Wedding Song (24 page)

A short distance away, under the persimmon tree, the
shokhet
said a
brakha
, plucked a patch of feathers from underneath the neck of the chicken, pulled the head back, slit it, and then threw the body on the grass to do its dance of death. Next, the father of the bride gathered two or three throbbing birds in each hand, holding them by their feet, and dropped their warm carcasses in front of us to pluck.

Weddings tested a young woman’s skill in cleaning chickens. Since refrigeration wasn’t available, chickens had to be cleaned quickly and cooked right away, leaving the pluckers little time to bathe and dress for the wedding party.

I felt hurt that I was excluded from the party room, missing the fun and treats. As I grew older, my fate, my role in the family, became more tightly connected to my mother as an outsider, as if I still swam in the amniotic fluid that had protected me in her womb, but now it offered no warmth or safety. Instead, its cloudy stench kept me at a distance from the other daughters of my generation, those cousins who should have been my equals, my friends and confidants.

Khanom-bozorg came by, noticed my look of disappointment, and told me that I was doing a
mitzvah
by plucking the chickens for a wedding, that
I would be blessed with good luck, a good husband. I didn’t want to get married; I hated the hard and dirty work. I knew that by the time the chickens were feathered, gutted, and cleaned, I would not only be covered in chicken feathers, fat, blood, and excrement, but would also smell like a barnyard.

I kept at the work, sulking. A large surface of the carcass had fine feathers, easy to pull, and I could get through them quite fast. The larger feathers, however, embedded deep in the flesh, were the most difficult, particularly on the wings, where the delicate skin tore easily. Even worse was the fatty backside of the chicken, where the long quills often pulled out and splashed fat and blood on my hands, arms, legs, hair, and clothes, where the fine feathers clung, making me look so silly that everyone smirked. Sometimes, the quills broke and I had to trap the imbedded piece between the edge of a small knife and my thumb to pull it out, careful not to cut my finger. My mother’s hands, however, were already rough from housework and the knife made only a small dent on her thick calluses.

While I worked on my third chicken, I realized that the ceremony down the hall was a
bandandazi
party. As the
bandandaz
entered the room with her little basket of thread, we heard a wave of ululation. We echoed the celebratory cries while plucking. I had seen this particular woman before. She held the end of a string between her teeth, looped it and put it close to the skin. With her other hand, she pulled the opposite end of the thread and swiftly removed the hair from women’s legs, arms, faces, and armpits. Its growth and darkening being synonymous in women with their loss of childhood beauty and innocence, body hair obsessed Iranians, and its removal appealed to Middle Eastern men, who preferred a youthful appearance in their women.

Plucking the chickens, I listened to the noises from the party room. The ululation went on; water gurgled in the waterpipes, and once in a while I heard a subdued moan from the bride when the
bandandaz
pulled a particularly stubborn hair.

The chickens were almost done when the small groans became heartwrenching screams that all the noise from the ululation could not muffle. Horrified, I started to rise from my stool to help Ziba, but my mother pulled me down with a knowing smile on her face. What was going on? No one seemed to want to talk about it. Instead, my mother and the rest
of the women joined in, drowning the screams in their own sounds of ululation.

I had learned not to ask questions, but I didn’t have to wait too long for the answer. My mother left briefly to fetch water. We had to wet the feathers once in a while to keep them from flying. Then, one of the cleaning people (whose low-class status freed her from the inhibitions of the “high-class” people) bent over and, using a derogatory word, whispered, “They’re doing her private parts!” Then she giggled hysterically, covering her mouth with her feather-laden hand.

There I was cleaning the chickens while the aristocracy of the community plucked my cousin’s pubic hair! I couldn’t get Ziba’s image out of my mind, legs spread in front of women who themselves were covered modestly in long
chador
s, having the hair plucked all the way down to her private area. Angry and worried, I plucked recklessly, ruining the skin of the next few chickens.

The removal of the body hair didn’t bother me, since I had seen the
bandandaz
working on women’s faces, legs, and arms; I had seen naked bodies of married women with shaven private parts in the
hamam
. Rather, the public nature of the ceremony terrified me, the loss of privacy and self-determination; this initiation into a culture of conformity appalled me, although it delighted the other women.

I was only fourteen, a year older than my mother at her wedding, and three years younger than my cousin. Instead of accepting the custom as a show of support and camaraderie, as many women did, I felt lost and feared that my life could spin out of my control as I grew older and became a woman.

A few weeks later, I asked Ziba about the ceremony. “It hurt like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Even the
bandandaz
said she had never seen anyone bleed so badly.” She spoke with a pride I couldn’t understand.

For years, I analyzed the ritual, trying to understand why Ziba’s mother and grandmother had allowed it, especially after having experienced it themselves. The realization sank in slowly and bitterly. All mothers helped to perpetuate the cycle of misery for their daughters, I concluded. For a long time, I wondered if my mother too was going to drag me with her into darkness; I wondered if I had to break the bond between us in order to free myself.

Thinking of Ziba’s mother, and of her grandmother, who was also my grandmother, passing the customs of torture to the next generations appalled and horrified me. Their joy in linking their chains to the younger women made me feel lonely and powerless, for the plucking of both the feathers and hair plainly symbolized our mothers’ subjugation.

At the end of the party, my grandmother stopped by to see how the chicken cleaning progressed. She blessed me, “I pray for the same happiness and good life for you.”

And I, who had learned to shut up, once again lost control of my tongue. “May it not be God’s will!” I blurted.

In the silence that followed, looks of horror spread over every face, including my father’s as he happened to walk by to check on us. I felt sorry for both my parents, since a daughter’s wedding day was the ultimate desire for Iranian Jewish parents. Still, I just didn’t want it, not this way. But which way? I recognized myself as an oddity, a loner, a defiant girl. My heart went out to my parents. I was sorry that they found me an embarrassment, but I also feared my own fate. What was going to become of me—the one who didn’t belong?

A decade later I would move to the United States and marry an American man. At my own wedding, I so adamantly wanted to distance myself from my past that I took care to exclude all rituals of my heritage from the ceremony. I walked down the aisle American style; I offered neither Iranian stew nor aromatic rice for the reception party, and I was glad that the chickens weren’t plucked by anyone I knew. The poultry came from neat packages that did not even look like chickens—breast of chicken stuffed with wild rice was on the menu for my wedding.

Today, partly through my writings, I have come to peace with my past, and if I have any regret about my wedding, as beautiful as it was, it’s the fact that I allowed my fear and disgust of some customs to erase all others. But in May of 1977, my fiancé and I selected music with an Eastern-European flavor, and I was actually pleased that my aunts weren’t there to sing
vasoonak
, the traditional Shirazi Jewish wedding songs. I was jealous when my grandmother became the center of attention at my wedding, smoking her
ghalyan
with Iranian tobacco. She covered her hair with colorful silk scarves for modesty, sat cross-legged on the floor, sipped mint tea
with a sugar lump in the back of her cheek. Taking puffs of her waterpipe, she entertained her American grandchildren with the gurgle of the water at its base. Men ran inside for cameras.

When they were gone, my grandmother put her lips to my aunt’s ear, signaled toward me, and in a loud whisper, asked, “Has she taken care of the stuff?”

For a moment, I didn’t understand what she meant. When I realized the meaning of her words, anger went through my body like a jolt of lightning. The memory of Ziba’s wedding flooded my mind. How could I have forgotten? But I composed myself and, with a smile, replied, “Yes, definitely,” and in a small voice she could not hear, “for generations to come.”

During my college years in Iran,
khastegaree
rituals changed in many ways to accommodate the more educated generation. Yet many elements remained unaffected. Since public
hamam
s were not in use by the upper class who had moved out of the ghetto, the synagogue became a focal point for hunting brides. During the holidays, many families scrambled to have their daughters sit closer to the main sanctuary (the men’s section), either on the front row of the balcony or in the yard, to be seen by the young men inside. Still, the most likely judges were the other women, who viewed the new crop and passed the information to families on the lookout for their sons.

As the Shah’s government encouraged education abroad, more Jewish men enrolled in the universities in the United States. Rarely did these men marry Americans. Most were shocked at the sexual freedom in the United States. Declaring that “there were no virgins in America,” many returned a year later suffering from culture shock and loneliness, looking for wives to take back. Since time was of the essence for these students, their families made the preliminary arrangements. A few wanted brides as young as possible. Many requested their choices to be limited to those women attending a certain high school. Some preferred women with higher education, particularly students of a humanities major—not medicine or engineering.

I studied English literature at Pahlavi University in Shiraz, frustrated by living in two different worlds. My American and British teachers spoke of
individual freedom and rights, of the power of critical thinking, free expressions of thoughts and exchange of ideas. Yet daily I went back to our half-communal household, to a world of patriarchy. It was one that I understood less every day, a world whose rules were rapidly becoming foreign to me.

After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Americans often asked me why the Iranian people accepted such a radically different government. I told them that if one person in each family had felt as I did, that would have been enough reason for the older generation to revolt against the government for separating them from their children by offering Western education. If half of Western-educated men and women had felt as I did, that would have been enough for them to reject the West, which alienated them from their culture, weakened their roots, and drastically altered their identity.

In 1973, I was finishing my sophomore year in the university. At the end of the second semester, as exams approached, I often spent extra time at school to avoid confrontations with my family. The weather turned extremely hot. Lacking deodorants, I went back to the house every day at noon to take a shower before returning to school.

One day as I gathered my books in a hurry to make the 4:30 bus, my grandmother approached me with an evaluating look. “Good, good. I was going to ask you to take a shower myself. I see you’re dressed nicely,” she said. “Make sure to use the sidewalk on the right side of the street and walk very slowly.”

I looked at my mother for an explanation. She giggled and looked away. I went to a second-floor window and saw what I suspected. There they were, women of all ages waiting for a one-person show, a drama whose sole actress was me. The watchers had spread a Persian carpet on the sidewalk, set up a few chairs, brought tea and even a waterpipe. I could imagine the conversations:

“No
khanom!
You should sit closer,” one probably said.

“This is a better place for you; after all you are the one to make the decision,” another responded.

“Come, come sit here. It’s under the shade of the tree. It’s cooler here,” a third woman offered.

My hair dripped wet. I always allowed it to dry in the hot dry summer air, but now I regretted having washed it, since a woman’s wet long hair was considered seductive. I contemplated grabbing the scissors to chop
my hair off. I thought of going downstairs and releasing my anger by hitting my grandmother and my mother hard on their chests, breaking the cultural rules of seniority and respect. In the end, I did neither. I was going to miss the bus, and the exam was more important than my rage. I collected my books, held my head up, smiled, and walked out of the house. I noticed a commotion in the little circle down the street as someone announced my appearance and more women came out of the house. I wondered if the entire extended family had come there to see if I were a suitable bride. I looked back. My father leaned out of the upstairs window, smoking; my mother and grandmother stood at the door watching.

My grandmother motioned me with the back of her hand: “Go, go. Don’t keep them waiting. It isn’t polite.”

I wore my comfortable shoes, no high heels for such an occasion. With no one around to beat my back as I held my books tightly to my chest, I slowly crossed the road to the opposite side, took a long breath, and broke into a run. I managed to get on the bus in time, flushed, sweaty, and out of breath. I sat there for a few minutes with my fists clenched in anger. But the episode had been too funny. Soon a small giggle escaped my mouth, which I didn’t try to hide from the rest of the surprised passengers.

When I returned from school, no one was amused.