'Dressed and undressed in the uniform of the regimes': Sanaz Fotouhi on growing up in Iran

In the third grade, when I was a student at the all-girls Sevvom Shaban School in Tehran’s Arayshahr in the 1980s, I had a best friend named Mahsa. Every day after school, Mahsa and I used to do our homework together and then we would play music and dance to our favourite Andy and Koros songs. One day after school, Mahsa didn’t turn up at our house and didn’t come to school the next day. She already had a broken leg at this time and we were concerned about her. We found out that Mahsa was overtaken by such a fear after a particular religious studies class that she could no longer go to the bathroom. Her mother had to take her to the hospital with a leg already in a cast to put a catheter on her.

I recall to this day every little detail of that particular religious studies class clearly even after decades. Our teacher was a ‘spinster’ probably in her thirties, angry and scary. While every other subject was taught by the same teacher across the same grade, religious studies was the only subject which had its own educator assigned to the entire school from the ministry of education. Mrs Badami, our grade teacher, always allowed us to take off our mandatory maghnaeh — the navy scarf that formed part of our uniform — on hot days, in the classroom. But the religious studies teacher not only didn’t even dream of the idea, but also made sure we followed the rules strictly. She would check to make sure we didn’t wear colourful socks and shoes, or didn’t have any nail polish on. For the upper grades, she made sure they didn’t wear any lipstick or make up, and didn’t do anything to their face like plucking their eyebrows.

The content of the classes always revolved around the punishment and reward system. It was her godly duty to save us from being punished, she would tell us. She would make sure we got the message loud and clear by demonstrating punishment if we disobeyed her rules and she would explain in great lyrical detail and vigour — as if she had been there and back — afterlife punishments of worldly sins. In that particular class, the topic was music.

At this time in the mid-1980s, the new government had fully established the rules and regulations by which people were to live by. In and amongst them, it was decided that based on the interpretation of the religious laws set in place hundreds of years ago that music, particularly the kind of modern music we listened to which was copied and duplicated on cassette tape and smuggled to us from Los Angeles by the exiled Iranian singers, carried the biggest sin. In this class, our teacher first asked us to put our hands up if we listened to music at home. By now, we had learned not to disclose this kind of information when asked by anyone outside of our closest circle. Only a few confused kids put their hands up while the rest of us sat in silence. Then she said that she highly recommends those of us who did put our hands up to remind our parents that they are allowing their children to sin. A sin for which, after we died, we would pay dearly. Every single part of our body would come back from dust and gather together to confess that we had sinned by listening to this kind of vile music. Then a hot rod would go, like this, from one ear and come out the other to punish us. I still remember how my body shrivelled up in fear at the idea.

With already three years of this kind of exposure and training in religious studies twice a week for nine months of the school year, we all well and truly understood and feared God’s mighty wrath and anger towards its creation. Mahsa had realised already how much sin she had already accumulated in her ten years of life and this is when her body decided to shut down in response.

Mahsa eventually recovered. Well, as much as recovery on the physical level goes, for the unspoken and unseen damage was far greater for her, and all of us. And it would be years before we could even recognise the trauma inflicted upon us.

Three decades later, when my child was born, I started suffering from anxiety. A kind of unexplainable and irrational fear also birthed along with him in me. Up until then, I thought, I had never experienced anything like this in my body. I went to see someone and she started by asking me if I suffered from any major traumas in my childhood?

Not really, was my answer.

She dug deeper, tell me more about the times and circumstances when you were born and grew up in.

I was born in Iran soon after the revolution, in the midst of the war between Iran and Iraq. For the first eight years of my life we were in the war and…

Stop right there, she said. She didn’t need to know any more. Did I not see this as traumatic?

Well, yes. But it was so long ago. To me, it was just the way life was then. I had come to terms with it as had everyone else.

I didn’t go back to see her because I was determined that there was something else wrong with me. I didn’t want to dig up the past. But when the anxiety continued, and I could not find anything else wrong, I knew it was the past which was unveiling itself. It was then that for the first time I remembered the anxiety and tension that I had suppressed so deeply and compensated for through other means of release. As I dug deep into this fear, for the first time I recognised and acknowledged the matrilineal trauma that I had inherited from my mother and grandmother. A kind of historical trauma inflicted upon us, not just specific to my family, but to every single Iranian woman — and man to some degree — by a series of events and by powers beyond our control.

At this time, I found a photo of me when I was around ten. When I looked into the eyes of the photograph, I didn’t see a peaceful joyous child. In my shell-shocked eyes and firm downward facing mouth, I saw a reflection of a society’s generational unresolved trauma. I saw my mother’s fear for our survival. I saw my own fears indoctrinated through the years of schooling of things a ten-year-old should never be afraid of or even think about — like listening to and enjoying their favourite music. I saw my fear of being caught by the morality police for wearing nail polish, for having strands of hair out, or for the unthinkable act of being out with a boy and the shame it would cause my family. I saw the shame instilled in me about my body, my sexuality, my womanhood. I saw a reflection of all my sisters and brothers who have experienced this — for anyone who grew up in Iran during this time will without a doubt have experienced these on a molecular level.

It was deeply troubling to confront the little girl in the picture and to acknowledge and voice the deep layers of historical trauma. The reality is that Iranian women, in the last century, have been played as the pawns of political systems. Dressed and undressed accordingly in the uniform of the ruling regimes, they have formed the deeply traumatised frontline through which these ruling powers hold their fort. My grandmother remembered when Reza Khan forcefully pulled the hijab off women’s heads in the name of their modernisation, only to live through a time when women were forcefully put back again into the hijab after the 1979 revolution.

But it hasn’t been just the hijab as an attire that has caused the trauma. The hijab, the wearing or not wearing of it, is symbolic, pregnant with other meanings that are dripped forcefully and gradually fed into young minds through the media and school system, as soon as we had an understanding of ourselves as social beings. Wrapped in fear, there was no choice but compliance because if we didn’t eat it and smack our lips, the system would eat us and sometimes not even spit us out.

If you are watching all the news and social media feeds of the upheaval in Iran and thinking that women are only fighting for the freedom to dress how they like, look deeper. To have the freedom to choose to dress how we like is a symbol of something else. It is a demonstration that we are no longer accepting to be the pawns but the queens who are taking charge so that the next generation of Iranian men and women can look at their ten-year-old photo and remember how really joyful their life was and the how powerful their mothers had been for breaking the lineage of trauma and setting them free.

(Sanaz Fotouhi is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and academic. Born in Iran, she currently lives in Melbourne (Australia). She is one of the founding members of the Persian Film Festival in Australia, and is the former director of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Inc, a literary networking organisation that brings together people from the creative writing and publishing industries)