Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni Read Free Book Online Page A

a propaganda campaign worthy of the darkest dictatorship. The episode cemented a conclusion I had long been approaching: Being Iranian amounted to psychological torture. It meant bringing a friend home from school, to find an old woman (there was perpetually a great-aunt or third cousin in town) with a flowered bonnet on her head kneeling in prayer, or sifting through a vast pile of dried herbs like a prehistoric gatherer. It demanded a rejection of the only
lifestyle I knew and wanted and offered only vague promises of community inclusion in exchange. And so I decided then and there that Iranianness and I must part.
    This break came at a convenient time, just as I was old enough to realize with the sensibility of a young adult, rather than the fuzzy intuition of a child, what a burden it was to be Iranian in America. The hostage crisis had forever stained our image in the American psyche, and slowly I saw how this shaped so much of what we did and strove for as immigrants. We could never take for granted that ordinary Americans—people Maman would encounter at PTA meetings, or at work—would know that the very fact of our living in the U.S. differentiated us from the type of Iranians who held U.S. diplomats at gunpoint for 444 days. Each time I told someone I was Iranian, I would search their face for a sign that they understood this.
    Iranians coped with this oppressive legacy in various ways. Some, like parts of my family, willed it away by losing any trace of a Persian accent, and becoming so professionally successful that they entered a stratum of American society sophisticated enough to understand and appreciate their presence and contribution. Some, nearly a million in fact, sought strength in numbers and founded a colony in Los Angeles. They seemed unfazed by their growing reputation for vulgarity and obsession with image; better to be associated with a penchant for BMWs than revolutionary Islam, they figured.
    The Iranians who fled the revolution, and those who were already in the United States when it happened, included the country’s best and brightest. That they succeeded in their adopted home is not such a surprise. But the image of that Islam-intoxicated, wild-eyed hostage taker was still a shadow that dogged all of us. Whether we were monarchists or not, whether we took some responsibility for what happened in Iran or blamed others, the shame of the revolution placed enormous pressure to be successful, but discreet about being Iranian. As though to make up for this image’s awfulness we had to be ever more exceptional, achieve more, acquire more degrees, more wealth, make more discoveries—to become indispensable. All this effort was needed to clear up our nationality’s good name; being average, obviously, would not cut it. Redemption became our burden.
    These were the preoccupations of my parents’ generation of exiles, and it left little energy for ministering to the second generation’s delicate cultural
transition. We were on our own, as our parents struggled with their nostalgia and political anger. As a teenager I felt there was nowhere to turn, and I often felt invisible, alone with my two irreconcilable halves. Sometimes it felt like we didn’t even exist, even though I had proof we did (there were Iranian grocery stores, after all, with too much feta cheese and baklava for our own little circle). We weren’t reflected anywhere—not on television, not on radio; we didn’t even have our own ethnic slur (the ones for Arabs didn’t count), let alone a spoof on The Simpsons . It was too overwhelming to dwell in a home wracked with inter-cultural turmoil, within a larger community wrapped up in the awkwardness of arrival, to attempt to bridge my two identities.
    At the University of California, Santa Cruz, indeed in probably most universities in California in 1998, there was nothing more pressing to do than amplify your ethnic identity. I groaned under the