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...

PRESERVING MOMENTS AND FLAVOUR AND MORE

We're been returned to summer by the weather gods these last few days. I've been out in the evenings on my bicycle under huge radiant sunset skies and luminous dusks lit by the fat moon. This is mid-autumn festival time on the lunar calendar, but really so far there's no autumn feel to it at all. The axe will fall this week I think, with rain and chillier weather. So it's a very live-in-the-moment few days.

Of course this date also reminds us of the fragility of things and that living in the moment and appreciating it fully is one of our main tasks as thinking imaginative beings. Today, brilliant with morning sunshine, clear blue sky, and still-green leaves is very like in feel and weather that day ten years ago.

A wonderfully obsessive and energetic friend spent yesterday canning tomatoes, which of course involves cooking them down and then being very careful about sterilising the jars etc. She had worked her way through one whole bushel of tomatoes by the time I got there at the end of the afternoon. Bowls and pots of them in various stages were all around, brilliant gleaming redness. We had supper, then I stayed for a little while to help with the first batch of 6 one-quart jars. They got lowered into a large pot of boiling water, then had to stay there for 45 minutes. There was a lot more to do, and from a note she sent very late last night I gather she stayed up for ages putting the rest into jars.

We labour at these things, putting food by for winter, preserving in our small way the warmth and immediacy of summer by sealing tomatoes and peaches, pickled cucumber and more, and jams too, in glass jars. They're like jewels on the shelf, as richly beautiful. They are the promise of a hit of summer sunshine and optimism when we need it most, in the dark days of winter. It takes imagination to visualise that moment of need vividly enough that it prods us to engage in the long laborious work of canning and preserving. And that's why most people no longer do it. There are tin cans of crushed tomatoes we can buy...but once you taste the homemade version, and see it in a glass jar, the tins no longer seem a good substitute for home-made.

It's a question of flavour, yes, but also something about identity and meaning and connection. Food is more than a "product" or "input". If we production-line produce food, as we might a car or a computer, the end result is not comparable to food made by hand by you or someone you know well. This point is made with far more elegance and developed over several pages, in the article that opens this issue of Lapham's Quarterly, the one on Food. I often find the collections too much of a pastiche, but the food issue has some real treasures in it, such as the description by a sufragette of her experience of being force-fed. Horrific, yes, and a process that continues to this day. For example there's the woman in India, whose story appeared recently, who has been suffering force-feeding because she has been on a politically motivated hunger strike for years. Yes, years.

On this day that marks a very public violence, it's important I think to remember that there are ongoing instances, many of them state-sanctioned, many of them occurring behind closed doors, of humankinds's cruelty to fellow human beings. ("Man's inhumanity to man" is an elegant expression, but somehow feels so incomplete; so many victims are women, and also a good number of perpetrators, let's admit.)

The Toronto International Film Festival, most often referred to as TIFF, opened this week. The downtown and uptown are abuzz not just with students returning to university, but with the news of which film is wonderful and which star or director was last spotted coming into or out of this or that bar or restaurant. I've been to one film so far, with a friend who gets pass tickets. I Have another three to look forward to. I saw the second showing (a morning screening) of the Vietnamese film Lost in Paradise. It's a love story, set in contemporary Saigon, in the milieu that is toughest: the street. The central relationship is between two young guys, one of whom is a prostitute. There are many kindnesses in the film, but also many cruelties. Beautifully shot, not as tightly edited as it needs to be, and with strong acting, it's one to look out for.

No, I have no pretensions to be a movie reviewer, I promise! But the unfreedom of the lives of many of the characters, the virtual slavery of the prostitute whose woman pimp comes round to berate her and beat her if she's not on the job, for example, was a reminder that slavery exists in many forms. It's not an institution from before, but an ongoing possibility and reality for many people, in varying degrees.

Freedom and transparency are both fragile plants. They can't just be preserved in glass jars and put on a shelf; they have to be actively defended and fought for.

Meantime, on the home front, it's time for my annual small preserving routine, time to start putting up basil in olive oil. That intensity is so welcome once the cold weather comes and the garden is fallow.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO KEEP A VILLAGE BREATHING FREELY

It's cool and clear out, on this morning of Friday June 25. The birds are singing. But these are not normal days, whatever the birdsong sounds like! We had an earthquake a few days ago, surprising shaking in the middle of the day. Was it the washing machine shaking the house? I wondered...since we tend to look for normal explanations first I gather. Others thought of explosions or bombs as an explanation and listened for the police to respond. That's because of the heightened atmosphere of fear and suspicion here these days. Pretty wild. Here's why.

The city is very empty, emptied out is what it feels like, because of the "guys with guns" thing (AKA the G-20 meeting and the attendant security) going on downtown. The police are walking around in posses and asking people what they are doing downtown, or asking for ID. I feel like the city has been stolen. The university is closed, with cement barriers blocking the access roads. It's pretty creepy, as if this "lockdown" means we're not allowed to think and not supposed to act either. There are still protests planned and 'counter G-20' talks and conferences around environmental, economic, health, etc etc issues, but the public life of the city has been chilled, and each of us who lives here is feeling the cold blast.

What to do? Most people's instinct when we see uniformed police is to feel anxious. And when we feel anxious we hesitate to hold our heads high and to think freely. We shrink and reduce ourselves. What's the corrective?

I have one good friend who takes a clear line, forcefully, to counteract those instinctive flinchings. She says, the police are my employees, I pay their salary. So I greet them cheerily and chat to them and get them to engage with me. And she does. I do too, but never remember that they are employees. I just do it to remind them that we are all citizens together and to get them to not feel afreaid. If the police get into an "us and them" feeling or dynamic with citizens, then we are all in danger. The danger is physical sometimes, given the noise canons and bullets and other weapons the security forces have, and it's political and social and cultural. I do not want this police-state vibe to become a pattern that recurs or that sticks around after the G-20 is over. Our job is to prevent anyone being damaged or alienated or radicalized by it.

Hard not to be alienated when the police are given last-minute special powers of search and arrest; when foreign security forces here to guard foreign heads of state etc are being permitted to arm themselves as they please; when schools are closed at short notice with no provision made for children; when public institutions are closed and the city's civic and civil life brought to a standstill with no consultation or compensation for the people on the ground.

Yes, I know I'm ranting. Sorry! But it's hard to remember what normal feels like right now. We expect eighty (!!!) motorcades to come into the city today. No wonder people are staying off the roads, those who can!

This state of lockdown is nothing compared to the daily seige in Gaza or the lockdown in many totalitarian states, where individual rights count for nothing. We are just getting a tiny taste. It should be sobering. It's a life lesson of sorts. So we need to hold our heads high, remember how lucky we are to be able to complain and feel entitled to complain and protest, and we need to remember those who don't have our freedom, remember them as individuals struggling each day to live with dignity. If it's hard for us here to not feel intimidated by the police presence etc, imagine what it's like where the police have absolute power always. And then pause to admire the people living with that, who still manage to speak out against injustices or assert rights.

Anyone reading this in the Toronto area, do please come into the city centre, use public transport or a bicycle, and walk the streets and eat at the eateries and shop in the markets and talk to your fellow citizens. It takes a village to make a village!

While you're in the middle of town, you'll notice that many of the trees in the Annex and the university and downtown have splotchy sidewalks around them: It's mulberry season, and this year the mulberry trees are dripping with fruit. What a treat. Occasionally you'll also see ripe cherries, but those are usually on someone's property, not fair game. The mulberries on the other hand are most often streetside. And now that there's no spraying, all they need is a quick rinse-off (though I'm often too impatient even for that). The best time to pick and eat is right after a rain, of course...

POSTSCRIPT: My sliced fingertips are healing, thanks, though still fragile. I heard of two other finger/hand injuries from friends, so I'm hoping it stops at the traditional three: Lillian sliced her pinky-finger tendon right through when it caught in the laundry line pulley. A moment of inattention in a rush to grab laundry when it started to rain and there she was. Horrible! It took general anaesthetic and a surgeon to stitch it back together. And another friend sliced herself deeply, on what? she doesn't know, broken glass perhaps? as she was washing dishes. Three domestic situations: veg prep, laundry, washing up; and three hurting injuries. Time out please!!

SENDING LIGHT AND HOPE UP INTO THE DARK

This evening here in Chiang Mai a bunch of us sent light up into the dark. What am I saying? you ask. Well there's an amazing phenomenon here, a kind of cross between a balloon and a firecracker, that you can buy to celebrate an event or just for fun. It's made of paper, a large sack like a balloon nearly four feet in diameter, but with an opening below it. Underneath hangs a paraffin lamp. You light the lamp, holding the paper globe away from the flame and over it. The hot air from the flame fills the ballooning paper, inflates it, and then eventually lifts it into the air, where it floats upward.

Some days here there are a lot of these being launched, other days there's the occasional one or two drifting in the night sky.

Gary and Trish had bought the lantern, shaped like a monkey's face, to honour the baby daughter than Boom and Jayan had four months ago. We were all there, lighting the lantern or watching, The baby was happy and oblivious of the fuss. Once the paraffin was lit, we stood there holding the paper away from the flame and waiting for the hot air to inflate it. In that slightly anxioous moment the moneky's face seemed to leer at our hopefulness. (Of course there's the idea that if it inflates and floats well up into the sky, it's a harbinger of good luck; a failure to rise up is the reverse, so there is a little tension around these lightings.)

Finally we let the lantern go, and up it floated, brilliantly light against the dark sky, the growing crescent moon the only decor. It floated over toward the apartment building and seemed to hover, hesitantly. Argh! Would it get caught on a balcony? Surely not! Would it rise up over and beyond the building? Perhaps? And yet? Eventually, after some heart in mouth moments, it drifted up onto the rroof and then on up into the midnight blue sky from there.

So she's well launched, this lovely baby!

All this light and fire in the dark comes just three weeks after another time of light in the dark in Chiang Mai, this one Loy Kratong. Chiang Mai is a big place for Loy Kratong, a festival of lights at the full moon in November. A kratong is traditionally a small leaf raft with a candle on it. Now you can buy elaborate kratongs of course, but at its origin it's a simple candle on a leaf Each person launches a kratong, sets it floating down a stream or river. Bad deeds and bad luck float down the river on the little raft, freeing each of us. It's a lovely concept, and a relief too.

Now what are we going to do with this freedom?

Talking today with Tiger, a man in his eighties who settled here in Chiang Mai about twenty years ago, I was reminded of how differently each of us engage with the world and with the future. Tiger set off from the UK, after retiring in his fifties, to travel and engage with the world. He didn't have a plan. Eventually, a good ten years later, he settled here in Chiang Mai. But he started out with the confidence that he'd find his way, and also with the urge to be surprised, to not-know and to find out and trust to luck that what was coming next would be interesting.

Another approach at retirement or even any time in life, is to try to make sure, to tie things down and aim for certainty. I sort of understand that urge for security, the wish to have a sure outcome. But how uninteresting, too. If the future consists only of what I have planned for it, then it's llimited to what I can imagine, and that's so puny compared to all the possibilities the world has to offer (possibilties good and bad, yes, I agree, but wonderfully unknown and infinite).

So when we launch a little raft with a candle on it, or send a fire-powered paper lantern up into the dark sky, we're gambling and hoping, launching ourselves metaphorically into the future, eyes open, hope surging, fingers crossed, that the light will float on upward and that we will have good luck and find our way.

THE DALAI LAMA'S BIRTHDAY REMINDS US ALL...

Here's another anniversary day:  this time I'm thinking about July 6 as the Dalai Lama's birthday, at least his official birthday, I guess.  Who would have been keeping careful note of the date of a child's birth in faraway Takster (not far from the town of Xining in China's presentday province of Qinghai) seventy-four years ago?  At the time the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama was ruling in Lhasa, some forty days' journey away...  

Now His Holiness is based in Dharamsala, in northern India, given refuge and status there by the Indian government, then (in 1959, when he fled from Tibet to India) led by Prime Minister Nehru.  The Dalai Lama has come to stand for wisdom and compassion to many, but is still named a trouble-maker and worse by the Chinese authorities.  I can say, after spending a good hour with him a few days after his birthday in 1978, that he is a vibrant good-humoured highly focussed and very disciplined man.  

What a privilege that was, to talk with him (I was so nervous of course, when I first presented him with a kata, but then he laughed and put me and the two others I was with at ease, and the rest went smoothly and timelessly).  My mother had died the previous November, and somehow that time with His Holiness and the other Tibetans in exile, together with a long trek that I did into Ladakh over the Baralacha La, were an unbelievable restorative.  They were a reminder that it's up to us to make our way, up to us to find meaning in life.

The date of his birthday is a good time for those of us who live in relatively secure freedom to contemplate the places, and the people who live in them, where oppression and unfreedom are the rule.  People lose a sense of their own ability to take risks, they learn to play it safe.

Those of us who are free, with health and life before us, can take occasions like His Holiness's birthday to remind outselves to take our freedom and use it in an engaged way.

We truly have little to complain of, especially if we compare ourselves to Tibetans or Somalis or Sudanese or people of any one of many other nationalities who are in exile from their place of birth, or alternatively living in fear in their homeland and trying to survive with dignity from day to day...