Hijab-Turned-Tank top; appropriation, diaspora, and assimilation.
I adored the patterns on one of my grandmother’s old hijabs, and decided one morning while in college, to wear it as a shirt. Folding the giant square in half, I draped the pattern around my chest, tying two narrow corners at my exposed back. It was a hot California day, and my hijab-turned-tank top would allow for wind to hit me in all the right places.
The door had shut behind me when I suddenly became uncomfortable with my exposed back and collarbone stretched out in the sunlight. I looked down at this fabric — what a life it’d gone through. Was I disrespecting its past?
30 years ago, this cloth was a triangle folded onto my mother’s head in a small Azerbaijani town in Iran. Concealing her hair, the patterns folded themselves softly over her shoulders, and the narrow corners tied themselves securely at her chin. Her dark hair was hidden under woven colors of warm oranges and thick, muted greens. This headscarf had been resolved for modesty. I had made its sole purpose to reveal the sun loving parts of my torso.
Was I a walking sacrilege, allowing this ancient pattern to tickle my young body as a thin veil? Its identity was flipped upside down, but not one complaint came from its patterns, and I certainly didn’t stand out in the Southern California sun. Still, I felt too nude.
Indeed, my roots are deeply set in North Western Azerbaijan, Iran. My sister’s DNA test shows 79% from that one concentrated region — our great great great grandmother’s body has become the nutrients to the trees on my grandfather’s farm. So it goes with ancient heritage. That heritage comes with a life that had been predetermined through the generations: my parents, who had an arranged marriage, were supposed to move in right next to my paternal grandparents. While raising children, they would care for their ever-wrinkling mama and baba. I would do the same with my husband… so on, and so forth. This is the way it was supposed to be, this is the way it had always been.
But my parents migrated, they divorced, they got remarried. My grandparents got sick, and with no sign of their children to take care of them, have become increasingly depressed — so it goes with modernization.
Upon visiting Iran, I always find deep comfort in behaving the ways I would have, had my parents not fled. I like measuring out tea glasses and serving family members. I like remembering to always offer to the eldest guest first and to insist three or four times that they drink, in order to overwhelm their modesty with my welcome. I was drawn to the goat last fall, sacrificed for our arrival in the backyard. Its parts were given to those who couldn’t afford food (the Muslim practice of Zakat). I enjoyed listening to the very particular ways to prepare rose petal jam ; during which phase of the moon it was customary to harvest, what time of day the petals were most fragrant, what part of the season the petals would be ready.
These are ancestral ways of being, solidified from generation to generation — intricate traditions that I thirst for, in the whirling reality of diaspora. The tinkering of glass cups on my metal tray felt nostalgic, as I knew how irrelevant these cultural materials were in my new American home.
But not all of the lifestyle in our Azerbaijani town was the same as when my parents were growing up. Mama frowned at the amount of cars on the streets, the loss of community values, the drying waterbeds, and the increase of greed and want for material surplus amongst people. She gasped when we visited Lake Urmia, formerly the largest salt-water lake in the Middle East. It has dried now into a vast plain of salt flats, due to unsustainable management of its headwaters by an expanding agricultural industry, and damming upstream. She used to play in its depths: just like her mother’s, mother’s mother did. She even commented on the new Western toilets inside her parent’s home, “We used to use an outdoor bathroom that smelled so bad. Once a year someone would empty it into the garden!” “Mama, you were using a composting toilet!” I remarked, amazed at what had been lost.
Modernization has pushed these changes like knives into the ancient heritage of Azerbaijani Iran. The 1953 U.S. CIA organized overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh gave Mohammed-Reza Shah, a U.S./British puppet, further reign over the country. His Western values and allegiance to the U.S. and its economy brought intense amounts of materialism, and individualism into the culture.
This region, whose people were once so connected to the land that “sustainability” as we know it was simply embedded, is being compromised for the destructive norms of modern industry. Within these global trends is the little spec of my mother’s emigration: also a product of the same forces.
It is not only my grandmother whose eyes dampen at the thought of her runaway children — our family is one spec in a global mass impacted by neo-colonialism. While studying abroad in Nepal, I was astounded at the seemingly endless fields that were left empty, as people opted for a “better life” in the city. America was a dream, and people marveled at the light color of my skin, the softness of my unworked hands. They wanted the same.
Mountain villages hymned by the characteristic laughter of children next door, or of women working on a neighbor’s potato field, felt destined to become mere postcard pictures on isolated city apartment walls. Village homes were ghosted for polluted city bustle; ancient rituals dependent on earth’s seasonal cycle were left for the city’s sleepless shine. Magnetic promises lit up the eyes of villagers, and pulled its young people away. It was unclear whether some of those villages would exist anymore, in 30 or so years.
In the Black Sea region of Turkey too, nomadic peoples have, since time immemorial, immigrated to seasonal mountain villages with their herds of sheep. At one of these yaylas, we witnessed a local struggle against a proposed highway project that would completely change the village’s dynamic, allowing tourism and retail to flood it.
This is why my hijab-tank-top felt like betrayal. There are thousands of me: we, children of immigrants, who make oxymorons out of our cultural materials in our lack of understanding. We lose the ways of their heritage in our Western culture, which, in its premature roots, has not created the intricacies that stitched my hijab together. Each one of us is another ancient cycle lost to the homogenization of Manifest Destiny’s assimilatory demand.
I do not desire to go back and live in Iran. I couldn’t handle the life of a woman in the current political regime. I don’t argue that Nepali individuals who want to see the city shouldn’t have the opportunity. My purpose is not to idealize, or reduce complex cultures of people into utopian clouds.
I do think though, that there is a harmonious wisdom that sings in the actions of timeless, collectivist oriented cultures. This wisdom exists in peoples all over the world, but has quieted as globalization takes an economic, environmental, social, cultural, and political toll on previously independent peoples. The conquest of our own country committed countless indigenous peoples to genocide, attempting to erase their cultures. A similar erasure reverberates around the world today.
I look at the many failed commune experiments in the U.S. with deep sorrow. These are groups of (often very privileged) individuals, who have attempted to recreate autonomous lifestyle by “escaping the system” into peace-loving and ponytailed communities. They almost invariably fail, as their members don’t have access to those little intricacies that keep collective communities cohesive; the songs of the potato harvest, the subtle rules of who to serve tea to first. The world I want to create looks like a more grounded version of these experiments: one which takes from the teachings of ancient cultures that can recall the ways of interdependent community, and living in harmony with the land. It is impossible to create true sovereignty and independence in our communities without dedication to, and respect for that knowledge. It is also impossible to do so without decolonizing all of the muck we’ve been trained to believe.
I am sitting now in my Berkeley apartment, which has been decorated by my roommate with Tibetan prayer flags, a poster of Hindu “Om” signs, and a tapestry with a mandala from somewhere in South East Asia. I am unsure that she understands the true depth to any of these objects (I know I don’t) — the ideas behind their patterns, the way they have been used, the emotions they would conjure up in someone who shares their homeland. Like the folded cloth on my torso, they hang around the rooms obediently, with no seeming resentment. In this nonchalance, so much of their complex meaning evades them. They’ve become pretty colors to brighten white city apartment walls in Berkeley, California, United States.
