Iranian women are a mighty force
One woman's reflection
What follows is a guest essay from my dear friend Neda Frayha in which she reflects on how the current revolution in Iran has affected her sense of identity as an Iranian-American woman. Listen to her read the essay (her voice is gorgeous) or read it yourself, below. Either way, be sure to scroll through the text to see the family photos and social media posts she shares.
“Zan, Zendegi, Azadi*”
*Woman, Life, Freedom
By Neda Frayha
I first became aware of my Iranian heritage, and of the strength and power of Iranian women, through my grandmothers.
My maternal grandmother, Mahmonir (“Mama Monir”), would visit from Iran every several years and stay with my family in suburban Maryland for months at a time. She was petite, with a beautiful, deep voice and sonorous laugh. Forced into a prearranged marriage as a teenager, she went on to lead a bold and trailblazing path as an adult, divorcing her first husband, pursuing an education, and becoming the health sciences librarian at a prestigious academic library in Tehran. She traveled the world throughout her life, collecting artwork, jewelry, and beautiful fabrics. She always hugged me tight, laughed with me about the latest drama on “Days of Our Lives,” and listened to my stories about middle and high school as we went on long walks together. When I was a medical student in my mid-20s, she passed away in a hospital bed 40 miles away from the hospital where I was working. I lost a close friend and co-conspirator as much as I lost a grandmother.
My paternal grandmother, Mahjabin (“Mama Maji”), is a vivacious storyteller, an elegant bolt of energy who remembers every birthday, every friend’s name, every anecdote anyone in her vast circle has shared with her. She was a brilliant and talented nurse before marrying and having children. She felt the push/pull between her professional and family lives 60 years before I would do the same. During the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, as I tried to juggle work alongside 24/7 child care, it was Mama Maji who offered me the greatest solidarity and grace. I still call her and my grandfather once a week, and our conversations continue to center on our experiences with parenthood.
As an American-born child of Iranian immigrants, I did not realize my experience of family or cultural identity was different from that of my friends until my grandparents came to visit. When Mama Monir opened her suitcase and pulled out lavaashak for us, a treat of pressed, dried fruit in flavors of apricot and sour cherry, I experienced a moment of realization that this was special and unique. Mama Maji’s expansive, exquisitely detailed stories about Iran helped me realize that I was both American and from someplace else. Together, my grandmothers showed me through their stories of education, achievement, and travel that Iranian women were strong, courageous, intellectually curious, and full of agency.
I first began to understand Iran as a country with a complicated political history, including the repression of women’s rights, through my mother. Shortly before Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, she and my father left Iran for Europe and then America. When I was a child, my mom had nightmares that she was trapped on the streets of Iran, not wearing the required veil over her hair, and that the police had caught her. In real life, such offenses could (and still do) lead to beatings and imprisonment. I remember being 7 years old, and my mom’s father was dying back in Iran. She would go for long drives in our silver Oldsmobile Omega and return with her eyes red and swollen. She desperately wanted to be with him in his last days, but she couldn’t return to the country she’d left. The brutal Islamic revolution of the late 1970s had been so difficult, so traumatizing for her family that she knew she could not go back. At the time, I was too young to understand the inner conflict she must have felt; I could only see that my mom was sad, and that the country of my parents’ birth had something to do with it.
It is easy for a child of immigrants to grow up feeling neither here nor there; in my case, not quite Iranian enough for my parents’ community of friends and not quite American enough among my own. I spent every Saturday at Persian school from age 6 until I went to college, learning how to speak, read, and write the language and then diving into Persian poetry and history. Even still, whenever I spoke in Persian, grownups at dinner parties laughed and laughed at my American accent. On the flip side, elementary school classmates in the late 1980s asked if I knew the ayatollah personally. No matter how I code-switched between communities as a child, I felt slightly ashamed, like I was doing something wrong and didn’t know how to correct it. Years later, in my early 20s, a consulting firm colleague told me in a friendly tone of voice, “you know, Americans don’t really like Iran.” It took me until my early 40s to realize he was being a jerk, rather than internalize his words as a truth I somehow needed to prove wrong.
Given the political turmoil within Iran and in Iranian-American relations since I was born, there has been a tension between pride in my heritage and shame in Iran’s politics. I love and cherish Persian culture, food, music, poetry, and the legendary warmth and hospitality of the Iranian people. And simultaneously, when someone asks me, “where are you REALLY from?,” I observe in myself a moment’s hesitation, a flash assessment as to what kind of response the answer “Iran” will elicit and how much energy I have to deal with it. I am not proud of this pause, however fleeting it may be.
Today, over 40 years after the Islamic revolution of 1979 and all the resulting conflict it wrought, both within Iran and internationally, Iranian women are leading a new revolution in the streets.
The catalyst for this movement was the September 2022 arrest and subsequent murder of 22 year-old Mahsa Amini by the country’s “morality police” for allegedly improper use of the hijab, the hair covering Iranian women are still required to wear (and the same hair covering that plagued my mother’s dreams). The official report is that Mahsa Amini died in custody of natural causes; a photo of her at a Tehran hospital, on life support with signs of head trauma, shows otherwise. As I’ve immersed myself in news and social media about what’s happening in Iran, I’ve seen reflected back to me both the bravery and agency I saw in my grandmothers and the collective weight of decades of gender apartheid that I first became aware of through my mother. And I’ve felt moved to explore my feelings about my own Iranian-American identity in a deeper way than ever before.
Over a month after Mahsa Amini’s arrest, widespread protests continue all over Iran in which women and their male allies demand greater freedoms and an end to the current authoritarian regime. I am utterly consumed by the news, obsessed with every development, racking up hours of additional screen time every week as I pore through dozens of Twitter and Instagram updates every day. My social media feeds, previously a mix of medical education, cute dogs, and baked goods, are now a steady stream of videos from the streets of Iran, some beautiful and some utterly brutal as the government cracks down on its protesters. I am filled with hope, worry, excitement, and dread as I inhale this news every day.
For the first time in my life, I text my parents using my phone’s Persian keyboard, however rusty my memory of the Persian alphabet may be. I reach out to my Iranian-American friends more than usual. My normally quiet Instagram stories feature regular reposts from prominent activists and journalists in the Iranian diaspora. I feel an ever-deepening connection to the Iranian part of my identity, and a sense of woeful inadequacy and lifelong complacency compared to the women I see literally fighting for their freedom.
It feels as though the rest of the world is taking notice and expressing solidarity with the people of Iran, and with its women in particular, crystallizing a crucial truth it has taken me far too long to internalize: a country’s government is not the same as its people. I now teach this lesson to my young son, making sure he knows that bad actors on a global stage are often bad actors with their own citizens. We cannot assume a given leader or administration truly represents the character of all their country’s people — as America’s own recent history has shown us.
It is too soon to know what will come of this enormous groundswell of resistance to the Iranian government, led by women in response to the death of Mahsa Amini. It could have tremendous consequences for the people of Iran and also for the rest of the world. While I watch and wait to learn what this revolution will ultimately mean, my own relationship to my Iranian heritage has shifted. I reflect on the women and girls risking everything as they protest in the streets; on my parents as young 20-somethings leaving their home country as a violent new regime took hold; on my grandmothers’ bold paths long before I was born. I think of lavaashak and Persian school. I extend grace to the childhood version of myself, who was never sure how much of any identity to be. And I recognize now, in my mid-40s, that it is possible to embrace all the identities, to be unapologetic whether I’m speaking Persian with an American accent or taking pride with my son in the Iranian half of his heritage. May the foundational, feminist rallying cry of today’s revolution, “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), unlock similar connections for other children of immigrants. And most of all, may it become the daily, lived truth for the people of Iran.
