When Tribal Men Talk about Women

The following is a translation of a wonderful article by Mas`ud Naseri about Bijan Bahadori Kashkuli, "The Wind Painter".(1) It was conducted on May 4, 2008.

Bijan Bahadori is a tribologist who depicts the life and the culture of his tribe, the Qashqais, in his paintings. He works in the Naïve School of painting, very much like Mokarrameh Ghanbari, the peasant woman from northern Iran. Bijan employs vivid colors, simple images, and mixed perspectives (direct angle as well as distant views). He uses contrast to create harmony and rhythm, an atmosphere full of energy, movement and life which is the secret of tribal life. As portrayed in Bahadori’s paintings, tribal life owes its energy and vibrancy to its women, and this is the secret of tribal life he tries to reveal by depicting them in his paintings. His paintings have been on exhibit in Iran, France, England, the Netherlands, and Turkey.

Bahadori was born in one of the black tents of the Qashqai tribe. He says he is seventy or even sixty years old, but his wife, Bibi Iran, jokes, “Sixty or seventy? He is ninety years old!”

Undoubtedly, he has sucked the milk off his mother’s breast perfumed with clove and rosemary and slept in a bed covered with salt flowers, sea shells and love rings dropped off snakes when copulating, with the lion’s nail hanging over his crib. He has dreamed of climbing his mother’s delicate silky head gear and has witnessed the life of “tribal women and men who are born on horseback, live on saddles and die while riding.”(2)

Very likely he has spent his childhood in the saddle of new brides riding hill and dale in a Gabbeh and Qashqai tribal klims that he recalls with joy and ecstasy:

I loved painting. There were no tools for it in my tribe, even a pencil. I designed over stone slabs with the sharp edges of pebbles. I would draw horses, goats and camels. My tribal elders showed my paintings to each other and would say, “See, they look very similar to horses and camels.” They would encourage me with their tribal simplicity. Later on, I drew over the blue and while papers wrapped around the Belgian sugar cones. There was no paint or pigment and I had to use the juice and essence of various herbs and plants. I would smash the grass and thought I would make green dye, but after drawing it would yield only a dull brownish color. Despite the lack of facilities, I loved painting. The head of our tribe, Elias Khan Kashkooli, was a cultured man. He liked me and tried to make a good painter out of me. He introduced my paintings to everyone. He even sent me to school so I could learn Persian. In fact, he revived me a and gave me a new life. He introduced me to Mohamad Bahman Beigui, who had a great impact in my life. Later I became an art teacher myself and taught painting and calligraphy to the tribe kids.

Then, he could paint the bluest of the blue sky of his tribe, and “listen to Qashqai music that was nourished from the modest and generous breast of Mother Nature.”(3) He traveled and became a companion to troubadours, storytellers, camel drivers and stevedores, and listened to the magical happy songs of Vasunaks, the sad melodies of Kakams, the exciting and energetic music of Koroghlus, the love songs of Sanan, the lamentations of Aghoriles, the heart-breaking songs of Guriely Khavar, and the epic lyrics of Jongnamehs. He translated them all into the colors and images to his tribal people on his return.

My paintings are narratives from tribal life: women and men and children, migration, hunting, stick games, erecting winter and summer tents, handkerchief dances, weaving klims and gabbehs, spinning wool, horseback riding, cooking food, rebellion, war, and peace among the tribes, nature, local animals, and rain prayer ceremonies in which a designated person with beard and moustache (often artificial) would lead the prayer and sing:

I’m the bride’s drum.
I’m the golden horn.
I bring the wind, I’ll bring the rain.
I do not want anything in return.
I want only some sweet.

The sweet he requests is wheat flour that people would give him willingly. They believe that God would listen to him and send them rain. But, more than anything else…

Love and loving is a different story. Whenever is on top of the mountain, next to the valley of Khosrow and Shirin, such as a ghazal, golden and silky, running under the light of sun or moon, the natives believe to be the Lady of Ladies, the daughter of the chief, with strings of rubies and safire and Kahroba, and delrob on run.

We do not know where and when Bijan Khan and Iran Banoo bound their heart together, but we know Iran Banoo was a rider of the Chariot of Wind.

We do not know whether or not Bijan Khan, when he met Iran Banoo riding on the back of Badjani(4) said in his heart: “You dark-skinned tribal girl, do not boast of your skin color, tell me what you have in your bosom? Is it clove and rosemary that takes away from you the sweat of sowing, weaving, knitting and milking?”

But we know for sure that if Iran Banoo would have asked Bijan Khan, “You, young man, what do you have in your leather arms?” Bijan Khan would have answered without hesitation: “I have my paintings of our tribe.”

Not only are his paintings the images of Iran Bibi, but of all those women who have born Iran Bibis, those who themselves were born on the road, sometimes during the migrations and sometimes while fleeing from an enemy, the women who have ornamented the harsh tribal life with the colorful rainbow of their womanly love and wisdom.

I like wedding scenes. I remember my own wedding. I wore pants and a jacket. Iran Banoo had worn local dress. But I don’t know why I never painted our own wedding. In Qashqai’s weddings other tribes would get invited and the celebration would take a week to twenty days. The guests participate in the wedding by bringing lambs and rice as gifts (to help them out). They would play music, young men would dance with sticks and women with colorful kerchiefs and do kel (a joyous sound women make in weddings). Everybody would be happy. Men would shoot and exhibition riding and other sports. In all events, men and women would all be together and never separate, never. The bride would ride on a horse along with a little boy on the saddle as a sign of good omen and good luck. At nights they would set some stones around to make a fire. Every day they would feast, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with tea and yoghurt drinks in between. Of course there are some unfortunate times that wedding turns to mourning… I have painted them all not to get lost.

One of the memorable stories in Qashqaii tribe is the tale of Gureily: The bridegroom went to the mountain to hunt an animal to offer to his bride as a gift, in accordance with tribal custom. While he is setting his traps for his hunt, he is attacked by a tiger. He kills the tiger but at night, fearing an attack by other animals as well as the mountain cold weather, he hides himself inside the tiger’s coat/skin and sleeps there to return to his tribe the day after. At dawn his friends and relative, worried for him, go to the mountain looking for him. A strain of blood leads them a sleeping tiger. Thinking the tiger had killed him, they shoot the tiger. When they get closer, they scream loud enough to shake all the mountains. The bride with her colorful wedding dress climbs the mountain and when she finds out about her husband’s death, she cries and sings heart-rending hymns. A song is composed based on this story which is called Grielly or “Leily’s Crying”(5)

Bijan Khan did not paint this story but he draws plenty of wars, peaces, and quarrels between the tribes which have caused painful divisions or joyous marriages among the young lovers in the tribes.

“Iran, tell them that I hunted a tiger too.”

“Yes, it was in the Spring.”

“I think it was five or six years ago.”

“Five or six? It was thirty or forty years ago!”

Bijan Khan has no intention of getting old… In the cool shadow full of love and affection of the wise and capable women of the tribe there is no way to become old… He expresses his wishes childishly to his wife Iran Bibi and to us as:

“I wish I had a forty foot length of paper on which I could draw the life of our tribe and its beauties.”

Images, color, colorful paintings of life, tales of happiness and woe, struggle and patience, defeat and victory … Bijan’s paintings are filled with the colorful spring rain drops in the meadows and the plains of Fars and the blissful hands of the women that have places these drops one by one in his loom.

If one looks carefully at the tribe’s women, one can find Jahaneh Bibi Kashkooli, who has been an innovating designer and the colorist of the tribal carpets and an innovating expert in agriculture and animal husbandry.

Khadijeh Bibi Kashkooli was the famous wife of the chief of the tribe who was, like her husband, a brilliant fighter. According to an anecdote, Reza Shah had said we have to give this women an honorary army medal … One of the tribes’ popular tales says of her that after her husband was killed by one of the Reza Shah’s men, when she received her husband’s body, she sent a message to the Shah saying, “ Oh kind and just King, I received your honorary military award.”

Bijan Khan still talks about the tribal women and paints them, although he knows that today’s tribal life does not have the color and sound of the past. But he continues painting lest nothing is lost and he sing the song:

Oh, the tall mountain, may I sacrifice my life to your soil and rocks,
Give me a signal until like an eagle,
I fly to your arms
To reach to your peaks,
And gaze on my tribe from your heights.
Where is that massive Qashqai tribe?

Footnotes:

(1)“Wind Painter” was the title exhibits of the painter in 2005, in Netherland.

(2) Ashayer Iran, Nasrolah Kasra’ian and Ziba Arshi, Mo’alef publication, 1373.

(3)If there were no Ghareh ghach, Bahman Beigui, Novid Shiraz publication. 1381

(4)Racehorse

(5)kouch ba Eshgh-e Shaghayegh, Manouchehr Kiani, Kian Nashr-e Shiraz Publisher, 1377
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The Blood of Flowers

Against the backdrop of Persian art and craft of carpet weaving, wrapped in seven sheer layers of Persian folkloric-mystical tales, Anita Amirrezvani weaves her narrative of The Blood of Flowers, her first novel.

The story’s unnamed narrator tells her life story, woven delicately among the colorful flowers and leaves and birds and animals which gradually appear as five carpets are woven. The seven tales, alluding to the seven mystic steps Sufi masters have set to lead seekers of absolute truth or love to the most inner self, serves a two-fold function: to help the narrator demystify the ambiguities of her own fate and destiny and to encourage her to bear it courageously and to keep the reader from losing patience while confronting the extremities of pains and hopelessness woven into the fabric of the narrator’s life.

The art of carpet weaving is not used decoratively, informatively, or even metaphorically, as has been suggested by some reviewers. Indeed it plays a structural as well as an instrumental role in her story, functioning just as the art of illustration and miniature did in Orhan Pamuk’s celebrated novel My Name Is Red.

Anita Amirrezvani successfully, with a fairy tale style narrative, tells us a magical tale which unfolds in a magical land and a magical time. Though the setting is too far away in Isfahan and in the seventeenth century, the carpet design lends its lack of perspective to the characters in this tale, allowing them to transcend time and space to connect to us, the reader, here and now. However this universality never diminishes the liveliness, vividness and individuality of the characters, thanks to our author’s skillfulness.

The story’s narrator is a carpet weaving villager who is caught in a web of misfortunes but manages against all odds to pull herself up into the centre of a male-dominated carpet industry as a major designer. In a charming and engaging, though very sad, story we follow her obsessively from the profound depth of her misery to the peak of her glory as if it is our own fate. Exaggerated as it appears, the story is an idealized narrative of an intense infusion of centuries of epical struggles of Iranian women to overcome the obstacles of male-dominated tradition, religion, and politics which hinders them. (I very deliberately and consciously avoid the term culture when the suppression of women is concerned. I very strongly feel that Iranian “culture” is not misogynistic and it seems, judging from the two male characters in the story, that the narrative’s father and her uncle, Amirrezvani agree with me.)

The sharp contrast between the wealthy and haughty and the poor and humble, the glory of the city of Isfahan with all its magnificent bridges, mosques, palaces, and public squares and the extreme poverty, disease, filth and squalor of the narrator’s life, are effective in giving the idealized characters a vivid life, just as the play of colors separate the various idealized layers of images in the carpet designs. The dichotomy of two worlds is also used to advance various themes in the novel as well, such as sexuality, child bearing, marital discrimination, and luck and chance versus merit.

Our narrator’s divided city, with all it contrasts, is a natural setting to tell us that once upon a time “chance and luck” overrode merit; women’s life was glued to only one tiny thread, the child or the children she bore; the only value in a woman was in the pleasure she could bestow; at the age of thirty she was considered old; her dowry was the price she had to pay to buy a life; the world was divided into two halves, those who lived it and those who stare at those who lived it; some did not even have the right to a lawful marriage; others were destined to a term marriage for a limited time only, sigheh; and the institution of family was the prize not for all but for a privileged few.

Our narrator’s divided city is a two-colored life, and our narrator is a denizen of the dark and unfortunate side. Her struggle is not only to achieve happiness, in spite of what was destined for her and many other women throughout the centuries, but an effort to redefine “happiness.” The narrator, to her own disbelief, succeeds in bringing a new life and a new meaning to a concept which for centuries was imprisoned in rigid cliché.

“I had never imagined that a woman like myself, alone, childless, impoverish—could consider herself blessed. Mine was not a happy fate, with the husband and seven beautiful sons, that my mother’s tale had foretold. Yet with the aroma of the pomegranate-walnut chicken around me, the sound of laughter from the other knotters in my ears, and the beauty of the rugs on the loom filling my eyes, the joy I felt was as wide as the desert we had traversed to reach our new life in Isfahan.”

Not only has the narrator crossed a line to change the definition of happiness, but she dares to see the boredom and unhappiness in a life that for centuries was considers ideal and desirable. When she crosses that border and reaches the land of her dreams, she finds just sadness, waste, and loneliness—nothing but a gilded prison. She considers herself lucky not to dwell in that realm. She finds that in reality it is the habitants of that life who are deprived, since they cannot make a mistake and learn from it, since they live an unworthy, unexamined life which is nothing but a gradual death.

“I did not envy her. Each time a gate closed with a thud, I was reminded that while I was free to come and go, she could not leave without an approved reason and a large entourage, she could not walk across the Thirty-three Arches Bridge and admire the view, or get soaked to the skin on a rainy night. She could not make the mistakes I had and try again. She was doomed to luxuriate in the most immaculate of prisons.”

There is a myth in carpet weaving circles that the carpet weavers intentionally leave at least one erroneous knot in the carpet as a sign of humility and submissiveness to God, since it is only He Who is perfect and can create perfection, while some experts in Iranian medieval arts hold that there is no such thing as an intentional error in art and that this myth is just a clever justification for the unavoidable. After all, a work of art as massive as a carpet with such a complexity of design is never devoid of mishap.

Following the carpet weavers’ myth, Amirrezvani, intentional or otherwise, leaves some missing knots in her tapestry. I found it troubling that it ends so rapidly and so “heavily” in a very uncustomary way. The long paragraph running from page 359 to 360, just eight pages to the end of the story, is a much-delayed explanation of the narrator’s “trade of life of occasional opulence” for the life of “hard work.” One needs to know this when the narrator makes the decision or at least shortly thereafter. The sophisticated explanation, attributed to her learning from her uncle, with all the mystical tone in it, obviously justifies the expectation. As she gains in knowledge gradually and step by step, as she strengthen her self-confidence through her experience and her learning, and since she distances herself from her sigheh, physically, mentally as well as metaphorically, she waits too long to talk about it, and that only too little.

The other missing knot, which I’m impatient to air my feminist’s view of, is the letter that the narrator writes to her friend Naheed expressing her regret for not “doing her best to stop her renewal of her sigheh,” which had been decided upon by her relatives even prior to her knowledge of Naheed’s engagement. I wonder why she did not ask Naheed what she would have done had she known about her sigheh. Would she have broken off her engagement and consequently her marriage? Would it have been for her sake? Or for finding Ferydoon, (her temporary husband and now Naheed’s permanent husband), no longer worthy of herself ? Indeed, this short letter deserves good amount of consideration from a feminist perspective. There is a solid tone of inferiority embedded in the narrator’s guilt and consequently her asking for forgiveness. I wondered why she felt so obliged to her friend and not the other way around.

However, neither of these two objections diminishes the joy of reading such a well-crafted tale. Indeed, I expect the book to stir much discussion both in Iranian literary circles as well as among feminists on these two issues, as well as many others, particularly over the aesthetic aspect of story. Amirrezvani may have philosophical and aesthetic views on both objections. She may believe that more time was needed for the narrator to achieve a status on par with Naheed’s, or even some moral consideration which is left unclear in the story. I’m looking forward to hear her comments on these issues.

One last point. This book may be of interest for art historians for many reasons just as My Name Is Red was read and used widely by those interested in all aspects of the Iranian and Ottoman miniature and illustrations. While a little knowledge of Iranian medieval art would help the reader, particularly non-Iranians, enjoy the book more, I very much hope the book itself would encourage the reader to learn more about our magnificent heritage. A few years ago at NYU, Orhan Pamuk gave a talk, and an Iranian in the audience exclaimed to a friend of mine, “What if we had a writer like him!” I hope this audience member discovers Amirrezvani; she might be the writer she was looking for.

I extend my warmest thanks to Ms. Amirrezvani for her massive work, which is truly the labor of love.

PS: The author's publicist has kindly offered to give free copies of the book to the first five readers of Iran Writes to ask for them. Don't be shy!

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The Islamic Republic 's Third Phase

Almost at the end of the third decade of the Iranian Revolution, it seems it is about the time to demystify what was for three decade intentionally confused and mystified. The whole world was shocked at the birth of this “monster” that no one knew anything about. American president Jimmy Carter said “he was surprised.” The deposed Shah of Iran seemed woken up by a nightmare. Empress Farah in her memoir claimed that “they had no clue about it.” The journalists went to Iran and returned with their mouths gaping in awe or dismay. The experts, with their display of shock, added to an already existing enigma and sense of mystery which the public sees around the Islamic Republic of Iran. And we Iranians did not do any better. All of us were waiting for a hint from those whom we thought were a little closer to religion, like Mehdi Bazargan. He did give us directions, though they were wrong. He was as shocked as everyone else. His Islam was very different from what was born and growing so fast, yet he still endorsed it.


Several books on Shiism were all new even to us Iranian. The clerics in Qom were given the status of Oxford and Cambridge dons by one western scholar, and Qom was described as another Heidelberg or Sorbonne. Iran and Iranians and clerics and Shiite Islam all fused into each others, wrapped up in a halo of mystery, and each expert and each journalist only added another layer. The whole country and its people became so unfamiliar even to us that I did not even dare to go back home, like many of us, for over twenty years.

The most distressing of all were non-Muslim scholars who were so zealous and defensive of the Islamic Republic and completely denied the sufferings of secular Iranians. Most of them became apologists for the Islamic Republic, as if criticizing it meant denouncing their own existence. Mandatory Islamic hejab for women was a horrifying imposition but was taken so lightly, the family laws changing to laws of Shari’a was another which was not given any attention, the problem of the religious minority, particularly the Bahai’s, was dismissed totally. I do not recall any of the Iranian (non-opposition) or Western scholars gave any weight to these matters except en passant. They defended the Islamic Republic so firmly and strongly that one wondered why they didn’t join the club and convert. Anne Marie Schimmel was at least honest enough to say “I prefer my glass of wine.”

On the other hand, there were those who made Iranians out to be some strange, somehow dangerous, species. I will never forget, night after night, listening to the news and commentators talking about “Allah,” as if Shiites worshiped some genie. I never figured out why it became a problem to understand that just as God is an English world for the deity, whom the French call Dieu and the Greeks, Theo and the Russians, Bog, some Iranian use the Arabic term Allah, though they themselves have one hundred and one names for Him in their own language—Khoda, Izad, and Yazdan being the most common. A simple matter as such was turned into a puzzle and amusing games for the nighttime shows on TV; and alas none of those experts in Shiism came to help.

Then came the “confusion” period, when every single sentence uttered by any of those clerics came as a mystified code which needed to be decoded, even simple words, such as moderate, money, punishments, apology, and independence. After every speech by Imam Khomeini or the Friday Imams of the time, everybody would fall over the Shiite dictionary to unravel its meaning. Then would come the analysis of the experts from various levels of the State Department or those think tanks in Washington D.C. or all the Middle Eastern Studies departments of the universities in the United States. It is interesting that after some thirty years, people are still referring to that the famous saying of Khomeini, who wished to “cut the hands of foreigner,” although this was simply a literary mistranslation of an expression used in Iran equivalent to “talking one’s hands off something.”

The whole artificial attempt to “understand them” was not only unhelpful, but only added to the confusion.  They mislead the public to a misconception that the Iranians got what they ask for and what they deserve: They want to be ruled by mullahs, they want to go backward, they like having their hands cut off, they want to be told how to perform every step of their most trivial affairs of life. Once, watching a documentary on PBS about the Iran-Iraq war, the reporter interviewed an Iranian war veteran on wheelchair. We could hear the veteran’s line being fed to him by his minder, i.e. that everything was staged. We wrote to PBS and reminded them of their obligation of professional honesty, and pointed out to them the futility of such phony documentaries. Some PBS flack wrote back that if a “nation” wants to portray itself as such, we have to cooperate and air it as they wanted! A strange sense of professionalism indeed!

In the last few years there were few books by journalists, The Last Great Revolution (at least its last half), Persian Mirrors, Neither East Nor West, and The Rose Garden of Martyrs, or travelogues, which tried to depart from the apologetic tradition of the academics and Middle East experts of the first two decades. However, each one of them very cautiously took off only one layer of the mystery. One explained that not all Iranian went to the front to get killed to be martyrs; war was run by a well-calculated manipulative machinery. Another explained that teenagers in Iran are the same as teenagers the world over, even a bit more cheerful and playful. Another revealed that in spite of all the efforts by the clerics to undermine the status of women, their presence and their influence in the overall society is still undeniable. But none took the trouble to explain the system of the government so the people won’t rush to the bunkers out of fear that Iran’s president who has no power as such would eliminate them from the earth. It seemed there was a limit to excavating this great tomb, one inch at a time would have to do.

And now finally it seems it is the time for demystification. I’m not sure that we have arrived at this stage since it is a convenient time, or it is just the American way of learning something. Perhaps the revolution has reached its zenith and now is going to merge and blend with Iranian culture to disappear, and this allows the observers have a better perspective. Books are being published which are more exposing, articles are written which are more revealing, clerics inside the country are saying things which makes one wonder why they hadn’t said them twenty-five years ago. People talk about the government’s corruption, clerics are criticizing clerics, and in spite of all the arrests on charges of endangering national security and social order, people are still outspoken. And we hear more and more the forgotten word “secular” in a variety of contexts. For the first time, thanks to internet, news travels over the boarders more freely. It might be for this very reason that journalists and commentators follow suit and are becoming more open to talking about Iran, however cautiously. In any case, I welcome this third stage; though, had we done this from the start, we would have been saved much trouble.
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