Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran
From The Human Rights Project
A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran
The book description from Amazon.com:
A young Iranian-American journalist returns to Tehran and discovers not only the oppressive and decadent life of her Iranian counterparts who have grown up since the revolution, but the pain of searching for a homeland that may not exist.
As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense stand off between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution.
Moaveni's homecoming falls in the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran's rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran-ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes-is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.
Review by Ilan Bashir for The Human Rights Project
In my experience, there are, largely speaking, two types of memoirs. There is the memoir that is essentially a litany of experiences, chronologically arranged, much like a dry journalist's recitation of the facts, with little or no context. And there is the memoir that is an experience, steeped not only in the minutiae of the writer's life, but in her/his imagination and intellect. Azadeh, despite being a journalist, falls into the latter category, and her memoir is all the better for it.
Lipstick Jihad is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable memoirs I have ever read. As Iranian memoirs go, it is head-and-shoulders above others, such as Afschineh Latifi's Even After All This Time, and on a par in certain areas with Azar Nafisi's landmark Reading Lolita in Tehran.
There is a maturity in Azadeh's writing that belies her age. It does not detract from the youthfulness and abounding innocence that she displays throughout the book, though it certainly enhances her melancholiac moments, making them seem more dire than they - perhaps - are.
But it is her language - flowing, poetic and almost lyrical in places - that is the star of the book. It becomes hard to reconcile, at times, what you are reading with the fact that Ms. Moaveni was a journalist first. There is what appears to be an Iranian-inspired dramatic flair to the book, balanced beautifully with her journalistic aptitude for storytelling, so the book does not meander. Her analyses and reflections add to the narrative and rather than taking off on a tangent as many authors are wont to do, they add much-needed context to her story.
Her story is in itself striking. Azadeh writes about the "as if" generation, the ones who live "as if" it was okay to do the things that are against Iranian law and fundamentalist Islamic doctrine, like have boyfriends, wear lipstick, speak their minds, push the limits of the dress codes, have parties and much more. Her use of the words Lipstick Jihad for her title are, in that context, quite appropriate; Iran's youth, which makes up the majority in that nation, appears to be in the midst of a quiet and understated struggle completely unlike the violent revolutions of their predecessors. Lipstick, not guns, are the new weapons.
Even more striking is the Iranian predilection for, and preoccupation with, sex. Azadeh's narrative, if read in a cursory manner, might even give one the idea that Iran is basically full of horny teenagers lusting for one another. But look closer, read carefully, and she lets you in on the social, religious and cultural undercurrents that this obsession with sex is emblematic of.
Her coming to terms with what is 'Iranian' and what is 'American' about her is revelatory. The difference between her Iranian heritage and her American upbringing is highlighted often and with an almost fierce poignancy. One of the best examples by far of this is when she is berated by a friend for continually canceling and rescheduling their meetings.
"You're Iranian in a superficial way," he said one day, after I rescheduled one of our meetings for the eight time. "You come across warm, but your affective nature is really western. Eastern affection involves generosity with time. You drench people with warmth and charm, to distort them from how miserly you are with your time. You handle minutes like an accountant."
Her final observations about Iran have the sense of an incomplete story. "... Iran, like the Simorgh, was elusive, that it defied being known," writes Azadeh, comparing the country to a mythical bird. "Its moods changed mercurially by the day, the scope of its horizon seemed to expand and shrink by the season and even its past was a contested battle... the search for home, for Iran, had taken me not to a place but back to myself."
The final pages are almost wrenching. "... the bridge between Iran and the past, Iran and the future, between exile and homeland, existed at these tables - in kitchens, in bars, in Tehran or Manhattan - where we forgot about the world outside. Iran had been disfigured, and we carried its scraps in our pockets, and when we assembled, we laid them out, and were home."
The mark of a good book, someone once said, was that it should leave you wanting more. By that standard, Lipstick Jihad qualifies beyond the shadow of a doubt.
