Behind the Green Veil Ch. 01

Back on the plane, remembering these beautiful experiences, I continued to ponder why I was feeling so down. I still couldn't put my finger on it. I looked out the window and saw that the sea below us was about to become land. That's when the captain came on and told us to prepare for landing. This part of the trip went blessedly quick. I doubted I would be so lucky for the next phase.

Three hours later I was finally boarding the Boeing 777 for the long flight to New York. Just the thought of how torturous this was going to be was turning my low mood into a grumpy one. I fortunately had an aisle seat, because I knew that I would be getting up to stretch often. Seat 19C, I was the first person to make it to my row. I figured I would wait to take out my laptop until the other people in my row arrived and got settled in. I did not have to wait long before an elderly gentleman gave me the universal nod that says "I'm in your row." I stood up and let him in. He unpacked a couple of novels and then put his carry-on in the overhead bin, which seemed to take him forever. There was a line of people that had built up behind him. He finally moved in to take his seat by the window and I moved to resume my seat so the other people could pass me by.

"I'm sorry to ask you to get up again but I'm in the middle there," the voice said with a slightly off British accent. I had just plopped back down. I looked up to see a Middle Eastern woman wearing a hijab indicating that she needed to get into my row. "No worries" I said and stood to let her in. She moved past me into our row, giving me my first whiff of her amazing scent. For her, it was an I-Pad and a bunch of books, journals, and magazines that she removed from her bag. There was an anthropology journal, and journal of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, a few heavy books like Foucault, Franz Fanon, and John Paul Sartre, and a French edition of Elle. I knew right away she was an academic. Lastly she pulled out a copy of Cosmo, and I could not help but start to chuckle.

She looked up at me with a surprised and defensive look on her face and asked, "Are you laughing at me? I know I'm taking a long time but I'm about finished."

"You take whatever time you need but that's not why I'm laughing," I responded.

"What then?"

"All that heavy intellectual reading, and Cosmo? Really?!" I could barely contain how tickled I was by it.

"I know, it's a weakness," she said, softening her defensive posture, "but don't embarrass me. Don't you ever have times where you want to shut your brain off and occupy yourself with something mindless?" she asked as she took her seat.

"I guess I do," I said, moving in to sit next to her. Playing Grand Theft Auto came to mind, but I didn't let her in on that much detail. "I'm not judging, but it is funny."

"Uh huh," she snickered, "You say that now, but I'm sure you will be asking me to borrow it before these 14 hours are up." She could give tease as well as she could take it. I liked that.

From looking at her, I could tell why she had the fashion magazine. Every article of clothing she wore all the way down to her shoes was a designer brand designed to look stylishly casual. She wore black thin-strip corduroy pants, a green shirt, a silk knit scarf, and a black light sweater. The sweater looked plain at first but one could tell by looking at the stitching that it was soft on the skin and pricey. Complimenting her outfit she wore a hijab of beautiful dark green silk with black streaks patterned throughout. So her reading Elle made sense. The Cosmo must have been just pure mindless indulgence.

I stood back up to grab my laptop and headphones out of my bag in the overhead bin then sat back down. "We'll just see what kind of mindless entertainment you bring up on that thing and then we'll talk," she further teased back at me.

"Nothing but high-brow content here," I lied. "A documentary on Darwin, another on post-structuralist philosophy, one on the fallacy of post-modernity, and finally one on great women thinkers throughout history." She looked at me sideways with one eyebrow raised, trying to assess if I was telling the truth. I tried to hold in my smile but I could feel the corners of my mouth betraying me, moving up ever-so-slightly higher on my cheeks.

"If that were true I wouldn't know whether to be impressed or sorry for you," she said, reassessing me with her eyes. She knew it wasn't true but the content of my assertion told her that I was likely an academic.

We were now taxiing to the runway. Members of the flight crew started going over safety instructions, disrupting our conversation. I tucked my laptop away in the seat pocket and prepared for takeoff while she did the same with her books and magazines. I have always loved the rush of liftoff when flying. It wasn't quite the same on big jets because the acceleration isn't as fast, but it was still fun. She looked tense, a look that stayed on her face throughout the takeoff. Once we were in the air I decided to change the subject.

"Are you heading home or are you visiting?" I asked. A pained look came over her face.

"Funny you should ask..." she said softly, "A few years ago I would have answered that I was visiting. Now I'm not so sure."

"You make that sound like a sad thing," I observed.

"It is sad for me... not because I'm really unsure but because increasingly I am fairly sure. I just don't like..." she paused to reconsider her words. "I'm not sure about how I feel about the answer."

"O-kay... I won't pry if it's a touchy subject."

"I'm from Iran," she explained and left it at that as if that said it all.

"I see. I think I get it."

"Do you?" she challenged me.

"Well, I know my government labels you as part of the so-called 'axis of evil,' and I also know that the US and Israel are foolishly trying to start a war with you guys right now, pushing for sanctions that will hurt the basic citizen more than the government. All part of the global war on terror. That can't be easy for you," I concluded.

She just looked at me cautiously, so I decided to continue.

"There is also all this turmoil right now in the Middle East with the Arab Spring but I also know that there was the Green movement in Iran that preceded these uprisings, though Ahmadinejad crushed them pretty thoroughly."

She looked at me with either increased skepticism or renewed respect, I couldn't quite tell. Maybe it was both. "How do you know so much about what's happening in Iran?" she asked finally.

"I keep up on my international news," I said coolly.

"Yeah, but most Americans do not," she observed. "What makes you different?"

I raised my hand slightly and looked down at my dark skin covering it. "I know what it's like when they try to make you out to be the boogie man," I finally told her. "Lately, Arabs have been catching it pretty bad."

She didn't say anything for about a minute, reassessing me. It felt like five minutes, and I realized how quickly I had become concerned with what she thought of me. Then something in her demeanor changed and she finally let the tension out of her shoulders. "That's only the tip of the iceberg of my story," she began. "My name is Orkideh, by the way." She offered her hand and for the first time I saw her engagement ring.

"Jackson," I replied as I took her hand and shook it, contemplating life's small cruelties. "Jackson William," I repeated, giving her my full name.

"Is Jackson your first or last name?"

"My first. William is my last name."

"Isn't Jackson usually a family name?" she asked. "Your mom got that little backwards," she teased.

"You know, you're the first one to ever make that observation" I replied in a mocking voice. She laughed and gave me a slight elbow to my arm.

"It's nice to meet you, Jackson" she said, her laugh fading into a beautiful smile.

"It's nice to meet you as well," I replied, trying to pronounce her name to make sure I had it right.

"It means 'orchid' in Farsi," she continued. "You can call me Orchid if that's easier for you."

"Not a chance," I said. "I will not dumb down your name, Orkideh."

"Very good," she said, complimenting me on my pronunciation. "Farsi is the most widely spoken Persian language, and so first let me share with you that we're not all Arabs. Most Iranians are Persian. We have Arabs and Turks in the minority in Iran, but most of us are Persian."

"Secondly, your observations are half right -- but it's not so much the threat of war that really worries us. Though the US, Israel and the EU claim that we are isolated and want to cripple our economy with sanctions, Iran actually has strong economic and historic ties with China, Russia, Korea and Japan, none of whom will strictly adhere to sanctions. More recently Ahmadinejad has built strong ties with Venezuela, Brazil, and a many other countries in the southern hemisphere.

"The real danger for the Iranian people is in how this treatment by Western powers emboldens Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah to take a much harder line stifling any dissent and crushing dissidents. Islamic fundamentalism is typically seen as the answer to Western aggression and the attempts to emasculate Middle Eastern leaders. It's these kinds of policies that make our lives hell."

"So it's not always being regarded with suspicion as terrorists that causes you the most problems?" I asked.

"I don't want to make it sound like that's not also a pain, especially when I travel and the treatment I've received in the US over the past three years that I have been living there. But over the past 30 years since the Iranian revolution, Western threats have had a much more profound affect on our daily lives," she explained, "and that's very much related to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism."

"Like how?" I inquired.

She thought for a moment then reached to remove her hijab from around her hair. For the first time I got to take in her full beauty. Her thick black hair was run through with dark golden highlights. Her high cheek bones gave a regal beauty to her face. She wasn't flawless -- who among us is? Now in my 30s, my physique wasn't what it used to be in my 20s. I work out occasionally but I prefer to keep in shape by staying active -- playing tennis, shooting some hoops, riding my bike, or better yet building something. I like to play carpenter on the weekends.

My problem was I didn't have the time to do it often enough. I eat healthy most of the time, stay well groomed, but I'm not the kind of man to maintain a six-pack. Physical perfection is not what I look for in a woman, either. I value intellect and a strong, passionate personal connection, the strength of the chemistry between us. With Orkideh, I was becoming increasing drawn into her personality. The fact that she was soft on my eyes only made me regret more that she had an engagement ring on her finger.

"From the youngest age, I remember learning that the most important skill was lying. We lied because we had to. At school you were supposed to cover your hair with these tiny scarves," she said, holding up her hijab. "When I was younger we could only wear black ones but nowadays white or bright colors are permitted. Our teachers would ask us if we were always wearing our scarves, and we quickly learned to lie and say we were.

"The questions did not stop at our attire. We were also constantly asked about what kind of music we were listening to and what kind of movies we were watching to make sure that we were not being exposed to anything that was forbidden. Even though we learned to deny it, when at home we could easily have access to video tapes - considered illegal then - containing musical videos and banned movies, all kinds of stuff.

"Most foreigners find this funny or rather unbelievable, the issue of restrictions in my country. I am not talking about the basic rights of human beings to live their personal lives -- about which too much has been said already -- but rather how all this has created a culture in which we learn to speak a dual language, and the psychological toll that takes on us. That dual culture requires little kids learn to lie at school about our moms wearing or not wearing a hijab in front of men, to lie in high school about our favorite writers, favorite book or favorite song, to lie in the uni about what we do when we are not studying, and to lie at home to our parents about our friends, relationships and what we do when we go out."

"Yeah, but most kids learn to do that when they're growing up," I replied.

"Sure they do, but not with their lives depending on it, or the lives of their family members. What happened in Persia in the last century was an abrupt change of values after the revolution in 1979. Religion was the key point of this power shift, however this is only the surface of a much more complicated story. After the revolution, all expression and communication became couched in religious terms. Our personal lives became subject to scrutiny to insure that we were living in concert with the religious themes of the revolution. This did not mean that we all became ultra religious. The pressure of the investigations into our personal lives and the consequent discrimination we face when we fail that scrutiny ends up in the formation of a language in which things have dual meanings. We learned to use religious prose with multiple meanings to convey what we are trying to communicate.

"In this dual language, we live two lives and speak two tones. We are religious at school, we take part in the prayers held in the school yard, we celebrate the anniversary of the revolution. But once we go home we change our clothes, dress up, attend parties, drink and dance. In a fraction of a second we forget about school or work, like our minds just switch to another channel," she explained.

"There is a similar phenomenon in Black culture in the US," I interjected. "Du Bois called it 'double consciousness' and more recently we call it 'code switching.' Basically there is an alternative universe that we live within, in terms of how we communicate and express ourselves, depending on the context and who else is around."

"Yeah, I think all oppressed people must learn this skill, and it has certainly become well-developed in Persians in the past 30 years. We can't be proud of this ability though, which is based on pretending to be what others want you to be. This 'Other You' is your key to survival, it's our way to get accepted by the rulers as a citizen. Don't you think it's unhealthy to have to live like that?" she asked.

I thought about it for a minute. "On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, a lot of creativity comes out of living in that kind of liminal space. When I think about our music, our styles, imitated all over the world... all that creativity has come from our experiences."

"I never thought about it like that," she reflected.

"I bet there is a lot of creativity in you, as well," I wagered. She thought about it for a moment.

"I write poetry," she admitted finally, "But it doesn't mean that I'm grateful to live like this!" she was quick to assert. "The worst is not about the dual language thing, but the violence we face when our dissent becomes known. It's the threat of that violence that does the most damage to us mentally."

"You're right, Orkideh," I admitted, looking deep into her dark brown eyes, "and the threat of violence we face is not what it used to be. Yet still, many of us still get randomly shot by the police, and we have to be the most incarcerated group of people on the planet. We live with that threat constantly."

"I've known 5 people killed in the last two years," she said softly, not in a way to try and prove who lived under the biggest threat, but just as a statement of fact. A silence hung in the air.

"Were they all part of the Green Movement?" I asked finally.

"Some were, if only tangentially. One was a writer, an older man, who had been writing political dissent pieces for many years. But the regime is cracking down on people much more harshly than they have done in the past, and that scares so many of us."

"What kind of poetry do you write?" I asked, connecting the dots between the sense of fear that I picked up from her in recounting this story.

"The themes in most of my poetry have been pretty subtle, hopefully not enough to get me in any trouble. Plus, I've written them on a blog using only my first name. But I have a second blog where I write commentaries on political events. That blog has focused on the Green Movement and the rest of the Arab Spring and I write under a pseudonym, but I fear that I might have recently been discovered."

"I'm guessing you're an academic in addition to the poetry, so what do you work on?"

She gave me an affirming nod. "Very perceptive of you, Jackson. Are you an academic as well?" she asked. Then before I could answer, "No, let me guess! Political Science?"

"Almost," I chucked. "I'm a historian."

"Anthro," she said. "And you're right, it's my academic work that will get me into trouble, and it's why I can't go back home to Tehran." She paused for a second. "The threat to me isn't even the worst part. I have family that still lives there."

"Do they support you, even with the risk?"

"For the most part, everyone except my brother, whom we were all visiting in Malaysia. He lives in Kuala Lumpur with his wife and two kids. We all gathered there for my father's birthday. My parents are the ones who still live in Tehran. They are the ones facing the greatest risk, yet they are most supportive of my work."

"Is he your only sibling?" I asked.

"I have two older sisters, the one closest to my age in London and an older one in Montreal."

I teased her about being the baby. She gave me a playful elbow in my side then asked me about my family. I had to admit that I, too, was the youngest. Then we shared stories about how all of our siblings give us shit about being spoiled. It was about that time that the service cart came around. We had been talking for over an hour. Our conversation continued over the meal and after we had both had some wine, we began to do a lot more laughing.

It was about that time that the older guy sitting by the window instructed us that he needed to get out and go to the restroom. Orkideh said she needed to go as well, so we all decided to get up and stretch. We stayed standing for a while to let the circulation run thoroughly through our legs, chatting by the serving station. After about 20 minutes we could see that our laughter was starting to bother some people near-by trying to sleep, so we decided to return to our seats.

"So let's see what movies you really have on that thing," she asked once we sat down, gesturing toward my laptop. "I want to watch a movie, and the ones that the airline has available never really interest me."

"S-u-r-e-..." I said a bit hesitantly. I had some good movies on there that she definitely might like, but I couldn't exactly remember the names of the ones I had downloaded. I also had some other, uhh... "private" movies of an adult theme on there. I was afraid that if I opened up the window with all my video files on it that she would see a little more than I was ready to share. Things were really going great between us and I didn't want to risk putting her off. Then I remembered that she was engaged. I had purposefully not asked her about it the whole time, and we were three hours into the flight by that point. She had also not mentioned it at all but I did not know if that was because she didn't want to or simply that it hadn't come up.

It's always a tense moment, when a man first shares his taste in porn with the woman he's dating... if he ever dares to at all. Not all of my girlfriends had been so open-minded about it, but three of my five last girlfriends were. We would watch it together sometimes, figuring out new things we wanted to try. One of my ex-girlfriends worked in a lab during the week and in a women's-themed adult bookstore on the weekends. Her job was to take home new porn movies they received and evaluate whether they were "woman friendly." Why did I ever break up with her?!?