Speaking Through the Veil: Thoughts on the Iran/America Divide
An Interview with Farzeneh Milani
By Virginia Moran
In ancient times, the Persian king, enraged that his wife had been unfaithful, vowed to wed and then kill a virgin each night. After this had been going on a while, Sheherazade, the prime minister’s daughter, offered herself as the next wife/victim. She had a strategy for turning the murderous tide, but it depended on how enchanting the story was she would tell on her wedding night. Her first story was a success, and then she explained to her husband that she could tell an even better story the next night—topping the first one in excitement—but, alas, she would be dead. The King kept her alive another night to find out whether the next was as good as the first (it was), and then another, and then another, until one thousand and one nights (and stories) passed without any more women dying at his hands. By then the King and Sheherazade had several children, and he was a changed man. He officially foreswore his revenge. Sheherezade’s stories have gone down in history as One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
Farzeneh Milani has lived in the United States for more than forty years, arriving from Iran in 1967 with her husband. Her two children were born in the United States. Milani currently is on the faculty at the University of Virginia in Studies in Women and Gender and Middle Eastern and South Asian Culture and Literature. She has been a guest lecturer at over 150 other universities, and has written books, articles, commentaries, op eds, and poetry.
Farzeneh Milani and Sheherazade have more in common than the fact that they both came from the part of the world once known as Persia, now as Iran. They also share an enchantment with story-telling. Throughout Milani’s work runs the thread of story—and a respect for the work words can do, far beyond simple entertainment. Milani, like Sheherezade, understands the tremendous political impact of sharing cultures. And she has quite a story to tell, as a world-renowned feminist and an Iranian-American.
When I ask Milani about the origins of her feminism, she talks about her mother: “My mother, I can say with certainty, was feminist. Was she part of an organized movement? She wasn’t. Did she call herself a feminist? She didn’t. Had she read any of the theory of the field? She hadn’t. But feminism is a belief system, and my mother believed in equality. She believed that men and women should not be treated differently just because they were born men and women, and she had great respect for her wishes and her desires.” She was also an Islamic woman in a traditional society, who, according to her daughter, “had a very nuanced, complicated vision of the world.”
Milani writes about her mother in the poem “Nutty Question.” [To read her poem, check out the Fall 2008 issue of Iris.]
Milani’s first book, Veils and Words, focuses on the symbol with which women like her mother are often associated—the veil. Although the veil is often viewed from a Western perspective as a symbol of oppression and control, Milani sees it differently. She studied its impact on the whole culture and explored its “centrality to women’s writing.”
Milani describes the Persian origin of the word as referring to the tent with which upper-class women created privacy around themselves when they were carried into public in covered sedan chairs. Use of this covering was voluntary and a mark of distinction.
Furthermore, “the veil has never been only an Islamic institution,” Milani points out. “The veil predates Islam. For instance, in most pictorial and sculptural representations of the Madonna, she’s covered. In fact, ‘to take the veil’ means to become a nun, a very Christian institution.”
Milani gives a personal example of the complexity of the idea of the veil in her NPR All Things Considered essay “Drawing the Line Between Private and Public.” In this richly nuanced essay, she talks about the time she and her daughter were at Santa Monica Beach in California when young American women nearby began to discuss the provocative activities of one of their group. Milani, unaccustomed to invisible veils—to the American pretense of not hearing or being interested in a topic—listened openly and could barely restrain herself from leaning over to give motherly advice. When the young women noticed her undisguised involvement, they objected. It was a lesson to Milani in how ubiquitous veils are, whether seen or unseen.
So does someone situated at the nexus of so many worlds—men and women, Iranian and American, among many others—see any means of healing the divisions among them?
Milani returns to the subject of Sheherezade, placing her among the Iranian women writers she has studied and admires: “They have struggled for human rights and human dignity, for democracy and tolerance, for freedom for all, and they’ve never believed in revenge. To me, this devotion to a peaceful resolution, the refusal to resort to violence is what is most attractive about them.”
These women—the story-tellers—“recognize that words are far more powerful than any weapon. You can be of help in the long run. They recognize the vicious circle of violence has to be cut somewhere. Sheherezade did that. She was a learned, wise psychologist who cured her husband, a serial killer. In her stories, Sheherezade did not divide the world in either/or dichotomies, in victim or victimizer. The world of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights is not black or white—it is black and white. It is a twilight zone; a world of complementary views and competing desires. In her stories, there are men who are cruel and bloodthirsty; there are women who are cruel and bloodthirsty. Hers is a world of moral ambiguity and synthesis of divergent views.”
So how does Sheherezade use this knowledge to stop her husband from killing?
“She cures her husband by de-stereotyping his mind,” Milani explains. First she tells him stories that portray men as victims. She sympathizes with him. “’I hear you, you’ve suffered, and you’re justified in being angry. But not in killing innocent women. Slowly, she helps him to be more discriminating, to know difference, not based on gender but based on individual action.”
In short, Sheherezade cures the King with words.
And it is to this point Milani speaks when she expresses her concern over the paucity of cultural exchange that has existed between the U.S. and Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis. While condemning the unjustifiable taking of American hostages, Milani sees the now decades-long absence of sympathetic dialogue between the two cultures as deeply troubling.
She points out that one way America and the Soviet Union reached the end of the Cold War was through knowledge of each other’s literature and art, which were never embargoed.
“I think we all gain from focusing more on commonalities among cultures rather than fanning the flame of antagonism through an obsessive focus on differences or on past grievances,” Milani says.
What would she say to young women to encourage them to lift that and other obscuring veils?
“It’s up to us to make a difference,” Milani says. “We have the power to do it by becoming involved citizens of the ever-shrinking global village.”
Virginia Moran is the Managing Editor of Iris.
