twitter, and to many other sites too. In that way it feels a little like Burma did during the time I was making trips there for my Burma book, from early 2009 until late 2011. But in Burma not only were there firewalls, there was also virtually no access to cell phones or to wi-fi, and very few internet cafes except in Rangoon/Yangon. When I found an internet cafe in a town, I’d go and ask the young guys there (it was always young guys) to help me bypass the firewalls so that I could get access to my e-mails. Yahoo was blocked; Gmail was generally easier. And they’d always manage it, by using something I heard called a “proxy”.

Fast forward to Iran now in late 2013. Social media have continued to evolve, and so have cel phones. Iran has both. And many people here are on FB and Twitter. How? you ask. Well people download a proxy server for themselves (a sophistication not available to most people in Burma a few years ago) and then they can fly over the firewalls. 

I had no proxy server (failed to deal with the issue before coming) and no way of downloading one once I was here (because of course access to that is also blocked), until I got to Kerman, in southern Iran. A nice guy I met there who is IT-proficient helped me download Puffin, a proxy server, onto my smart-phone. He did it using his tablet and bluetooth. 

And suddenly after two weeks of blocked access I was reconnected to Twitter and Facebook. The whole process - of restriction and then evasion of restriction - reminded me of all the attempts by governments, from China to Iran to Burma and more, who try to shut off their citizens’ access to the rest of the world. It used to be possible to enclose people behind an “iron curtain” or just a flurry of propaganda. But now there are ways the determined can push through electronically. Perhaps only North Korea has managed to lock its citizens away. At least so we’re told. 

Anyhow, once Puffin was flying me over the firewalls, one of the first messages I tweeted was to the president of Iran, who is actively on Twitter. I suggested that people in Iran could have better access to his tweets if the firewalls here came down.

That is of course true, but what’s also clear from my time here, and from things people have told me, is that Iranians in general are brilliant at “work-arounds”. They don’t take no for an answer, but instead figure out alternative routes to get what they want or need. And so people here who want to be online and connected are managing to do so, despite the government. Still, if the firewalls came down many more, I imagine, would get confident and engaged with social media and the wider world.

Other work-arounds here have to do with the dress code restrictions. Women are still by law required to cover their head and neck when out in public and to dress “modestly”. The definitions have changed over time, loosening in the nineties, then tightening again when Amedinajad came into power, and now softening again. In general they mean at a minimum wearing a headscarf tied or crossed under the chin, and a “manteau” a garment that goes down to the knees or nearly, over trousers.

Many or most women dislike the restrictions. In less-conservative places, such as Teheran and Shiraz, women, especially those who come from more moneyed families, wear light wispy scarves, and often set them way back on their hair. And their versions of manteau are equally gestural, brightly coloured and very form-fitting, often worn with fashionable high heels. 

All the emphasis on the face, as the only free and clearly visible aspect of the woman, has led to another perhaps predictable result: plastic surgery is fashionable and very unremarkable, almost expected, among young urban women. They have collagen to pump up cheekbones, the lips are made fuller, and the nose is “fixed. The result is that noses with a white strip of bandage on top are a common sight. There’s also a lot of make-up, thickly applied, from foundation to eye shadow to lipstick. And eyebrows are plucked out completely and then redrawn in pencil, or tattooed on, in a higher wider sweep. 

Women in more conservative families or communities wear a black or dull-coloured manteau in the form of a loosely fitting trenchcoat closed up to the neck, with black pants and socks or stockings and black shoes as well as a scarf or other hair and head covering. Over that many wear a chador, usually black, a long one piece cape like a nun’s veil from another era, that rests on the top of the head and floats/drapes down to the ground. It’s open in the front, has no fastening, so women clutch it closed with one hand in front of them, or hold it in their teeth sometimes so they have both hands free.

The result is that in conservative towns, and at some shrines and mosques where it’s compulsory that women wear a chador, the women become a flock of black creatures... It’s disturbing to think about and to see. Only when you get close and are talking to a woman in a black chador can you sense her personal distinctiveness. Otherwise the outfit erases her, just as nun’s habits were designed to do to the women who wore them.

The wonder is that women here manage to function with confidence and strength in public, despite the censoriousness of the laws and the special police who enforce them.

I stayed two nights with a family in a village ten days ago. There were two daughters, aged 14 and 11, both alert intelligent people. I watched them dress for school the last morning I was there, a Saturday, the first day of the school week. Niloufer, the younger one, still in primary school, wore pants, a long manteau top, and a kind of pink wimple of stretchy knit material that framed her face and covered her hair and neck completely. Over that she wore a looser head-covering, a kind of scarf. The older daughter was entirely in black, as the school requred of girls her age: pants, manteau/trenchcoat, wimple and scarf over the hair, and on top of all that, a black chador to the ground. Her liveliness drowned in all the black coverup.

That kind of clothing requirement in school that tells girls to cover up and hide their bodies must cripple some. I remember how gauche and uncertain I was about my physical self, about what was acceptable or “ok”, when I was a teenager. But unlike these girls and young women,  who have not since early childhood been out in public with their hair floating free (just imagine!) I had never been told that it was my responsibility to hide my hair, my neck, my arms.

Of course as a women visitor here in Iran, I had to follow the rules. They have eased up, as I said above, or at least they are not as strictly interpreted and enforced as in earlier times.  I didn’t want to give offence. That’s how I felt at first.  But once I realised that most people disliked the rules, I didn’t worry about offending custom.  I was instead aware that I could be chided for having my scarf on so loosely (and incompetently let me admit) that “too much” hair was showing.

And finally it happened, that a man in authority insisted that I correct the thing he reproached me for: the front of my hair was showing too much. It was at a very holy place, the holiest place in Iran for Shia Muslims: the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashad. (He is the eighth Imam, and was murdered not far from Mashad. About twenty million people visit the huge shrine complex every year.) I was outside, not yet in the grounds, and had asked directions of one of the guys who keep an eye on things, not guards exactly, but officials. He gave me a censorious look and gestured to his hair, to show me where I was at fault. Ony once I had adjusted my scarf did he answer my question.

The encounter was a small thing. But how would it feel if I had been born and raised here, and perhaps was especially sensitive to criticism, or just not confident? Surely it would make me over-compliant, anxious to make sure that my tenue was correct at all times.

And indeed, even unworried, after my first few days in Iran I found myself taking on the habits of the women here: you reach up and feel your head on top to check whether your scarf has slipped back. Then you feel with your fingers along the edge of the scarf, where it meets your face, and check that no hair has strayed forward and that the edges are even. It becomes a tic, endlessly repeated. A time-lapse of women in a bus or at a restaurant or in a car, or in a classroom I suppose too, would show a pattern of check, recheck, adjust, readjust, going on all over the female landscape.

Wild. And taken for granted by the women of Iran. They have to take it for granted or it would surely drive them around the bend. In any case they have more important thngs to worry about: They are doctors and teachers and filmmakers, mothers and grandmothers, sweepers and cooks, secretaries and managers, most of them managing all the cooking and other household matters as their second or third job. And they are strong.

AFTERWARD: In the plane this morning, as the doors were closed and we started to move off, there was a rustling sound here and there as most of the women passengers, including me, removed their headscarves and shook out their hair. And then of course most also shed their manteau, emerging, in some cases, with very skin-tight outfits of various kinds...

KNEADING MEMORIES AS IRAN TRAVEL BECKONS

Last week at the Kneading Conference West was a huge treat. I like being physical, and the bread- and cracker-making that I did for various workshops – along with wonderful Dawn Woodward of Evelyn’s Crackers, with whom I co-presented – was satisfying, and tiring too of course. We did a lot of baking for a tasting of (freshly milled whole grain) single varietal wheats, so interesting. I can't wait for next year's tastings. 

Meantime there were lots of other pleasures: exploring the amazing orchards at the Agricultural Research Center in Mount Vernon; talking, eating, and drinking with friends old and new; and cooking too. Best flavours? Hard to say, but the Alchemy apple that Dawn and I shared, forbidden fruit from a survivor tree at the Center, ranks very high. (It has Cox Pippin in its ancestry, so a firm-crisp bite, but it also has a sweetness and complex flavour. Just a dream.) High ranking too for the freshly shucked kumamoto oysters at Taylor's, that we ate sitting by the water last Saturday afternoon….

Now I’m back in Toronto, the moon is about to be full, and my trip to Iran via Istanbul is less than two weeks away. Can’t wait. But meantime, as the moon shone straight into my room through a crack in the curtains at 4 this morning, I started to run through the to-do lists that whirl in my head but that I still have difficulty remembering to write down. They include small things like shopping for black socks and a manteau or two for Iran; larger issues like learning a little Farsi, and preparing some language pages on the (old laptop) computer I am planning to take with me; urgent tasks like preparing for the talks and presentations I am giving this weekend at Savour Stratford, some of them Burma-related, some wider; and travel detail issues like what bag will I take, how much money to bring (there being no access to cash once I am in Iran, just like Burma until recently, so at least I have an idea of what’s involved), what shoes? and the trivial fusses that go along with packing decisions.

Hmmm…no wonder I sometimes feel scattered.

Yesterday morning though I had a wonderfully focussing experience. I went for a heart ultrasound to give my doctor a baseline (and yes, I have an active-person’s slow pulse and good blood pressure, and all looks very healthy I gather). Have you ever seen images of your heart beating? Or listened to the wonderful syncopations? It was thrilling and awe-inspiring to watch the regular pumping, see the “flapping” of the valve (can’t tell you which one), look at the heart’s structure from different angles. And there was a bonus: The very nice and experienced cardiology tech was teaching a student as she did the tests, so I learned a little about what they see and what they watch out for. As I walked out of the hospital and down the sunny street I was exhilarated, as high as I was when, years ago, I walked home from having a pregnancy ultrasound.

Life is mysterious, and the heart in each of us keeps us going. Best to have respect for it, treat it well, and keep it healthy, for it’s working without a break…

Now, as I round the corner on this blogpost, I look up and realise that there’s bright sunshine outside, and blue sky. The cat is asleep in the corner, in a patch of sun. It’s time for me to get moving. The writing and other sedentary “activities” of home, after the lovely physicality of the Kneading Conference, leave me feeling flat. The obvious answer is to remember to get my blood moving. And so I’m heading out now, heeding the call of the lovely September sun and the always interesting life on the streets of Toronto.

HEADING TOWARD NEW HORIZONS

Once more I’ve left a long-ish gap between posts. It’s strange the rhythm of writing and communication of ideas in general. Sometimes I feel rich with all that I want to explore in writing. Other times my concentration gets scattered by other projects. That’s what has happened this week, in part. I have been assigned one small entry in what will be a large comprehensive volume from the Oxford University Press in the US called The Oxford Companion to Sweets. Like everyone else who is involved in writing one or more entries, as I imagine it, I’m finding it slow-going, and frustrating too, for my word limit is under 1000 words, and in that I am supposed to talk about Southeast Asian sweets.

I’m not here to rant about that, just trying to let you know what I have been cluttered with. I’ve now got a good draft written. It is always interesting to be forced into taking a fresh perspective on a region or a cuisine. In writing this I’ve had to characterise the general approach to sweets and also to their evolution. Influences include of course trade, colonisation, conquest, immigration, etc. But all I can do is skim over it all, while tryig to give specifics about sweets in each of the countries. It’s a bit of a grind. And of course not paid, I mean, the pay is under $50…

So why do it? Well, I like a challenge, and I am of course learning as I think through it all and do research.

But I’ll be glad when it’s done. My deadline, the one I’m setting for myself, is the end of this week, so that the Labour Day weekend can be clear of deadlines and I can start look forward to the longhouse event put on by Molly O’Neill on September 6 to 8 in Renselaarville, and after that the kneadingconferencewest in the Skagit Valley in northern Washington state (September 12-14). It’s time to think about packing and cooler weather, and planning out the baking schedule for the Kneading Conference.

In the meantime I have been waiting to hear about my visa for a trip to Iran in October. I heard from the agency ten days ago that they expected to get word on my application by the middle of last week. And then finally two days ago I heard it was approved. Yes!! The deal is that with the visa application is approved in principle, I fly to Istanbul, hand my passport in to the Iranian consulate, and pick it up three working days later. And from there I can fly directly to Iran, a short-ish hop.

I have now booked flights to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines and have five days booked at a centrally located air bnb in Istanbul. So pleasing to have a few things sorted out.

I really hope this Iran trip can work, and not get derailed. The massive sabre-rattling that is going on in the west about Syria can only be terrifying to ordinary people trying to live their lives in Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Iran, and southern Turkey. They become statistics, or numbers, in the headlines, rather than individuals with culture, education, humanity. And of course Iran has now become a kind of unnuanced idea of threat to the US and I am sad to say to Canada too.

In the meantime, I have found advice on how to deal with clothing requirements in Iran. I need one or two manteau, a coat-length long-sleeved garment. And I need some headscarves and long pants and comfortable shoes. It all seems very manageable.

And so like any other trip or project, this one breaks down into the practical details and preparation, and vast imaginings and endless reading…