Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran 9781503609860

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W H I S P E R

T A P E S

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W H I S P E R K a t e

M i l l e t t

N E G A R

T A P E S i n

I r a n

M O T T A H E D E H

stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Material from the Kate Millett Papers at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. © 1979 by Kate Millett. Used by permission of the Kate Millett Estate. Going to Iran, by Kate Millett with photographs by Sophie Keir. © 1982 by Kate Millett and Sophie Keir. Used by permission of the Kate Millett Estate. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover photos: (background) crowd protesting in Iran circa 1978, Kamal al-Din, via Wikimedia Commons; (strip) Frames from a contact sheet of Kate Millett portraits taken by the feminist photographer Ann Pollon. Courtesy of the Kate Millett Estate and the Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Text design: Rob Ehle Typeset by Rob Ehle in 10/13 Adobe Garamond. libra ry o f con gre ss c atalo gi ng - in - p u bl i c ati on d ata Names: Mottahedeh, Negar, author. Title: Whisper tapes : Kate Millett in Iran / Negar Mottahedeh. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018047093 (print) | LCCN 2018052665 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609860 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503610156 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Millett, Kate—Travel—Iran—History—Sources. | Americans— Travel—Iran—History—Sources. | Feminism—Iran—History—Sources. | Protest movements—Iran—History—Sources. | International Women’s Day— Iran—History—Sources. | Iran—History—Revolution, 1979—Women— Sources. Classification: LCC HQ1735.2 (ebook) | LCC HQ1735.2.M68 2019 (print) | DDC 305.420955—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047093

D E D I C AT E D TO T H E M E M O RY O F M Y BROTHER, SRINIVAS, WHOSE CHEEKY S PA R K L E A N D C U R I O S I T Y T U R N E D P L AY I N TO A R E VO LU T I O N A RY PRACTICE

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CONTENTS

A Revolutionary Timeline xi Overture 1 I

A

II

B

III

P

IV

T

V

S

Azadi Freedom 25 Beauvoir 29 Pahlavi 35 Tehran 40

Servat Wealth 50

VI

J

Jaryan Flow 57

viii

C O N T E N T S

VII

CH

VIII

H

IX

KH

Chaghaleh badoom Unripe Almonds 62 Hamleh Attack 66

Khomeini 70

X

D

Durud Salute

74 XI

Z

Zat Instinct 79

XII

R

Rooznameh Newspaper

81 XIII

Z

Zan Woman 82

XIV

ZH

Zhornalist Journalist 89

XV

S

Surud Anthem

96 XVI

SH

Schoenman

100 XVII

S

do-Sefr Si-Sad-o-Si-yo Yek 00331

104 XVIII

Z

Zabt Recording 110

C O N T E N T S

XIX

T

Tulu’ Dawn 116

XX

Z

Zaher Appearance 118

XXI

‘AYN

Eid Festival 135

XXII

GH

Ghazal Ode 139

XXIII

F

Fallaci 140

XXIV

Q

Qom 145

XXV

K

Kooh Mountain 147

XXVI

G

Guruh-ha Women’s Groups 150

XXVII

L

Lisans Bachelor’s Degree 154

XXVIII

M

Mard Man 156

XXIX

N

Nafas Breath 161

XXX

V

Vafadari 163

ix

x

XXXI

C O N T E N T S

H

Hasht 8 165

XXXII

Y

Yavash Slowly 172

Coda 179

Acknowledgments 185

Notes 189

Photo section follows page 120.

A Revolutionary Timeline

T U E S D A Y , J A N U A R Y 2 2 , 1 9 6 3 . The theologian Ruhollah Khomeini issues a declaration denouncing Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran’s ruling monarch, listing the various ways in which the Shah has violated the Iranian constitution. Khomeini condemns the spread of moral corruption in the country and accuses the Shah of submission to the United States and Israel. He decrees that the Nowruz celebrations (the festival of the New Year) for the Iranian year 1342 (March 21, 1963) be canceled as a sign of protest against government policies. M O N D A Y,

JUNE

3,

1963

(ASHURA,

THE

TENTH

D A Y O F T H E M U S L I M C A L E N D A R ) . Khomeini delivers a speech in which he denounces the Shah as a “wretched, miserable man” and warns him that if he does not change his ways the day will come when the people will offer up thanks for his departure from the country. In Tehran an estimated one hundred thousand Khomeini supporters march past the Shah’s palace, chanting, “Death to the Dictator! Death to the Dictator! God save you, Khomeini! Death to the bloodthirsty enemy!” W E D N E S D A Y , J U N E 5 , 1 9 6 3 . Khomeini is arrested in Qom and imprisoned in Tehran. This sets the stage for a massive

xii

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uprising referred to as the “15 Khordad” incident, in which demonstrators attacked police stations, offices, and government buildings, including the ministries. The government declares martial law and a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Khomeini is released on Tuesday, April 7, 1964, and returned to Qom. W E D N E S D A Y , N O V E M B E R 4 , 1 9 6 4 . Khomeini is forcibly exiled from Iran. He settles in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq. S A T U R D A Y , A U G U S T 1 9 , 1 9 7 8 . Cinema Rex in Abadan is burned down by arsonists. The regime and the opposition blame each other. M O N D A Y, S E P T E M B E R 4 , 1 9 7 8 ( E I D A L - F I T R , T H E E N D O F R A M A D A N , M O N T H O F FA S T I N G ) .

Hundreds

of thousands march in support of Khomeini. F R I D A Y,

SEPTEMBER

8,

1978

(BLACK

F R I DAY ) .

Demonstrations in Tehran. Iranian military use tanks, helicopters, and troops to fire at twenty thousand protestors in Tehran’s Jaleh Square, leaving “a carnage of destruction,” according to the Guardian. Western media report fifteen thousand dead and wounded. The French philosopher and journalist Michel Foucault reports four thousand dead at Jaleh Square. The Shah declares martial law and appoints a military government. Schools and universities are closed, newspapers are suspended, and gatherings of over three people are prohibited in Tehran. 1978.

Khomeini moves his

M O N D A Y, N O V E M B E R 2 7 , 1 9 7 8 .

Millions weep as they

T U E S D A Y,

OCTOBER

10,

residence from Iraq to France. see Khomeini’s face in the moon. S U N D A Y – M O N D A Y, (TASU’A

AND

DECEMBER

ASHURA,

NINTH

OF THE MUSLIM CALENDAR).

10–11,

AND

TENTH

1978 DAYS

Seventeen million people

A

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xiii

join in demonstrations against the Shah, declaring Khomeini the leader of the Iranian Revolution. The Shah chooses the longtime opposition leader, Shahpur Bakhtiar, as prime minister.

F R I D A Y,

DECEMBER

29,

1978.

W E D N E S D A Y , J A N U A R Y 1 0 , 1 9 7 9 . Khomeini appoints a secret Council of the Islamic Revolution to issue regulations pertaining to the period of transition. T U E S D A Y, J A N U A R Y 1 6 , 1 9 7 9 .

Mohammad Reza Shah

Pahlavi leaves Iran. J A N U A R Y 2 1 , 1 9 7 9 . In an interview with Khomeini’s aide, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, in the national conservative newspaper, Kayhan, Ghotbzadeh is quoted declaring the complete equality of men and women.

S A T U R D A Y,

W E D N E S D A Y , J A N U A R Y 2 4 , 1 9 7 9 . Mehrabad Airport is taken over by the army. Khomeini declares (on January 25) that he will return to Iran as soon as the airport is reopened. S A T U R D A Y,

JANUARY

27,

Millions of people

1979.

march in Tehran for the return of Khomeini. T H U R S D A Y, F E B R U A R Y 1 , 1 9 7 9 .

Khomeini returns to

Iran. S U N D A Y , F E B R U A R Y 4 , 1 9 7 9 . Khomeini declares Mehdi Bazargan prime minister of the interim government.

The conservative Iranian newspaper Kayhan quotes a talk given by Khomeini’s aide, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, to workers at the oil refinery on February 5 in Rey, now part of the greater Tehran metropolitan area: “Women are free in Islam.” T U E S D A Y, F E B R U A R Y 6 , 1 9 7 9 .

S U N D A Y,

FEBRUARY

18,

1979.

Kayhan announces

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March 8 celebration of International Women’s Day in honor of female laborers and freedom fighters around the world, Ferdows Auditorium, Tehran University. Kayhan announces the return of millions of students to school after the revolution. T U E S D A Y, F E B R U A R Y 2 0 , 1 9 7 9 .

F E B R U A R Y 2 5 , 1 9 7 9 . Khomeini moves his permanent home to Qom. The women’s group known as the Jamiyat-e zanan-e mobarez announces its formation as a democratic entity, noting the participation of women in the insurrection. It welcomes all women regardless of their ideological leanings to join. Jamiyat-e zanan likewise announces that International Women’s Day is March 8, not January 7, as it would have been celebrated this year under the Shah.

S U N D A Y,

T H U R S D A Y , M A R C H 1 , 1 9 7 9 . Kayhan reports on an open letter written in support of Khomeini by the “Group of Women Lawyers.” The letter asks the Bazargan government to acknowledge the great contribution of women in the insurrection against the Shah. The group also asks the government to guard the civil rights of women from the theologians.

Khomeini speaks to a women’s group in Qom, encouraging them to participate in “the business of the nation.” The talk is published in Kayhan on March 6. S U N D A Y, M A R C H 4 , 1 9 7 9 .

Kate Millett and Sophie Keir arrive at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran. Millett has been invited to speak at the International Women’s Day celebrations of March 8 by members of a committee organized by the Iranian feminist Kateh Vafadari and later named the Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights.

M O N D A Y, M A R C H 5 , 1 9 7 9 .

T U E S D A Y,

MARCH

6,

1979.

Ettela’at, the oldest daily

A

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T I M E L I N E

xv

newspaper in Iran, announces that all coeducational schools in Tehran will be dissolved at the beginning of the next school year. The conservative newspaper Ettela’at announces Khomeini’s March 6 decree on the veiling of women. The French newspaper Libération reports on the first appearance of the chant Ya roosai, ya toosari, “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head,” on the streets of Tehran on this day. Women’s groups are activated in resistance to Khomeini’s decree, and it is agreed that they will take their protests to the streets the next day. Ettela’at and Kayhan and the liberal newspaper Ayandengan each write a short piece on the history of International Women’s Day. That evening, Iranian television announces that all women participating in the “imperialist and foreign” celebration of Women’s Day will be regarded as un-Islamic. The announcement is made by a much-loved television announcer, Maryam Riyazi, who appears fully veiled on Iranian television for the first time that evening. The Tudeh (communist party) rally is held at 3 p.m. at Tehran Polytechnic. The organizers withdraw their promise to invite Millett and other female speakers to the stage to address the crowd. Outraged, women walk out in protest. (For video, scan QR code.) W E D N E S D A Y, M A R C H 7 , 1 9 7 9 .

T H U R S D A Y,

MARCH

8,

1979

( I N T E R NAT I O NA L

In Tehran, women in the tens of thousands demonstrate against Khomeini’s decree on mandatory veiling. A group of women arrive at the prime minister’s office and find out that three thousand women have already traveled to Qom to protest the decree in Khomeini's city. At Tehran University, women gather to participate in the celebration of International Women’s Day at Ferdows Auditorium. Students engage in heated debates on the campus that afternoon. They climb the locked gates of Tehran University to join street demonstrations and march to the

W O M E N ’ S DAY ) .

QR

Television announcer, Maryam Riyazi. https://youtu.be/Efk5nOqaH5M

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W H I S P E R

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Ministry of Justice and the central komiteh. That evening Millett speaks at the Reza Shah Kabir High School. Women gather at Tehran University. After much debate, they agree to march toward the headquarters of the liberal national newspaper, Ayandegan. F R I D A Y, M A R C H 9 , 1 9 7 9 .

Women gather at Tehran University and at the Ministry of Justice. High school girls from Marjan, Hasht-roodi, and other northern high schools in Tehran engage in protests on campus and join other women in street demonstrations toward Tehran University. They join women at the Ministry of Justice at a sit-in and rally. The grand hall of the Ministry of Justice is filled to the brim with women, including university students, nurses, women judges, women from the wood and paper industry, women workers from the gas company, women from the nursing school, women working in education, women working in building and urban development, women working for IBM, women working for the oil industry, policewomen, women working for the Tehran electrical company, women working in telecommunications, women working at Iranian Airlines, and high school students from Azar, Anooshiravan, Kharazmi, Jean d’Arc, Chista, and Toos.

S A T U R D A Y, M A R C H 1 0 , 1 9 7 9 .

S U N D A Y , M A R C H 1 1 , 1 9 7 9 . Demonstrations occur at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Millett holds her first press conference at the Hotel InterContinental. Iran’s interim government retracts mandatory veiling. The liberal national newspaper Ayandega’s headline on the retraction reads, “There is no compulsion. And it’s not about the chador.” The paper reports on violent attacks on four women during Saturday’s street demonstrations to the Ministry of Justice. M O N D A Y , M A R C H 1 2 , 1 9 7 9 . Women gather at Tehran University. Debates ensue. Great march to Azadi Square. At 4 p.m. a few women head toward National Iranian Radio and

A

R E V O L U T I O N A R Y

T I M E L I N E

xvii

Television (NIRT), where there has been no coverage of the women’s protests since they started. Khomeini’s supporters attack the headquarters of the newspaper Ayandegan. At 8 p.m. Iranian radio announces an attack on the director of NIRT, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, by women demonstrators. Ghotbzadeh denies these attacks a few weeks after the end of the women’s demonstrations and deems the retraction of the news story irrelevant. T U E S D A Y, SOORI).

MARCH

13,

1979

(CHAHAR

SHANBE

Demonstrations occur at National Iranian Radio and

Television. The deputy prime minister of the Iranian interim government, Abbas Amir-Entezam, holds a press conference in which Ralph Schoenman’s deportation is announced. Amir-Entezam confirms that Kate Millett will also be deported. The Comité International du Droit des Femmes holds a press conference in Paris announcing the departure of a women’s delegation to Iran. T H U R S D A Y, M A R C H 1 5 , 1 9 7 9 .

Millett holds a second press conference outside the Hotel InterContinental.

F R I D A Y, M A R C H 1 6 , 1 9 7 9 .

S A T U R D A Y , M A R C H 1 7 , 1 9 7 9 . The Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights in Iran establishes its first offices in Tehran and drafts its first constitution.

Millett and Keir are expelled from Iran. A delegation of eighteen women from the Comité International du Droit des Femmes leaves Paris at 1 a.m. and arrives in Tehran in solidarity with Iranian women. M O N D A Y, M A R C H 1 9 , 1 9 7 9 .

A delegation from the Comité International du Droit des Femmes is granted an audience with Khomeini. The group arrives at the Feyzieh Seminary in Qom for a meeting the next day. T U E S D A Y,

MARCH

20,

1979.

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W H I S P E R

T A P E S

W E D N E S D A Y, M A R C H 2 1 , 1 9 7 9 .

Nowruz, the festival of

the Persian New Year. F R I D A Y – S A T U R D A Y , M A R C H 3 0 – 3 1 , 1 9 7 9 . A national referendum is held on the question of whether Iran should become an “Islamic Republic.” S U N D A Y , A P R I L 1 , 1 9 7 9 . Of the national votes that are tallied, 98.2 percent are in favor of an Islamic Republic.

The liberal national newspaper, Ayandegan, is declared counterrevolutionary and is banned.

T U E S D A Y, A U G U S T 7 , 1 9 7 9 .

Sixty-six Americans are taken hostage at the American embassy in Tehran.

S U N D A Y, N O V E M B E R 4 , 1 9 7 9 .

N O V E M B E R 7 , 1 9 7 9 . President Jimmy Carter’s delegation arrives in Iran to negotiate the freeing of the hostages. Khomeini refuses to meet the delegation.

W E D N E S D A Y,

W H I S P E R

T A P E S

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OVERTURE

The American feminist Kate Millett arrived in Tehran just after the Iranian Revolution and just before the Persian New Year. It was an exciting time of national regeneration and seasonal transformation. Spring had sprung. A new cycle had begun and, for the nation, the vision of an unpresentable future, a future never seen before, was within grasp. On March 8, 1979, less than two months after a revolution that overthrew Iran’s ruling monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, International Women’s Day celebrations were held in Iran. This was the first time in over fifty years. While Persian queens had ruled long before the dawn of Islam and a vivid feminist consciousness had coursed through Iranian literature and poetry as early as the nineteenth century, the Shah had banned the celebration of International Women’s Day, decreeing instead that women celebrate the anniversary of his father’s authoritarian, pro-Western ban on public veiling on January 8, 1936.1 And so the choice to celebrate March 8 as International Women’s Day was in itself a symbol of a revolution that women had fought and won, hand in hand with men, against an autocratic Shah. Millett, who had opposed the Shah’s tyrannical rule from the United States, received an invitation to be one of the event’s international speakers. She was the only invited Western speaker to actually arrive. 1

2

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T A P E S

Time magazine had called Millett the Mao Zedong of the women’s liberation movement in 1970. Her manifesto, Sexual Politics, published in the summer of that year, circulated as the Kapital of the women’s movement. Millett argued in the book that patriarchy was the central organizing structure of society, a “social constant” that organized all other social, political, and economic forms.2 This seminal text, though her first, propelled Millett into the media limelight and effectively “slammed her with an identity” whose weight and responsibility for the movement was too much for her to bear.3 In Iran, less than nine years after the publication of Sexual Politics, her contact with the media, surprisingly, backed her into a similar position, this time with political and diplomatic consequences that few could have imagined given her renown as an international feminist and an ardent pacifist. Traveling to Iran with her partner, the Canadian journalist Sophie Keir, $1,200 worth of film and audio recording equipment, a duffel bag full of clothes and books, and no money to spare, Millett was burdened with technology and distracted by it at every turn. News clippings from Tehran show Millett with a portable cassette tape recorder in hand, her “memory box,” into which she “whispered” observations on her surroundings as she captured the voices of the Iranian women with whom she joined in six days of protest. With no training in the Persian language, commonly referred to as Farsi by Persian speakers, Millett was a stranger to the instincts of the Iranian women around her (see entries x, xiv, xviii). Her audiocassettes, factory manufactured to pick up all sound, captured an auditory landscape of which she was unconscious: the sentiments of Iranian women everywhere. Millett’s “whisper tapes” thus stored the spectacular soundscape of an unfettered, imaginative, and flickering moment of verve in Iran, until the final order of Millett’s expulsion by the Iranian interim government on the morning of March 18, 1979. The following morning Millett was deported. No charges were recorded. Millett’s tapes are in many ways monuments to the articulation

O V E R T U R E

3

of a present she recognized as the beginnings of a women’s movement in Iran and, in her estimation, the first record of an independent feminist movement in the Muslim world. Women from around the world—Belgian, Canadian, French, Moroccan, German, Swiss, Italian, Egyptian, Palestinian, Mexican, and American—all were invigorated by the energy of what she witnessed: the movement’s vitality, its resilience, and the courage of Iranian women. “These are the most polished feminists I have ever seen,” Millett said at a press conference in New York City on March 26. “They fought the Shah at the risk of their lives. . . . When we marched, men volunteers—friends, brothers, husbands, lovers—made a circle around us to protect us. These men understood that women’s rights were democratic rights. Those marches were the whole spirit of the insurrection.” That exhilarating charge in Millett’s voice over the international telephone lines, woven into the soundscape that engulfed her as she reported her daily encounters in Iran to feminist comrades all around the world, quite literally woke the international women’s movement up from its sleep. For them, there was a persuasive eloquence in the chants of the Iranian women’s movement—“Azadi, na sharghist, na gharbist, jahanist”—which they only provisionally understood, and this unpresentable vision, wrapped around a sonorous kernel, stirred them into action: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western, it is planetary.”4 Galvanized, women flocked together, sometimes in great numbers, to organize demonstrations, telegram their support and encouragement, plan women’s circles, publish newsletters and circulars, telex messages, stage press conferences, meetings, and media events, and to send funds in support of Iranian women. “Why does one wake up?” asks literary critic Mladen Dolar. “Quite trivially and commonly, one is awoken by a sound, by a noise, by a voice, something that has become too loud and disturbing . . . it can no longer be contained.”5 The sound of “Freedom!” ringing in the voices of millions of women at the dawn of national freedom in Iran had that kind of reverberating charge on

4

W H I S P E R

T A P E S

women all around the world. Unleashed, their voices arrived, as sound always does, in that unconscious perforation between inside and outside, that “tiny brink between sleep and wakefulness” where, from the margins of a page, an imaginative narrative for a not-yet-present, collective, and planetary future could unfold.6 The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University houses Millett’s “whisper tapes.” These tapes were meant to capture Millett’s voice, to make a record of what she saw for the book that she intended to write on the Iranian women’s movement. But there is an unconscious layer to her conscious recorded voice that sometimes speaks of things beyond what Millett could comprehend; beneath her whispers are the formidable cries, the unyielding demands, and the captivating debates of Iranian men and women. The voices that I hear as I listen to the tapes in the archive are acousmatic, that is incorporal, bodiless. And as I listen, the clicking sound of Keir’s Nikon camera and her intermittent commentary on the things she is capturing on film as she walks next to Millett anchor the acousmatic voices to the spaces, bodies, and objects surrounding Millett. The click of the camera, in other words, grounds the voices and sounds that I hear to the images I have studied for almost forty years, images of women and men in revolt in the streets and squares of the revolution, the victorious celebration of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, as he returns to Iran, and the women’s protests that follow upon his ascent to power. The tapes also record Millett’s regular interactions with members of the French militant feminist group Psychoanalyse et Politique (Psych et Po), a theoretical faction within the larger French women’s liberation movement (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, or MLF) and the group responsible for the feminist publishing house and bookstore Éditions des Femmes under the leadership of Antoinette Fouque and the patronage of Sylvina Boissonnas (see entries ii and xvii). With the recorder sometimes set in the middle of a table as people speak, next to a phone, held in her hand or hidden in a bag,

O V E R T U R E

5

Millett’s tapes capture her interactions and conversations with Iranian, British, and French activists and journalists from newspapers and media outlets all over the world: Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson (see Figure 5), Claude Servan-Schreiber (see Figure 13), all four powerful feminists whom Millett regularly speaks to on the phone; the unruly American activist Ralph Schoenman; and the journalists Elaine Sciolino, Jonathan Randal, and Terry Graham, with whom she interacts on the ground. Millett carried her tape recorder with her everywhere, and it was always on. As “whisper tapes,” her recorded cassettes have an intimate character about them, and much like Flying, the autobiographical account she wrote on the early years of the women’s liberation movement in America, they reflect Millett’s inner musings on her surroundings.7 As the auditory unconscious to Millett’s own voice, the tapes also serve as a soundscape of the streets and squares of the revolution. As such, they reveal a weave of everyday life, recording the slogans, demands, and conversations of women and men as they engage with and dive deep into political debates at Tehran University; participate in street marches, rallies, and press conferences; chant their slogans at the state-owned television station in Tehran (see entries iii, vii, xxi), outside the Foreign Ministry (see entries xiii and xiv), and inside the grand hall of the Ministry of Justice; and sit down, often over food and drink, to strategize, debrief, or just relax in various hotel rooms, bedrooms, living rooms, offices, lobbies, restaurants, and automobiles, settings where we can hear the banter, the laughter, the chatter, the mockery, the conviviality, the fears, the giggles, the threats to, and the solidarity among women and men. As I rewind and focus more closely, I take note of the revealing and often contradictory ways in which the voices layer the surrounding sounds and scenery of Millett’s visit to Iran, a visit that according to some later historians of the postrevolutionary period, as well as Iranian feminist scholars, was ill informed of the aspirations of the Iranian Revolution and ambivalent about the sentiments of the

6

W H I S P E R

T A P E S

anti-imperialist women’s movement that had emerged in Iran in that period (see entry xiv).8 As I listen to the soundscape of Millett’s “whisper tapes,” the voices of these women in protest emerge for me as capable of resuscitating the narrative, theoretical, and political possibilities of a feminism vanquished by identity politics—a politics of recognition that is today wholly divorced from a transformative, collective, and planetary redistributive struggle (see entry xviii). *

*

*

The sound belongs to two worlds, it embodies the break between the two, and in that break something comes up for a moment that doesn’t belong to either of the two and which only flickers for a moment, and it takes a supreme alertness and mastery to hold on to it, to prolong it, to make a literature out of it, to make sound art of it, to turn it into an object of theoretical pursuit.9 —Mladen Dolar LO C AT I O N

The arrangements to leave the United States for Iran were made in a chaotic flurry: passport, visa, money, tickets, film, tape, and the laundry. Leaving New York on Sunday, March 4, 1979, Millett arrived at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran on March 5 and found herself rather abandoned. Despite assurances by her comrades who had purchased the ticket to Iran, no one had come to the airport to greet Millett, nor had anyone been sent to collect her. This was all quite unexpected. The shock of this first frightening encounter with Iran, a hoped-for adventure for this activist, writer, and feminist, turned into a nightmare that echoed throughout Millett’s stay. Not knowing where to go, nor what to do, Kate Millett and her partner, Sophie Keir, checked into a Sheraton hotel north of the city, a “disgusting” Western-style modern building. They would soon move into a flat that Millett would refer to as the “unknown

O V E R T U R E

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apartment,” then to a fellow feminist’s home, and then, later still, into the Hotel InterContinental with a slate of foreigners, some of whom were distant acquaintances from France and the United States: French feminists Claudine Mulard, Sylviane Rey, Michelle Muller, Sylvina Boissonnas, members of the foreign press, and Ralph Schoenman, Bertrand Russell’s former secretary, who was expelled from Iran on March 15 while Millett was still in Tehran, just before her own expulsion. SOURCE

Millett arrived in Iran as a witness to the birth of an independent Iranian women’s movement and a supporter of the feminists there. She had been asked to come and to bring messages from feminists around the world to the Iranian women for International Women’s Day. As I listen to Millett’s tapes, I notice a prescience from the very start, a premonition of what is to come: an inkling, visceral at heart, that the rights of women would be curtailed in this period of transition, just as they had been in Algeria, where women had fought right alongside men to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. The case for Iranian women was not wholly different from the conditions witnessed by women in postcolonial Algeria a decade earlier (see entry viii). Some would claim that the insurrection against the Shah drew its inspiration from Frantz Fanon’s writings on revolutionary Algeria and from Gillo Potecorvo’s sublime representation of the early struggles for Algeria’s independence in The Battle of Algiers (see entry v). That is hardly the whole story. But whatever the case may be, Millett believed even before leaving New York that it was only by making a demand for their civil rights, that women would be respected as equals in a collective vision for an emerging postrevolutionary Iran. Within days of Millett’s arrival in Iran, on March 6, 1979, the respected theologian and Grand Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, an outspoken anti-Shah agitator at the helm of the revolution,

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made a religious decree that all women working in the nation’s ministries should wear a chador, the full-length veil (see entries ix and xxiii). Three days earlier, Iran’s postrevolutionary interim government, led by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, had declared women “too emotional” to be judges.10 And while women had been encouraged to take to the streets with their male comrades and to participate in the anti-Shah demonstrations during the insurrectionary period, Iran’s new provisional government now deemed coeducational schools an evil, an evil that had turned these institutions into “centers of prostitution.” It rapidly moved to segregate the school system at all levels.11 The 1967 Family Protection Act, which made polygamy conditional on the consent of a man’s first wife and divorce accessible to both men and women in the civil courts, was summarily retracted. Barely five weeks into Khomeini’s return from his political exile as the leading voice of the Iranian Revolution, women had already had enough. Seeing their liberties waning, they flocked to the streets in outrage. FLICKER

The planned celebrations of Women’s Day turned into demonstrations for women’s freedom and for women’s rights. Asked about the Iranian women’s demonstrations by a Canadian journalist at one of the protests held outside the Foreign Ministry, a branch of government from which many women had been expelled in response to Khomeini’s decree on the chador, Millett was effusive: “My God! In thirteen days they have organized thousands of people. It took us years to do that. . . . I think it’s wonderful. It is a spontaneous uprising of thousands and thousands of women, which would have been absolutely inconceivable in the West or for us in the West to have achieved. You see, these women have already been entirely politicized by the uprising so that they are able to take to the streets in outrage by the thousands. For instance, yesterday at the Ministry of Justice the announcement

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that we would have a demonstration here or that we would march on . . . Monday from Tehran University to Freedom Square was made with a piece of paper being held up, but everybody saw it and they tell everybody else. For us the kind of organizing we’re used to, this is completely novel, the spontaneity of it, the authenticity of it, the absolute grassroots character of it being impossible for the leftist factions to manipulate it or to develop foolishness like media stars and so forth.” MONUMENT

As women’s cry for freedom in street demonstrations displaced the planned celebrations on the campus of Tehran University on March 8, Millett set about making a record. Not knowing Persian, and an outsider to Iranian culture, she demurred at the idea of organizing the Iranian women’s movement. It wasn’t her place, and the Iranian women, having already fought an insurrectionary war against the Shah, were in any event better skilled than she. Instead, Millett positioned herself as an archivist, “a historian,” as she would refer to herself, eager to monumentalize the formation of an independent women’s movement and an international feminist movement with its critical kernel in the revolutionary activities of the women in Iran: “What if we had the voices of the nineteenth-century feminist women now?” Millett muses, and in wonderment shows off the tape recorder’s ability to make a document “instantly” to one of the Iranian feminists sitting next to her at the university on March 15. Millett’s literary monument to the Iranian women’s demonstrations, Going to Iran, was written and published on the basis of her “whispered” recordings on her handheld cassette player and the photographs that she and Keir took during the women’s protests.

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SEA CHANGE

The gesture of monumentalizing the emergence of an independent women’s movement in Iran, less than two months after the fall of the Shah, confronted Millett with issues beyond the language barrier. The culturally induced agnotology on Iran was constitutive.12 Referred to as unknowledge to distinguish it from pure ignorance, agnotology denotes a socially constructed lack of knowledge. The West-oriented Shah had constructed and perpetuated a discourse on Iran as part of his White Revolution that emphasized the status of Iran in the modern world. This image had little basis in the lived reality of Iran, and the constructed unknowledge that was perpetuated around it was meant to bolster the Shah’s power in the world at large (see entry iii). Confronting Millett was a secondary layer of agnotology, the absence of any socially pertinent knowledge of Iran’s Shi’i culture. The Shah’s bête noire at the helm of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, engaged in numerous forms of religiously prescribed tactics that were aimed at both unifying the nation against the Shah and leading the enemies of Islam into a misjudgment of Khomeini’s position (see entries ix and xxxi); cases in point, his perpetuation of the position that an Islamic government had the characteristics of a Western-style democratic government; the pledge to extend freedom to the press, a reality that was absent under the reign of the Shah; the promise of the full equality of women and men (see also entry xxxii). Layering these agnotologies were remnants of a timeworn orientalism that shaped Millett’s own notions of “Persia,” a dreamlike setting whose radical absence confronted her immediately upon her arrival. Millett landed in Tehran looking for what she knew to be “Persia.” The melody of a French chanson, “Les roses d’Ispahan,” barely recollected in hummed snatches and refrains toward the end of her visit to Iran, had since childhood woven a dreamworld for Millett. “Persia” was for Millett the word for a magnificent world of ancient architecture, the bridges and mosques of Isfahan; a

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world of courtly love, of mossy-sheathed roses and poets, of cushioned cafés; a world of abundant draped Persian carpets, miniatures, and lacquered mirrors decked with birds and flowers. Millett expected to be greeted by “Persia” when she arrived in Tehran and was dismayed at its absence everywhere. Listening to the soundscape of Millett’s tapes, it is apparent that two concurrent upheavals, one upending the leadership of the nation with an upcoming referendum on the political character of the new government and its leadership, and the other a calendrical upheaval, springtime in the northern hemisphere, are at work as well. Nowruz, the celebration of spring marking the Iranian New Year, structured the temporal and atmospheric setting of Millett’s visit. Focused on her own agenda, however, Millett seemed largely oblivious to this celebratory ritual of rejuvenation and transformation. Preparations for the new year began within days of Millett’s arrival; in Persian homes greens were being sprouted in anticipation of the vernal equinox, goldfish put in their bowls, sweets laid at hand, and tables were laden with symbols of a season of purification and transformation. As I listen, this spirit of the new year fills the soundscape of Millett’s whisper tapes with an energy that spells freedom’s blossoming and the newness of a season associated with the renewal of the planet on Nowruz. All around her the blossoming of trees and flowers—the narcissus, the pussy willow, violets, and the sombol—speaks of spring, of the breath of renewal and the unmooring of permanence (see Timeline and entry xxix). An electoral vote, a referendum on the question of the creation an “Islamic Republic,” is also on the table. The vote had been scheduled for March 31, following Khomeini’s return from his fifteen-year exile on February 1, 1979 (see Timeline). Thus, at work “in the sea of incomprehensible Farsi”13 that was all around Millett were political debates and deliberations that both outlined and impacted the articulation of the Iranian women’s demands and rights, the timing of their articulation, their place within the

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sociocultural horizon, and their fluidity and transience in relation to the season of regeneration. TRANSIENCE

Millett’s excursions in Iran occurred within a six-kilometer range of Tehran University (see entry iv). That said, Millett rarely knew where she was in the capital. This was in part because a revolution had swept through a city whose streets, buildings, and monuments had been constructed to pay tribute to the nation’s nowfallen monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, and his Western backers. As protestors marched the streets of Tehran in the millions in the autumn of 1978 and the winter of 1979, streets were renamed and the monuments to the Shah and his Western allies were reinscribed. Pahlavi Avenue became Mossadeq Avenue, Eisenhower Avenue became Azadi (Freedom) Avenue, and Shahyad (literally, the Shah’s memorial) became Freedom Square. Azadi Avenue ran from Enghelab Square (Revolution Square) to Freedom Square. As I listen on the whisper tapes to the reinscription of the street names and structures in conversations among women as they march, I am puzzled that the Pan-American owned Hotel InterContinental—that “den of thieves and spies and pirates” where Millett would have a cold drink, take a bath, and gab—remained intact. To help pay Millett’s hotel bills in Tehran, concerned French feminists would go to the Paris branch of the InterContinental and make deposits. When Millett was eventually harassed by the staff at the Tehran branch, she asked her comrades to contact the French branch and thus help ensure her safety on the property by maintaining pressure on the men who were harassing her. Judging by the way she was picked up at the hotel on the morning of March 18 to be deported—barely up and still in her slippers—global capitalism failed to do what it does best. Neither money nor Millett’s connections with the metropole would grant Millett the kind of protection she expected. When it came down

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to it, Millett was a stranger and remained an outsider. Having fought and won a revolution against a West-oriented Shah, Iran had declared itself autonomous from Western pressures, and everything around Millett in Tehran, from street to square, spoke of this victory. Despite her considerable knowledge and deep fascination with Iranian architecture and its political unconscious, this was something Millett seemed unable to fathom. F LU I D I T Y

Street names and monuments were not the only societal structures that were shape-shifting around Millett. In the absence of the Shah, revolutionaries had established a provisional government and a series of local committees (or komitehs) that were answerable to the central komiteh in charge of law enforcement and certain social and political actions needing attention in the period of transition. Because of the nature of the revolution and the decision-making structure of the country’s leadership in this period, decisions were malleable and subject to daily pushback and renegotiation. Khomeini’s March 6 decree regarding mandatory veiling for women was, for example, modified by one of the country’s leading theologians, Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, and later retracted by the interim government on March 11. National newspapers would reassure Iranian women that their rights would be protected (see Timeline). This made the women’s demonstrations planned for Monday, March 12, subject to heated debates, ambivalence, and indecision. What were women demonstrating against if they now took to the streets? What rights were they claiming? Would such demonstrations be seen as counterrevolutionary now? What did the promises of an interim government amount to exactly? How indeed did this turn of events reflect on the upcoming referendum and vote on the formation of an “Islamic Republic”? An announcement by the transitional government on

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Thursday, March 15, of its intention to review all television and radio reports leaving the country illustrates this malleability. According to the announcement, which was published in national newspapers, anything larger than 16 mm film would need to be screened by the newly formed komiteh in the government news agency, and American television crews were told that “no film or videotape cassettes would be allowed aboard departing planes” without a letter authorized by the Iranian Ministry of Information. As Charles T. Powers reported for the Los Angeles Times on Friday, March 16, “the transmission Thursday night went without difficulty, and there was speculation among Western newsmen that the censorship threat might contain more bark than bite. The government here has set a pattern of taking hardline positions and then backing off of them.”14 And yet, by the end of March, Iranian women had completely disappeared from the news cycle. On March 27, eight days after Millett’s expulsion, Walter Lippmann (the “other” Walter Lippmann, an activist in Los Angeles from whom Noam Chomsky would borrow the term “manufacturing consent”), would write the following to Millett: Dear Kate, Your presence in Iran certainly helped draw international attention to the struggles of Iranian women as these clips show. It’s pretty obvious that this is why the ayatollah’s people were anxious to kick you out of the country. Likewise it comes as no surprise that all references to the struggles of the Iranian women have disappeared since your departure.15 EPHEMERALITY

Spontaneity and change informed nearly all the activities of the men and women who surrounded Millett during her stay in Iran. New decisions would immediately lead to a shift in tactics; new

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strategies would be explored; ideas would clash; possibilities would be evaluated and reevaluated to assess outcomes. No one arrived on time; people were left behind all the time; lunch dates had to be canceled, and meetings too. Traffic prevented group departures; checkpoints created hurdles; and komiteh detentions delayed comrades and friends, disrupting carefully planned meetings. Promises were overridden spontaneously. Frustrating. But this chaos ensured that everyone was on their toes and in the flow of sorting things out together, as a group. Leaderless, collective action in social movements is made of this flurry of activity. After all, how does a group learn to get out of a tactical freeze and collectively shift strategies if it hasn’t dealt with the tedious stuff of daily hurdles, negotiations, shifts, and reevaluations? But Millett would repeatedly insist on taking control in the midst of a fluidity she only perceived as chaos. Because they were always changed at the last minute, announcements, posters, signs, and slogans were inexpensive and unpretentious. There was no need for gloss; most things were handwritten. In crowds, signs would be held up high overhead, seen, and noted. Then they’d disappear. Different signs would take their place with new messages carrying different or additional information. The beautiful silkscreen poster designed to announce the Women’s Day celebrations at which Millett had been invited to speak was turned back to front in the snow outside a Tudeh (communist party) rally on March 7, the new date and place for the rescheduled talk being scrawled on it. That announcement attracted two thousand women to the Shah Reza Kabir high school for International Women’s Day. Such documents, leaflets, pamphlets, and daily newspapers in Persian and English were promised Millett at rallies or in the course of conversations. But things moved quickly and plans changed just as fast. People forgot to follow through; the papers were used for scraps, as to-do lists, food wrappings, and speakers’ notes at rallies, and then disappeared just as quickly. On the tapes,

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I hear Millett complaining to Keir about this all the time: “People who say, ‘I’ll give you the newspaper tomorrow. Do you know how hard it is to get yesterday’s newspaper now? It’s gone forever! . . . You pick it up then or you never pick it up. It’s the same with posters and any other documents you need. . . . You don’t postpone that. It’s like saying you’ll take a bath next week and you’re dirty now.” A notorious collector of protest paraphernalia and a quintessential Virgo, Millett just couldn’t deal with the chaos.16 F LU X

While Millett was assigned a translator for most of the rallies, sitins, and street demonstrations she attended, the women and men who were engaged for this purpose were comrades, mostly feminists or friends from her anti-Shah agitations as a member of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI). They were not interpreters. They missed parts of talks, got wrapped up chanting slogans, got into heated debates or interesting conversation with others around them. They forgot to translate some things and mistranslated others. But the problem was more insidious than the mere question of language. The demands of the women’s movement were part and parcel of the revolution that the men and women around Millett had fought. And the people had come out victorious. The question on the table was what was next? How would that translate into a new future? The constitution of a new republic inhered in and sprung from this as-yet-unpresentable vision. Without access to Persian, it was next to impossible for Millett to enter and exit rapidly moving deliberations, to grasp the narrative arc of a strategy in the making, and to sift through and predict with accuracy whether what was being said would eventually lead to an action, a vote, a march, a collective agreement, or a massive fight. A street demonstration would be called for one minute and called off the

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next. Then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, people would proceed to march inside the courtyard of the university. All this was puzzling from the outside. For me, this sense of disjuncture is less obvious in reading the book than it is in listening to the tapes. Listening to the sounds and voices surrounding Millett, I can hear how she, an outsider, is out of sync with what is right in front of her. Many of the actions taking place around her arise from a collective vision, spontaneously sometimes. I hear ideas and strategies being debated politically and weighted in light of Iran’s long and tumultuous history. They are agreed upon and quickly put into action. Meanwhile, Millett, who is in the foreground of my hearing, is “talking up” the dramatic effects of a march in the international media landscape with anyone who cares to engage with her in English (see entry xxviii). The distance between what preoccupies Millett and what is being debated around her is at times so vast that the impact of her words and actions in these moments would have been difficult for her to gauge without a good command of the language and a solid sense of the weight and significance of the matters which are at the heart of the cultural and political atmosphere of the time. By the midmorning of March 8, Millett would leave the grounds of Tehran University because the celebration of International Women’s Day she had planned to attend was filled to capacity. She had arrived at Ferdows Auditorium too late for the ceremony that was hosted by the women’s group Jamiyat-e zanan-e mobarez and was frustrated (see Timeline and entries iv and xxvi). Other groupings, meetings, and debates were taking place around campus, but she and Keir ran into the French feminist Claudine Mulard and decided to leave the grounds for the InterContinental. Shortly after, a group of women climbed the iron gates of the university and joined a demonstration of five thousand women that would take their protests against the veil to the central komiteh and the national ministries in Tehran. It was a

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watershed moment, but Millett missed it. The Iranian women’s decision to leave the university to protest had occurred spontaneously, probably out of a nearby debate that Millett had unconsciously ignored, and the gates they had climbed had been chained and locked just as spontaneously by supporters of Khomeini’s decree on veiling. When she later learned about the women climbing the university gates, Millett would repeatedly speak with regret of having missed “the picture” (see entry xx). She believed it to be a moment that would have monumentalized the women’s movement on the front page of every major newspaper. GLITCH

No one seems to have taken that picture, in fact. Had Millett and Keir remained at the university, would they have made a record of that monumental event? The answer to that question is unclear to me. As I listen to Millett’s tapes, what is absolutely certain is that the sound equipment will malfunction at any moment (see entry xviii): sounds disappear and reappear; the microphone is covered by fabrics and leather bags; batteries go dead, speeding up voices and sounds. Tape runs out and a conversation continues from side A to side B. Keir announces that she needs help changing film, and she and Millett move away from a still ongoing conversation in Persian, which I am completely wrapped up in, to avoid being jolted or trampled on. I’ll never know, for example, if the woman to whom I was listening as she loudly debated one of the men in the courtyard of the university managed to convince him to join forces with the women and protest the obvious censorship of the women’s demands from national television (see entry vii). As Millett moves away from their voices, the cries of a massive crowd fill my headphones from a far distance, their voices denouncing the head of National Iranian Radio and Television, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh: “Marg bar Ghotbzadeh!” (see entries vii and xxvi). When Millett and Keir are done changing the film and return to the

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scene of the gripping debate, a group of men and women have staged a photo-op for the press with a big sign in both Persian and English reading, we want equal rights! In the distance I can hear Keir’s still camera clicking photographs and winding film. Schoenman is also there with his camera. The ability to stop, rewind, rerecord, and fast-forward on handheld recording devices connects times and otherwise disjointed spaces. This happens on the tapes as I listen. Millett does this consciously sometimes, and at other times it seems reflexive, absentminded. The unwinding and fast-forwarding of the tapes unmoor the predictability of the things I take as tangibles, things we all take for granted: this moment, that time, this person, that space. Spaces and people appear and disappear, sometimes randomly because of the technology itself. A rewinding of that sort occurs in one of the most stunning documentaries from the revolutionary period. It is the 1979 film Baray-e Azadi, in which the Shah’s opulent coronation is played in reverse. The monumentalized time of the Shah’s reign is scrambled in the film. The recording technologies that the people have appropriated for the revolution are used not only to capture the crowds in revolt, but also now to disrobe the Shah of his stolen riches. This writing of wrongs through the inscriptive technologies of the revolution is like an act of redemption of the sort the literary theorist Walter Benjamin refers to in his “Theses on the Concept of History.” It is akin to a messianic return as well, one that inheres in the temporal consciousness of Iran’s messianic Shi’ism—a righting of all wrongs that takes place by resurrecting the past in the present. It is a consciousness enfolded in both the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s and the feminist literary critic Gayatri Spivak’s notions of teleopoiesis, a transformative crossing into a self one could never imagine being capable of becoming and doing so on behalf of an as-yet-unseen future. Losing their objective distance from the events they are recording, and too their chronological sequence, by the press of an FF

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button, Millett’s tapes upend the earthbound qualities of inscription, preservation, and monumentalization and reassign to these supposedly “archival technologies” other properties, properties associated with “erasure and ephemerality,” measures of flux that in sociocultural terms are deeply connected with the sea change of upheaval and revolution.17 C A S S E T T E TA P E R E VO LU T I O N

It has been common to trace the Iranian Revolution to Khomeini’s innovative use of the cassette tape and the sermons that were telephoned onto tape from his home while in exile in Paris. These tapes, in which Khomeini hurled insults at the Shah and demanded the monarch’s immediate departure from Iran, were broadcast over loudspeakers at mosques and played loudly over the noise of traffic on city streets in Iran. While the cassette tape was, admittedly, indispensable as an instrument in the awakening of the Iranian Revolution, its technology also served as a simulacrum for the populism of the insurrection against the Shah. The cassette tape, in other words, stood on the one hand as the material realization of a movement’s revolutionary commitment to something other than the Shah, something else besides. On the other hand, there was also a publicly held idea that the voices of nightly protests in the period of insurrection against the Shah were actually recorded voices, canned voices on cassette tapes. This was a denial in fact of the people’s very real opposition to the Shah and a form of technological agnotology constructed by the Shah’s regime about the revolutionary voices of the millions who climbed their rooftops at night in protest during the course of the Iranian Revolution. The novelty of the technology gave unjustified credence to ideas and information shrewdly manufactured to highlight the ephemerality of the people’s discontent. In spite of the important correspondences between Khomeini’s revolutionary audio recordings and the impact of his recorded

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voice on his charismatic leadership, the equivalences made between the technology of the cassette tape and the people’s revolutionary fervor remain relatively underdeveloped. The discourse on the cassette tape is a discourse on the acousmatic voice: on the disembodied slogans, sermons, declarations, objections, actions, sounds, instructions, sentiments, impulses, questions, responses, and rituals. What is required is work that recognizes the capacity of the acousmatic to generate a narrative landscape that emerges from the margin, to invigorate a collective will for an unpresentable future. This work, which I see as being largely informed by the writings of the literary theorist Mladen Dolar on the voice and the unconscious, still remains to be done. “There is,” as Dolar notes, “something acousmatic in every sound, not merely in the sense that one more often than not doesn’t see its spatial source and merely makes a guess about it . . . but in a more emphatic sense: even when one does see the source and location, the discrepancy between this source and its sound effect still persists—there is always more in the sound than meets the eye.”18 Millett’s voice from Iran and the auditory unconscious of its surroundings provided the bodiless, acousmatic sounds that would spawn imaginative narratives among feminists elsewhere. But the rumored voices of these women, often heard from a distance by foreign correspondents who were in Iran for the “oil story” and who were on the whole too comfortable to leave their hotel rooms and press conferences, were equally generative of the most outlandish theories about Iranian women and their movement. Fabulations dwell in the acousmatics of sound. Just think of The Wizard of Oz, or even Cyrano de Bergerac. Millett, who became close to the women she saw in Iran, insisted that it was necessary for the foreign press to close the gap that held the flesh-and-blood reality of the women they wrote about at bay with dinging typewriters, long lenses, and purportedly objective perspectives (see entry xiv). At the press conference she held along with the French feminists Mulard and Boissonnas and the Iranian feminist Kateh

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Vafadari, Millett would insist on an embodied solidarity that could close the gap of fantasy and ensure the security of a people standing for freedom on a planetary scale. “We are here concretely,” they said to the press as they invited them to join in the street demonstrations on March 12. “We are here concretely with our voices, our ears, our bodies—given to the Iranian women.” NUMBERS

What follows are thirty-two entries based on the thirty-two letters of the Persian alphabet, each introducing words and numbers that are drawn from the contexts that Millett encountered in Iran. After she left Iran, Millett would admit that when she realized that her hotel phone at the InterContinental was tapped, she carried out some of her conversations in code, resorting to a combination of symbolism (“double wedding” for the number two) and roman numerals. I have numbered each entry in the book with a roman numeral and followed each with a letter from the Persian alphabet along with a word or a number that begins with that letter—a lesson in the Persian language, essentially, drawn from words and concepts that appear in the auditory unconscious of the whisper tapes. Although the interpretive entries that follow from there are in numerical and alphabetical order, the content of the entries breaks with chronology, making rapid shifts in location. Thus, the entries mirror the capacities of Millett’s own handheld recording technologies to not only record the present but also fast-forward and rewind, revisiting a moment or the one that follows it again and again, while erasing others. Millett’s own use of these tapes to write Going to Iran would make my rendition of her musings redundant. But in drawing on the soundscape surrounding Millett’s own voice, layered beneath her whispers, what I attempt in Whisper Tapes is to replay what Millett saw and heard in postrevolution Iran. Formulated as an

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“interpretive guide” following the letters of the Persian alphabet, the book performs retrospectively as Millett’s guidebook to the demands of postrevolutionary Iran, to its slogans, its habits, its foods, and to the Iranian women’s movement—a movement some have claimed she never came to understand (see for example entries iii, xi, xiv, xxvi, xxx). Her audiocassettes capture Iranian women’s instincts and dreams everywhere she went. Most importantly, then, the book serves as an agnotology, a study of the culturally induced ignorance of Iran in the face its obvious, assertive, and eloquent presence. FALGUSH

I can only imagine by what processes of divination Millett’s telephonic codes were deciphered on a line that was often staticky, regularly disrupted, and clumsily dropped. But Millett was in Iran just before Nowruz (see entry xxi). This is said to be an auspicious season for making wishes and predicting their fulfillment. Falgush is one form of divination performed before the New Year and names the activity of listening in, from a fence or a dark corner, to the conversations of others, interpreting their words as codes and symbols in answer to the listener’s wishes or her unanswered questions. In writing an “interpretive guide” to Millett’s trip to Iran, I imagine the play of the falgush in the season of regeneration as perhaps what best captures what I do as I listen to Millett’s whisper tapes. There is another form of divination associated with the period of renewal, Nowruz. It involves the eating of a certain mix of nuts—the Ajil-e moshkel-gosha.19 On Thursday, March 15, 1979, as the women began to leave the university to attend to their families and their preparations for Nowruz, someone handed Millett a bag of “problem-solving nuts.” Millett immediately turned on her cassette deck to record the moment for posterity:

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“It seems at the New Year they have a . . . (little radio reporter here; everybody is laughing at me, but I’m reporting . . . )—that at the New Year they have a kind of nut that we are eating now, and someone has some in a bag and we’re all eating them now and they’re called in Persian ‘a problem-solving nut.’ ” A voice translates, “Ajil-e moshkel-gosha,” into Persian. “They open every problem,” another confirms in English. “She has problems,” Millett’s translator Taraneh giggles, teasing Millett in English. Joining in, Millett laughs. “We all have problems now. We need a lot of these nuts.” “It’s five-thirty now,” someone in the background reminds her friends in Persian, and this news of the lateness of the evening reverberates on Millett’s tape and against the stone walls that deck the hallway of the university where she has spent most of the day. Millett offers her bag of nuts to the Iranian feminist Kateh Vafadari, who approaches from one of her many meetings, and Millett tries to console her, “for the problems, Kateh. For the problems.” Vafadari, who misses the gist of the reference, asks one of her comrades in Persian, Migam . . . chi shodeh? “I mean . . . what’s happened? What’s happening?” At play, in a dark corner inside Millett’s whisper box, I was listening. This is what I heard. . . .

I A

Azadi Freedom

The first Persian word Millett learned when she arrived in Iran was Azadi, Freedom—the clarion call of the women gathered on March 8, 1979, International Women’s Day. For the women, and indeed the men who joined in solidarity, Azadi! would become the most passionate cry of that gathering and of the subsequent marches and sit-ins, which with few exceptions took Tehran University as their starting point and fanned out toward key government buildings and Azadi Square in Tehran in the five days of demonstrations that followed. “I am not really much at chanting,” Millett recalls in her book Going to Iran. “It embarrasses me a little. I never wear buttons either. But today one is swept away. To chant ‘Azadi!’ and to fumble through the more complicated chants is a delight.”1 No other movement made the demand for freedom as central to its mission as the women’s movement did in the early postrevolutionary years.2 The women who participated in the movement made it clear that they approved of the Iranian Revolution, and emphasized too that their own movement continued the revolution itself. “Ma enqelab nakardim ta be aghab bargardim,” the women chanted in the demonstrations of March 1979: “We didn’t make a revolution to go backwards!” To “live in a free society and 25

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to live a free life”—this was the motto of the Iranian women’s movement, and it challenged all social forces to join in their struggle for it.3 Less than two months had passed since the victory of the revolution. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had left Iran, and the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned from exile to take on the leadership of a nation that embraced him as Imam, a religious honorific of sorts. Recognizing that the fate of the Iranian Revolution was not written in stone and that a repressive Shi’i theocracy needn’t be the outcome of the insurrection against the Shah and in favor of Khomeini, the struggle for freedom became the foundation of the women’s movement. The women’s chant “Azadi, bayad, nabayad nadarad” captures the sentiment of their continued revolutionary struggle as a struggle against all forms of compulsion: “There are no musts or mustn’ts in freedom!” Less than a month after his return to Iran, Khomeini had, on March 6, 1979, decreed veiling mandatory on Iranian women. Khomeini’s ardent male supporters responded with force, bullying women with the slogan “Ya roosari, ya toosari” and making women’s presence on the streets without the veil the object of their repeated verbal attacks. As they left work at the end of a long day on March 7, working women’s choices were laid out for them by Khomeini’s men: “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head.” It is not surprising then that Millett would merge the question of veiling and the question of freedom as she listened to the slogans of the women during the massive demonstration of March 12 on the university grounds. Hearing “Azadi, bayad nabayad nadarad,” Millett attempts a translation on her tape recorder. “We fought with and without the chador during the uprising,” she proclaims confidently and chimes in with the women around her: “Azadi . . . ” “Oh no, it’s the other one,” interrupting her own recital of the chant. Though women did indeed fight for freedom with and

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without the veil during the uprising, her translation of the chant is obviously off. Turning to her tape recorder again, she reaffirms the associations she is making, brushing off the error in her translation: “Azadi means liberty anyway.” In Millett’s unconscious interpretive vocabulary, women’s veiling mingles with an existential sense of “unfreedom.” The very presence of the veil, in any form, in the global culture of patriarchy represents an imposition on women’s freedom. On the whisper tapes and in the book that Millett came to write on Iran, she repeatedly returns to the question of the veil, making an equivalence between the babushka, the hat in church, and the chador as hair coverings that maintain control over women under patriarchy and ensure patriarchy’s continuation as a matter of course. As Millett captures the voices around her in the demonstrations of March 12, a new group of demonstrators raise their demand for equal rights in a new slogan. On the soundscape I hear the women cry out, “Esteghlal, azadi, hoghoogheh mossavi!” Joining in on the word for “rights,” Millett fumbles with her Persian again: “Hoo hoo hoo! I think the ‘hoo hoo hoo’ part is civil rights,” she records. Millett has it almost right, though, again, not quite. “Independence, freedom, Islamic Republic!” was the slogan of the Iranian Revolution, and it is this chant that the women’s movement lyrically reappropriated in the course of the women’s demonstrations. In this reappropriation on March 12, women forwarded their demand for equality, substituting it for the concept “Islamic Republic” as if the latter, the subject of a referendum only two weeks away, should stand as a mere placeholder for equal rights for all. “Independence, freedom, and equal rights!” they cried out. This conscious will for an as-yet-unseen future on the part of the women bypasses Millett, whose thoughts are on Keir’s images, the tape recorder, and her own book, Going to Iran, which she hopes will be published in English, Persian, and French: “[Sophie] is with me from time to time and always in sight, but busy

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shooting movie film, doing her thing,” writes Millett as she recalls the massive march on March 12, whereas I am only being. Because this is one of the rare demonstrations of my life and I feel it with every step. . . . Today you don’t need to talk, you can just be part of it, one of thousands, chanting, marching along with your tape recorder, moving with them all, part of it, part of them, one of them. Chanting. In order that I can remember later. When I write. Because I know now that I will write. I will even write it for Claudine and Des Femmes, the book an account of our adventure together and therefore fitting they should publish it, the agreement reached without agents or commercial publishers at all. Just women. And we will do it in French and Farsi and English.4

Little did Millett and Claudine Mulard know at the time how difficult it would be to convince US publishers to publish the book that Millett would write in English on the basis of these tapes, especially when many of them, like Millett’s New York editor Michael Korda, believed that the Shah, whom Millett helped depose, was “our guy in Iran.”

II B

Beauvoir S I M O N E D E B E AU VO I R ’ S R E L AT I O N S H I P W I T H FRENCH FEMINISM WAS A STRANGE ONE. SHE HAD BEEN A PROPHET CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS FOR ABOUT TWENTY YEARS. — K AT E M I L L E T T

The French feminist journalist and filmmaker Claudine Mulard did follow up and was moving forward with her promise to publish Millett’s book on the Iranian women’s movement with the French feminist press Éditions des Femmes (see Figure 4). Nothing could convince Michael Korda, Millett’s New Yorkbased editor at Simon & Schuster, to publish Millett’s manuscript, however. Millett had spent hours preparing herself for the call with Korda to discuss the book and was willing to sacrifice decorum to fight for the human rights of the women she described as “half the Iranian population”—a phrase that the French existentialist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir would appropriate from Millett in her defense of Iranian women on March 22, 1979.1 Korda declared Going to Iran “poison.” “He wouldn’t touch it,” writes Millett. He had studied with the Shah at the Institut le Rosey in Switzerland and this personal interaction with the monarch influenced his views of the Iranian Revolution. A much more insidious agnotology was as work here, as we shall soon see, a manufacturing of knowledge and of facts generated and perpetuated in the American media about the Iranian monarch, an 29

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agnotology forged in Washington, in other words, to scaffold the reign of a US-installed ruler in Iran (see entry iii). This manufactured lack of knowledge about Iran sustained itself in the media throughout the hostage crisis at the American Embassy in Tehran and well into the 1980s. “The Ayatollah is terrible, fundamentalism is terrible,” Korda declared to Millett on the phone. “Of course. But the shah was terrible too. No he was our man in Iran. He was a tyrant I say, realizing I really have nothing to say at all.”2 There were few such debates on the left in France in the winter of 1978 and the spring of 1979 regarding the status of the Shah and the Ayatollah. Unlike most Americans, for whom the Shah’s oilrich Iran was the sacred cow, perpetuated as such not only by the news media but through Hollywood B movies of the 1950s and 1960s, the French left had been mesmerized with the revolutionary fervor of the Iranian people from the start. Tiers-mondisme (third-worldism) emerged in France, as the historian Eleanor Davey argues, “at a time when most European Communist movements were either stagnating or discredited and the third world seemed to offer a renewed hope for the revolutionary project.”3 This attitude turned the French intellectual class entirely against the Shah and passionately in support of Khomeini’s leadership of the anti-imperialist revolution in Iran. Rejecting capitalism as exploitative and oppressive, tiers-mondisme emerged, as the political scientist Robert Malley shows, as “the belief in the revolutionary aspirations of the Third-World masses” and in the utopian hope for their fulfillment.4 The French left believed in many ways that Khomeini would establish a radical utopia in Iran, ushering in a long-forgotten possibility, a “political spirituality,” or at the very least something akin to a form of “Shi’i socialism.” This was by and large the position taken by the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault and the Liberation journalist Serge July during the Iranian Revolution.5 It was in this context that Khomeini’s proclamation on compulsory veiling and the subsequent outpouring of Iranian women

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in protest against Khomeini’s decree caught the French feminists off guard. They had not expected a dystopic outcome on the return of the people’s chosen leader to Iran. His new opinions on women, especially, seemed like a 180-degree turnaround. The courage of the Iranian women also caught the French off guard. They had never witnessed a movement of women that took on the militant men, men with whom they had fought a revolution. No other revolution had produced a radicalized women’s movement of this magnitude. Iranian women’s cries on behalf of freedom reverberated with feminists all over France. The sexism of the French intellectual and activist circles of May 1968 had appalled a number of French feminists, among them the psychoanalyst Antoinette Fouque and the Marxist feminist Monique Wittig, who as Fouque would claim formed with Josiane Chanel the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) in 1970, a movement consisting of numerous feminist groups in France.6 Sylvina Boissonnas, the heiress of the Schlumberger family who had traveled to Iran with Claudine Mulard, had helped Fouque found the publishing arm of the movement, Éditions des Femmes, in 1972, claiming that only when women had their own press and media would they gain their own voice. It was the Des Femmes feminist bookstore at 68 rue des SaintsPères in Paris that took to heart the position of the Iranian women in the March 1979 demonstrations and resolved to take immediate action.7 Mulard worked around the clock to report on the women’s demonstrations in Iran and telexed these reports back to France from her hotel, the InterContinental. When she appears on the whisper tapes she is jovial though painfully exhausted, having stayed up nights writing reports from the day’s activities for France. On March 11, Des Femmes bookstore sent a message to all the women’s groups in France via telex: “In Iran, women did not revolt against the Shah to be subject to the Ayatollah’s oppression, to be pushed aside and stowed in a harem.”8 Nine days after the

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demonstrations were over, the French lawyer Gisèle Halimi would write in the French paper Le Monde: “How did so many revolutions and movements of oppression and independence movements in colonized lands occur amid exploitation of and scorn for women? These women who were at the least, the equal of their male comrades in withstanding torture, in courage and in death? For feminists today, the first concrete signs of an international solidarity have appeared.”9 These signs had appeared in Iran. Simone de Beauvoir followed suit with a statement on March 22 after Millett’s expulsion from Iran and her arrival in Paris (on March 19): Today the condition of women as such is in question, and that is what motivates our emotion.  So far, all the revolutions have required women to sacrifice their demands for the success of the action carried out essentially or solely by men. I join Kate Millett’s wish. And of all my comrades who are at present in Teheran: let this revolution be an exception; that the voice of this half of the human race, women, be heard. The new regime will also be a tyranny if it ignores their desires and does not respect their rights.10

It was clear that the 1979 Iranian women’s demonstrations had woken French feminists up from their sleep. And Beauvoir herself was firm in her convictions regarding the need for an international mobilization. Beauvoir’s influence in this regard was allpervasive. Despite the major clashes between the MLF feminists who were in Iran and Beauvoir, her opinion in French intellectual and activist circles of the 1960s and 1970s was often heeded. As Millett reflects, her longtime friend and idol’s classical feminist manifesto, The Second Sex, was a siren call to [me and] a lot of other people and a very dangerous book. This book could change your life, it could make you dissatisfied. It could make you not just want to be one of the good girls that went to college, but you wanted to kick the windows in too.

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You challenged everything then, and that meant you challenged everything you read and everything in the courses and the purpose and the shape of your life. It took hold of you. . . . After that, we never saw things the same way.11

At the core of Millett’s reading of Beauvoir on the common experience of women under patriarchy was something akin to a call for a “new diplomacy” among women that would, as Millett reflected, reverse “the injustices of the entire patriarchal past.” The allegiance of women to one another on the basis of their shared experiences as “second” to men was the foundation of an international feminism that would subvert patriarchy from within.12 Beauvoir would chair a delegation of eighteen journalists, writers, lawyers, and women’s rights activists from France, Italy, Germany, and Egypt who traveled to Iran on the heels of Millett’s expulsion. On March 15, at the press conference in Paris announcing the Comité International du Droit des Femmes and its imminent departure to Iran, as recalled by Claude Servan-Schreiber, the editor of the French feminist magazine F, “an Iranian man protested the departure of the delegation: ‘This is not the time.’ But Simone de Beauvoir, president of the committee, replied with passion: ‘I’ve seen many countries, and I’ve seen many revolutions, and each time the question of defending women’s rights came up, I was told it wasn’t the time.’ ”13 Leaving Beauvoir behind in France, a delegation from the Comité arrived as Millett was in holding at Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran, on her way to be dismissed from the country for good. Despite repeated calls to men to join in a struggle that would impact the lives of both men and women, the women’s movement in Iran faced a challenge similar to Millett’s with the press upon her return to New York. The struggle for freedom by the Iranian women’s movement was neither recognized nor supported by members of other democratic and left-leaning movements in Iran. Prominent Iranian intellectuals, too, would on the whole remain

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oblivious to the demonstrations that tens of thousands of women participated in. But for the French feminists the piercing cry of the Iranian women’s movement effected an awakening that would, within months, splinter the French movement forever.

III P

Pahlavi

Millett considered the monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi a “tyrant” and had by 1979 worked for seven years against the imprisonment and torture of artists and writers under his reign. Cleaning their equipment in the “unknown apartment” near Tehran University, Millett and Keir regrouped after Millett’s March 8, 1979, greetings to the Iranian women. As I press Play, I hear snippets of Keir and Millett’s conversation as Millett takes out the cassette to clean the head of the tape recorder. Jonathan Randal, a reporter for the Washington Post, had promised Keir that he would get her more tape earlier that day, and Keir reminds Millett of his kindness to them. “You can talk to him like a journalist,” Millett shrugs. “Me, he just asks those questions to.” “Fill in your own adjectives!” Keir teases, imitating his deep voice. “ ‘Give the devil his due,’ he says. ‘The Shah. . . . Under the Shah women made progress.’ ”Millett reels, “Whaaa . . . I won’t discuss it! He was Hitler. Period. I put my shoulder bag up on my shoulder . . . change the wind!” The monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, reigned from September 16, 1941, until he fled the country, after waves of revolts, on January 16, 1979.1 Revered as the Shahanshah, “the 35

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King of Kings,” Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was eager to bring about a Tamadon-e Bozorg, a “Great Civilization,” in Iran. He envisioned this transformation as the result of a “White Revolution,” a rapid set of social, political, and economic reforms that would, per his Washington advisor Wolf Ladjinsky, facilitate the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial, modern economy, raising Iran’s world status and strengthening the monarch’s own power. As a pacifist, Millett’s opposition to the Shah took the form of an international media campaign, one that would attempt to bring to light the corruption of the Shah’s regime and the torture and maltreatment of the intellectuals who opposed it. By 1978 Iran had well over 2,200 political prisoners, the numbers multiplying as the opposition to the Shah’s regime rapidly mushroomed. Under the Shah’s rule, members of the royal Pahlavi family in Iran were appointed to the country’s information and culture ministries and served as the heads of the nation’s news organizations. With his trusted family in office, the Shah could control the flow of information inside the country. As one of Millett’s comrades in the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom, Reza Baraheni, wrote on the human rights violations of the Iranian government for a subcommittee of the United States Congress in 1976: In a country where all political institutions are subjected to the vanities of a dictator, literature and the creators of literature turn into the voice of the nation’s conscience. Iran’s contemporary prose and poetry speak of the physical and spiritual poverty of humanity dominated by terror. They also articulate the spirit of protest against the injustices of despotism. Indeed, Iranian writers substitute for the political leaders who have either fallen prey to the ruler, emigrated or been imprisoned. . . . Almost all the prominent writers and poets of the country have suffered incarceration and torture.2

While efforts by US-based writers and intellectuals like Millett

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and Baraheni eventually impacted world opinion on the Shah’s reign of terror and gradually undid the agnotology that had been constructed around his White Revolution and its popularity among his subjects, few could sway the Shah himself. In an interview with the fiery Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci published in the New Republic in December 1973, the Shah reflected on his understanding of power with the following: Nobody can influence me, nobody at all. And a woman still less. In a man’s life, women count only if they’re beautiful and graceful and know how to stay feminine. . . . This Women’s Lib business, for instance. What do these feminists want? What do you want?

He turns to Fallaci: Equality, you say? . . . You may be equal in the eyes of the law, but not, I beg your pardon for saying so, in ability. . . . You’ve never produced a Michelangelo or a Bach. . . . Tell me how many women capable of governing have you met in the course of interviews such as this? . . . All I can say is women, when they are in power, are much harsher than men. Much more cruel. Much more bloodthirsty. You’re heartless when you’re rulers. You’re schemers, you’re evil. Every one of you.3

In the course of the interview, the Shah ameliorated his harsh views of women by referring Fallaci to his own benevolent efforts to better women’s lot. His White Revolution had involved putting in place a series of programs to improve the status of women, raising the level of literacy among women, increasing women’s access to higher education, and extending women’s rights in the context of family law. When all was said and done, the Shah’s education reforms impacted only a few thousand women. Many regarded these efforts, then, as mere “window dressing” designed to support the Shah’s ascent as a world leader. In 1959 the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf, called for an umbrella organization to coordinate the efforts of numerous grassroots and volunteer organizations that were working on behalf of Iranian

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women around the country. Approved in 1966, the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI) was largely funded by upper-class women connected to the royal court. Its associated committees worked on questions of health, literacy, education, law, and social welfare. The local branches of WOI and associated women’s centers, which were run by middle-class women on a volunteer basis, provided literacy classes, vocational training, counseling, sports and cultural activities, and childcare for women. In 1963 women were granted the right to vote and to stand for public office. The Family Protection Act would, in 1975, extend divorce and custody rights to women and stipulate polygyny as an exceptional condition rather than as traditionally practiced, as a matter of course. The Family Protection Act limited legal marriages to a second wife only with the permission of the first wife, an agreement settled in the civil court system. It increased the minimum age of marriage to eighteen for women and twenty-one for men, and abortion was made legal with the consent of the husband and available to unmarried women up to the eighth week of pregnancy. Immediately after he returned from his exile in France, Khomeini retracted the Family Protection Act, denying Iranian civil courts the right to make decisions in family matters. He deemed this to be the domain of theologians. Women were furious, but these rights were never reinstated. After the arrival of the Comité International du Droit des Femmes in Iran on March 19, the French journalists Katia Kaupp, Claire Brière, Michèle Manceau, and Martine Storti met with a delegation of Iranian women who had recently been appointed to take on the responsibilities of the WOI after the fall of the Shah, an organization now entitled the Organization of Islamic Women. Little had changed in the course of this transition in power. The women in the Iranian delegation were, once again, associated in some way with the men who held the leadership of the country. Among them were Azam Taleghani, the daughter of Ayatollah

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Taleghani, and the daughter of Iranian prime minister Mehdi Bazargan, Fereshteh Baniassadi. The few female activists that the French delegation would meet in the course of its visit repudiated feminism, calling it what it was: “window dressing,” a political tool for a West-identified Shah who used what minor impact his reforms had had on the condition of upper-class women to prove Iran’s equal standing with the West. The French were of course dismayed by what they perceived to be a rejection of their own platform by Iranian feminists. The differences between Western-style feminism and the demands that Iranian women were making in March 1979 had become critical in the context of the anti-imperialist revolution the Iranian people had just fought. “The dominant (and overlapping) discourses” of the toppled Shah’s state sponsorship of feminism had been at the heart of his White Revolution, and as Nima Naghibi observes, “The presence of Kate Millett and [the] European feminists in Iran at that particular historical juncture allowed the [new] ruling elite to argue that feminism was a Western phenomenon.”4 In that light, any militant activity associated with feminism would be seen as reactionary, in collusion with the Shah’s reign, and as such “counterrevolutionary.” This was the constant catcall of the opposition on the streets of Tehran during Millett’s visit as well. “Iranian feminist activists were thus forced to choose between the two sides of a false binary: the West and Iran.”5 When I turn to the whisper tapes and listen to the anticensorship protests at the National Iranian Radio and Television station recorded on Chahar shanbe soori, March 13, 1979,6 I can distinctly hear a second layer of mostly male voices belting out a chant against the women at the demonstrations: Masaley-e hejab nist, totee-ye Amerikast! “The question isn’t the veil, it’s the US conspiracy [we worry about].”

IV

Tehran

T

Millett would often claim that she never knew where she was nor, more accurately, where she would be. She would tell journalists who would want to speak to her that she spent fourteen hours a day in women’s demonstrations and that they could find her there. She commented on this regularly during her time in Iran. This was more of a strategy than a reality, however. She was concerned about the coverage of the women’s movement in the press and anxious about the safety and security of the women during demonstrations. Having the foreign press present at the demonstrations was akin to taking out an insurance policy against government harassment and violence. While the Timeline in the front of the book places Millett’s movements in the context of the history to which she bore witness, drawing in part on the reports of those events in the Iranian newspapers of the day, what follows is a mapping of her peregrinations in Tehran, a city in revolt (see entry xxii). M O N D A Y, M A R C H 5 , 1 9 7 9

Mehrabad Airport, situated in western Tehran

This was Kate Millett and Sophie Keir’s port of entry. Stranded at Mehrabad Airport with no one to pick them up and no friends to 40

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direct them, Millett and Keir checked themselves into the Sheraton Hotel. Sheraton Hotel, now known as Tehran’s Homa Hotel, located fourteen kilometers northeast of Mehrabad Airport and nine kilometers north of Tehran University

Millett describes the Sheraton as “an awful monumental concrete pile” with sandbags in front and in the lobby “and machine guns lolling about to ‘defend’ it from some anonymous attackers.”1 Having checked in, the couple checked out soon thereafter, thinking, at one point during the evening, that they would move into one of Millett’s comrades’ homes. That was not convenient, however. Their friends suggested that the two of them have dinner at the hotel. It was late and they were thirty-two checkpoints away. Millett and Keir spent their first evening at the Sheraton. They ate in the Sheraton’s basement restaurant, decorated in an Italian grotto motif, with a swimming pool outside its windows. They slept in. Checkout wasn’t until 3 p.m. on Tuesday. T U E S D A Y, M A R C H 6 , 1 9 7 9

France Avenue, the Home of Bahram’s Parents

Millett and Keir were met at the Sheraton by Kateh Vafadari’s brother, Khosrow. Afternoon. Siamak Zaharie, Millett’s CAIFI (Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom) comrade, arrived to pick Millett and Keir up. He drove them past the busy intersection of Shah Reza Street, now known as Enqelab Street (Islamic Revolution Street), and the tree-lined Pahlavi Avenue, now known as Valiasr Avenue, not far from Tehran University. They arrived at a house on France Avenue where they were reunited with Nemat, a friend of Millett’s from CAIFI. Millett had made Nemat’s acquaintance at Berkeley in 1973 (see entry viii). The bourgeois home that belonged to Bahram’s2 parents was not really to Millett’s liking. “I hope I don’t stay here,” Millett

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writes. “The traditional climate of parents is one thing, that of keeping servants is another, too much. I want to stay with women, feminists, sisters. Where are they?”3 That day they had lunch nearby—chelo kabab (rice and meat kebabs) “washed down with Seven-Up and Coca-Cola,” recalls Millett, “because there is no wine.”4 After a nap, Millett turns on her tape recorder to record Kateh Vafadari’s arrival in the home on France Avenue. On the whisper tapes, Vafadari’s voice is soft, her English articulate and lightly accented. Millett and Keir are both perceptibly delighted and disappointed by the visit: delighted to finally meet a feminist in Iran, and disappointed to hear that the celebrations at which Millett was to speak have been tagged on to the end of a Tudeh (communist party) rally on March 7. There could be no independent celebration on March 8, International Women’s Day. “All the places are taken Thursday the eighth,” Vafadari explains. “And to show these women that we have not lost this fight, we’re going through with it, we will hold it tomorrow. We have no choice.”5 W E D N E S D A Y, M A R C H 7 , 1 9 7 9

The “Unknown Apartment,” located on Amir Abad Avenue, not far from Tehran University

Millett and Keir referred to the Amir Abad apartment as the “Unknown Apartment” throughout their stay in Tehran: First of all, no one ever knew quite where it was, address and phone number were rationed out and quickly forgotten. Then, too, no one ever—in the full course of our time there—had even the vaguest idea whose apartment it was. It was thought to be some comrade’s, a student, maybe a student and a wife and child. The owner even had a relative quartered there, unknown to us at first, a young girl from the country who rigorously wore her kerchief even indoors, but she was never able to enlighten us.6

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1 p.m. Millett met her interpreters and prepared a translation of her greetings to the Iranian women. There was no time for lunch. The Tudeh rally started at 3 p.m. and everyone ran late. Millett recalled about her time in Iran: Always this gracious, hopeful air before circumstances: the circumstances of general poverty, without transportation among the women and having to travel by taxi in parts of the city where taxis are scarce, snow, rain, curfew. It is a pioneering hardly aware of itself, assuming that life is always this difficult, that all progress was necessarily heroic.7 Tehran Polytechnic, now known as the Amirkabir University of Technology

3 p.m. Tudeh Party rally. The organizers withdrew their promise to the women and neither Millett nor the other female speakers were allowed to address the crowd. The women walked out in protest. Other women joined them. Millett and Keir stood aside, watchful: Our job is to keep the record, attend to the archives. And we do. The tape recorder. The movie camera. The stills. This is the moment when Iranian feminism declares its autonomy from the left, its independence—something it must do if it is to live, if it is even to influence the left in any significant way. If the left is ever to develop a feminist perspective, it will do so only in reaction to the pressure of a large and powerful independent feminist movement.8

In the course of the disappointments of the evening, Vafadari finally located a hall. Standing outside in a circle in the snow, the women were euphoric. A makeshift handwritten poster announcing the International Women’s Day celebrations at the Reza Shah Kabir High School the next day was made by the women. Millett declared that an independent women’s movement was born in this moment. Only a picture of the poster announcing the meeting on March 8, 1979, appears in Millett’s Going to Iran.

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Hotel InterContinental, now known as Laleh International Hotel, located three kilometers northwest of Tehran Polytechnic

Millett invited the women gathered outside the rally to the hotel for a drink (see entry v). Ralph Schoenman, Bertrand Russell’s former secretary, had given a press conference at the InterContinental that morning. Still there, Schoenman ran into Millett in the lobby of the hotel. Of Schoenman’s appearance Millett writes, “Odd little Vandyke beard, it has the air of being glued onto his face. But his smile is very winning, something of the elf in his short stature and amused eyes. . . . He’s heard I was here in Tehran, but wasn’t sure of it, what a pleasure, he ‘admires my work.’ Very flattering indeed” (see entry xvi).9 T H U R S D A Y, M A R C H 8 , 1 9 7 9

Tehran University, Ferdowsi’s statue in front of the Faculty of Arts and Letters, located two kilometers south of the Hotel InterContinental

The news of Khomeini’s March 6, 1979, decree on mandatory veiling spread and was subject to heated debates on the campus. Millett and Keir tried to attend the celebrations in Ferdows Auditorium (see Timeline), but the room was filled to capacity. As they wandered home in the snow, they ran into the French MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes) feminist, Claudine Mulard, known to Millett as a longtime member of the Éditions des Femmes feminist printing collective and bookstore. Mulard had landed from Paris that day to attend the Women’s Day celebrations and came straight to the university. Mulard was dressed in white trousers, a pink sweater, and open-toed shoes and was unprepared for a snowy day in “tropical” Tehran. Seeing Mulard, Millett suddenly remembered that Antoinette Fouque, the French Psych et Po feminist and later head of MLF, the trademarked French feminist liberation movement, had said that she might come for the March 8 celebrations in Iran (see Coda). “I never heard from them again,” Millett writes. “I gave them up. And now to find an old friend, a Westerner, a feminist

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from France, like a comrade from home. We are no longer alone. . . . The whole thing seems easier now: France, or a French women’s group, is sharing whatever curious responsibility we imagine we hold today.”10 Early afternoon. Women climbed the gates of Tehran University, which had been chained by Khomeini’s supporters. This is when the three feminists missed the picture that could have placed the women’s movement on the front page of newspapers worldwide. Once they had made it out of the university courtyard, five thousand women marched to the Ministry of Justice and the central komiteh to protest Khomeini’s decree. “They had begun the revolution,” Millett recalls (see entries xix, xx).11 Reza Shah Kabir High School on Hafez Avenue, 2.3 kilometers southeast of Tehran University and walking distance from the French Embassy

Evening. International Women’s Day, 1979. Millett delivered her greetings to the Iranian women (see entry x, Coda). The “Unknown Apartment” on Amir Abad Avenue

Night. Millett and Keir rerecorded Millett’s greetings to the Iranian women gathered for International Women’s Day 1979 on three different tapes that night. They cleaned and readied their cameras and tape recorders for the upcoming protests. Millett received a phone call from Deborah Amos from National Public Radio (NPR) in Washington, DC. As she waits for the NPR engineers to set up a good connection, I hear Millett giving herself a pedicure on the tapes. “Too nude?” she muses. The interview with Millett was never broadcast. No record of it can be found in the NPR archives (see entry xxxi and Coda). F R I D A Y, M A R C H 9 , 1 9 7 9

Friday is like Sunday in southern Europe or Shabbat on New York’s Upper West Side. The Goddess rests (see entry xxix).

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S A T U R D A Y, M A R C H 1 0 , 1 9 7 9

Central Hall, Ministry of Justice, 2.1 kilometers southeast of the Hotel InterContinental

9:30 a.m. on the tapes. The hall is filled to the brim with women and high school girls protesting compulsory veiling and, too, the repeated attacks on unveiled women on the streets of Tehran (see Timeline and entries xi, xiii, xviii, xxvi, xix). Hotel InterContinental

Afternoon. Inspired by Schoenman’s press conference at the InterContinental on March 7, Kate Millett and the French women discuss the possibility of staging a press conference on the tapes with the Paris-based Newsweek reporter Elaine Sciolino. The press conference is scheduled for the afternoon of the next day, March 11 (see entry xxxii). S U N D A Y, M A R C H 1 1 , 1 9 7 9

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4.6 kilometers southeast of the Hotel InterContinental

Morning. Demonstrations. On the tapes I can hear the anxiety in Millett’s voice. This is as far south as she and the French women have been since they arrived in Tehran. “Because it is south Tehran,” Millett makes herself a note as she speaks into the microphone: “poorer quarters [of the city], quarters of the Muslim fanatics, class hatred will get mixed up with anti-Westernism, and misogyny and wow!” The crowd of demonstrators that day was relatively small, however: mostly women milling about in their lunch break. All the foreign media networks were well represented (see entries xiii, xx). Hotel InterContinental

Afternoon. A press conference was held to introduce the Iranian women to the foreign press and to invite the press to the March 12 street demonstration organized by Kateh Vafadari and the

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committee later known as the Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights in Iran (see entry xiv). M O N D A Y, M A R C H 1 2 , 1 9 7 9

Tehran University

Morning. Women gathered for street demonstrations, the great march to Azadi Square. They exited the gates of the university, marched toward 24 Esfand Square, which is now known as Enqelab (Revolution) Square. They marched along Azadi Avenue (Eisenhower Avenue), toward the Shahyad monument, now known as the Borj-e Azadi, in Azadi Square (Freedom Square), a distance of 6.5 kilometers. Millett was exhausted and falling behind; the streets started feeling dangerous. Millett and Keir flagged down a passing car and were driven away from the demonstrations (see entries v, xv, xvii, xxvii, xxviii). T U E S D A Y, M A R C H 1 3 , 1 9 7 9

Headquarters of National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT), now known as the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting

Demonstrations. Women protested media censorship and Khomeini’s former aide, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the new head of NIRT who had instituted new policies to purge women from national television (see entries iii, vii, xxi). T H U R S D A Y, M A R C H 1 5 , 1 9 7 9

Hotel InterContinental

Morning. Millett first heard of her possible expulsion from Iran. Schoenman was expelled and was put on the first plane to London (see entries xii, xvi, and Coda). Tehran University

Afternoon–5 p.m. Outside a leftist meeting convened in one of the

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lecture halls, Millett milled around in the hallway with a number of Iranian feminists (see entry v). Nasrin’s office12

Evening. A meeting was held to telephone the French delegation at their press conference announcing the formation of the Comité International du Droit des Femmes and the imminent departure of their delegation to Iran. The number was blocked (see entries vi, xii, xvii, xxiii, xxvi). F R I D A Y, M A R C H 1 6 , 1 9 7 9

Hotel InterContinental

11 a.m. Millett and Keir were initially kicked out of the InterContinental.13 Millett sat down at the Namakdun, “The Salt Shaker,” in the lobby of the InterContinental and tried to sort out with Keir and some of the foreign press how and where she should hold a one-woman press conference on the question of her expulsion. As her paranoia around the expulsion intensifies on the tapes, it feels as if Tehran has faded into the distance (see entries xiv, xxix). S A T U R D A Y, M A R C H 1 7 , 1 9 7 9

Office of Abdolkarim Lahiji

Millett, Keir, and Vafadari met with the civil rights lawyer Abdolkarim Lahiji. They were reassured that the interim government would not expel Millett from the country (see entry xxx). S U N D A Y, M A R C H 1 8 , 1 9 7 9

Mehrabad Airport

12:30 p.m. Millett and Keir were taken from their room at the InterContinental to the airport and detained there. Millett composed a letter to Abdolkarim Lahiji about the way the Iranian government had treated her. While the New York Times rejected her

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open letter, which she told the Times she had written exclusively for them, the piece was eventually published in the Boston Globe, the paper she had actually promised it to (see entry xiv). M O N D A Y, M A R C H 1 9 , 1 9 7 9

Millett and Keir arrived in Paris. They had lunch at Brasserie Lipp (see entries xxiv, xxv).

V

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“What an odd way to liberate a place,” writes Millett on the fate of Iran after the revolution. “Instead of confiscating the imperialist fat-cat stuff [the Shah’s riches] and democratizing the enjoyment of it—instead, what few pleasures it offered have all been forbidden. To everyone.”1 Waiting for a meeting to end and the room to empty out at Tehran University on March 15, Millett turns to one of her Iranian friends standing next to her in the hallway. “It is so sad, the Shah is gone, we should be able to be joyous and free!” The two of them are approached by a woman selling a pamphlet on “women and Islam,” as I listen. The coins jingle in Millett’s hand. “Two rials? Twenty tomans? [I see] twenty rials. Which is the twenty? I never know.” Millett did eventually recognize that the demand of the Iranian women’s movement was a demand for freedom on behalf of the entire society, women and men, but she observed the absurdity of a nation that had accepted a de facto ban on happiness and conviviality. “The just resentment against foreign things, foreign money, foreign arrogance has run its course to a kind of xenophobia,” writes Millett of postrevolution Iran.2 Listening to her whisper tapes, I hear Millett’s repeated return to this standing 50

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complaint about the new ban on alcohol in Iran under Islamic rule: “[What] a joyless place. Can you imagine going through a whole revolution and not being able to have a glass of wine after it’s all over?” Millett can’t stop wondering why Iranians are not taking advantage of the riches left behind by a monarch that has just fled the country. This and the question of the veil are the high-water marks of “freedom” for the anarchist feminist—an American in Iran. One of Millett’s most splendid encounters, as I listen to the tapes, is with Terry Graham, the longtime Iranian resident, filmmaker, and journalist. The two met on March 12, 1979, in the courtyard of Tehran University while the various women’s groups and factions spent the morning debating whether or not to stage the march to Azadi Square scheduled for that day. Tensions were running high, and the pressure was on to disassociate the demands of the women’s movement from the rhetoric of statesponsored feminism under the Shah, especially now that Khomeini’s decree on the veil had been retracted. This was a particularly sore topic for those who were or had been associated with the Iranian left and for whom the removal of the Shah was the main thrust of the revolution. Leaning in to my headphones, I faintly hear the voices of a group of students who have spontaneously started singing a “freedom song” in the midst of the cacophony of debating voices in the background. It’s difficult to make out more than three or four words of the actual lyrics: enqelab-e ma, “our revolution”; zanan-e Iran, “women of Iran”; doshmanan-e ma, “our enemies”; piroozi ba mast, “the victory is ours.” Millett comments that the young women are all still reading the words of the song from a sheet of paper. Curious, she is drawn over to them and here, outside of their circle, she runs into Graham, who recognizes her and recalls having met her at an event some years ago with the American feminist Gloria Steinem. It’s difficult to hear his voice, too, initially, and I wonder where Millett has put the tape recorder.

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“Wonderful place to come and find your friends, isn’t it? Everyone I ever knew at CAIFI is here,” Millett remarks about her involvement with the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran. “This atmosphere is so much like the Berkeley campus fifteen years ago,” Graham observes. “Columbia,” Millett retorts. “My first school of politics and police attacks!” “Oh, and Columbia after that. . . . So you have some thoughts to give the ladies here. That’s good,” Graham laughs, as Millett records his magnificent voice on her “memory box.” I recognize Graham’s voice as the voiceover in the spectacular cinematic record made by film director Hossein Torabi, Baraye Azadi (For liberty, 1979). In that feature-length documentary about the Iranian Revolution, waves of protesting crowds overwhelm the screen for a long 110 minutes. But in utilizing the capabilities native to film, it is the Shah’s opulent coronation, played in reverse, that stuns my senses, and in disrobing the monarch of his amassed riches, the film reflexively comments on the possibilities that are opened up by the massification of its own lightweight technologies—technologies such as the 16 mm camera and the audiocassette recorder, technologies which the film’s own camera focuses on throughout. Relishing the bold presence of high school girls in the demonstrations, Millett reflects with Graham on the women’s movement in Iran: “They’re doing so beautifully! So few days to build a mass movement this size! They are so politicized from the uprising, they have an advantage we never had,” Millett confesses. She herself never marched as a high school kid. “It is an enviable experience. I went to convent school,” she admits. “Oh Jesus! Well you can imagine what most of the girls here are going through,” Graham muses, himself a convert to Sufism.3 I hear him attempting an explanation for why the high school girls have taken on the vanguard role in the women’s movement: “the

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schools, the separation of the sexes right now,” referring to the recent decree on the segregation of the school system by the interim government. It’s the enforcement of dogma, a copied blueprint for living, the forced homosociality of culture by the clerical class that Graham sees Iranian women rejecting. But Millett’s only reference point for the homosociality of Iranian culture is its patriarchy and in particular the patriarchal enforcement of the veil: “Behind the superficial differences, after a while you recognize even in the veil, the babushka, the mantilla, the ‘wear a hat in church,’ the whole thing . . . that there’s something about you that is kind of icky and you ought to cover it up. . . . Because you, by just being around, are provoking some dreadful emotions. St. Paul says the same thing. It’s one of the ways you operate a system like that.” Graham listens patiently, then insists, “[Iranian women] have stressed their solidarity with men in every area . . . which is important,” noting with subtlety that at risk is not the veil per se but the enforcement of a gendered apartheid in a society that chooses neither the secularism of the West nor the materialism of Millett’s capitalist context: “[The women’s movement has] just grown out of the independence movement. . . . This is part of a world revolution as well, and the women are a part of that.” For Graham, there is a clear sense that what is at stake for this people, a people in revolt, is the possibility of something unprecedented. Something without a blueprint, something not copied. Something new. Days earlier, as women stood in a circle outside the Tudeh (communist party) on March 7, a similar vision of the future was being communicated to Millett in the wrinkled noses and visible “discomfort” of the Iranian women in her company as they responded to her invitation “to go out for drinks.” Standing outside in the snow, Millett suggested that they all go to the Hotel InterContinental. “[At the InterContinental] the ladylikeness of sitting in . . . big rattan chairs, the service of coffee [is] raised to a

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mystique,” Millett writes. “That and fancy pastry, Persian, French. Lady food, gluttony food, idle food. Luxury. After seven hours of snow and clamor and fracas—it seems both funny and necessary that female revolutionaries partake of pastry, tea, chocolate, antithetical comforts. . . . But you can talk and be warm and be comfortable.”4 “It is a permitted way for women to be together, like Ivy’s in St. Paul,” Millett writes later as she recalls her hometown’s ice cream parlor in the book. “A private booth wherein to discuss a separation, complain of a husband, brag over children, discover other women share whatever predicament you imagined you were alone in.”5 This is certainly the predicament of women in the heterosocial context of the Western family unit in Millett’s hometown in Minnesota, but for the Iranian women in this moment of revolutionary fervor in Tehran, “coming home” means not just coming back to family life and, as Millett recalls, “narrow circumstances.”6 For the Iranian women, the very fact of being home means living within and being completely enfolded in the homosociality of allfemale familial settings. Being home means being in the company of different generations of women, apart from men. It means being on one’s own, separate from men, all day long, with the female servants of the household, with one’s mother, aunts, female cousins, their children, yours, all in interaction, all confiding with one another, and not just occasionally. In the context of this type of homosociality, being part of the revolution and affiliated with the Tudeh and the leftist organizations meant in part that women’s political involvement was their one opportunity to interact with men, to communicate their ideas and hopes, to express their sexuality and desires and to do so freely. For many, this experience was in fact the very experience of equality. This was freedom. This felt like the future. The very gesture of sitting down alone without their male

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revolutionary comrades in “the copied furniture” and “the ‘American Bar’ ” of the Pan American-owned InterContinental felt more like conceding to a former blueprint, a scheme designed for the Shah’s forced model of Westernization.7 Sitting down for “high tea” at the InterContinental was, for the Iranian feminists, the very gesture of becoming “window dressing” for the Shah’s White Revolution—becoming, in other words, the “high bourgeois ladies in collusion with money and family and the system, the court, wealth, technocracy, modernism.”8 The dilemma is everywhere apparent on the soundscape of the whisper tapes as Graham and Millett continue to have their exchange about the protests at Columbia University and Berkeley a decade earlier and as they look around the grounds of Tehran University on March 12, 1979. It is present in the debates of the women and their leftist comrades on whether or not to march that day, too. It is present in the revolutionary song sung by the women in the circle. And it is present in the interrupting voices of the young men who struggle to translate their views into English and impress an agenda on Millett as she makes every attempt to ignore them. “Carter, very bad president,” a young leftist opines, interrupting the conversation between Millett and Graham. He has earlier introduced himself to Millett on the tapes as an ardent supporter of the Algerian independence movement and its fight against colonial rule. “Cash man very bad in America.” Enteghad-kardan chi mishe? “How do you say ‘criticize’ in English?” he turns to Millett’s interpreter and addresses his question in Persian. “Criticize,” Taraneh responds, getting back to her own conversation with Ralph Schoenman. “You [should] criticize Carter and the CIA, and the Pentagon!” the young man insists, interrupting Graham and Millett again. He tries to underscore with this that Millett’s focus as an American anarchist and an international feminist in Iran should be on

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the “money men” and capital, that she should direct her criticism toward the imperial and military projects of the US presidency, the CIA, and the Pentagon. Millett continues to ignore him. “Hamashoon ‘confused-and,’ ” another male voice teases. Merging English and Persian, he playfully nudges his friend to just move along and let Millett and Graham be: “They’re all confused!”

VI J

Jaryan Flow

Jaryan chi-ye? What’s up? What’s happening? What’s going on? These words reverberate inside Millett’s tape recorder around the clock. “What’s up?” Millett asks Vafadari, whose voice is usually in the flow of conversation when it is captured on the soundscape of Millett’s whisper tapes. Vafadari always happens to be in the midst of something urgent, solving a problem with groups of other women. It is Thursday evening, March 15. Millett, Keir, Vafadari, Nasrin, and a small band of other feminists sit around in the office of the “other Nasrin,” a friend of the feminists, waiting to get a call through to Paris for Simone de Beauvoir’s press conference. “Mikhay jaryan-o beporsi azashun?” someone asks. “Do you want to ask them what’s going on?” “Ageh fahmidan,” another responds with a giggle. “If they’ve understood what’s been going on.” The deputy prime minister and spokesman for the interim government, Abbas Amir-Entezam, has announced that morning that the government has expelled Ralph Schoenman from Iran. Asked by an unknown journalist whether Kate Millett would also be expelled, Amir-Entezam has responded that she too will be 57

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expelled. That much is understood, but what exactly the charge is against Millett will forever remain a mystery. The news of Amir-Entezam’s statement at the press conference set Millett off in a panic. Her French friends had spent the morning at the InterContinental shredding papers, mainly reports home on the daily activities of the Iranian women’s protests. Since no one in the government had in fact contacted Millett directly, she had spent most of the day discussing her situation with Iranian feminists and on the phone with France trying to figure out what to do about the rumor of her expulsion. In France, the Comité International du Droit des Femmes (CIDF), with Beauvoir as its chair, had organized a press conference to announce the solidarity of the French feminists with the Iranian women and to declare the imminent departure of an international delegation of feminists and journalists from France to Iran in support of the women’s movement. On the tapes it’s evening, 8:15 to be exact, and calls to France are blocked. It’s unclear why. Finding herself disconnected from that critical line of support, Millett airs her discontent with the encounters she has had with the staff at the InterContinental. The hotel has asked her to make a deposit of seven hundred dollars to hold their room. Vingt mille rial! Millett explodes in French. “Twenty thousand rials!” The hotel has additionally asked that she pay her bill nightly. “Like prostitutes!” she observes. “Let’s solve this somehow,” Vafadari interjects, astutely. “They probably want to make things difficult, but we want to pass this—” Interrupting Vafadari in Persian, someone in the room makes a suggestion: Kari nadareh, ye mard telefon koneh bege “man az nokhostvaziri-am”; begeh “az komiteh-am, chera ina-ro tarkid kardi?” “This is easy! A guy can just call [the InterContinental], say he’s calling from the prime minister’s office; [or] say he’s from the

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komiteh and inquire why [the hotel] is harassing them?” The room of women falls silent momentarily as they weigh the idea. There’s a phone call and news arrives that Millett and Keir’s hotel bill has just been paid at the French branch of the InterContinental. The feminists in Paris have taken care of it. The more pressing issue is Millett’s rumored expulsion and the impact it has on the burgeoning group of twelve Iranian feminists that is now assembled in Nasrin’s office. As the group discusses Millett’s case in Persian, reviewing notes from Amir-Entezam’s press conference and the various reports in the day’s papers, it initially settles on highlighting Millett’s activities with the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran and her work against the Shah. We have to argue, Vafadari points out, that the work Millett is doing is not against the revolution. She translates this for Millett, and Millett agrees. Recognizing that this is the position the Iranian women’s movement has taken in the demonstrations all along, she adds: “This is the revolution!” “You are not here to make a coup,” Vafadari teases, playfully. The flow of the conversation in Persian is rather more serious in tone, however. Seven days into the women’s demonstrations, the group realizes that Millett’s association with the group only intensifies the rhetoric that attempts to characterize their small band of feminists as an antirevolutionary force, putting their survival as a group in danger. It is argued that whatever Millett’s status may be at present, nothing can be done about her rumored expulsion until Saturday. Government offices are closed on Fridays. Any attempt on their part to act preemptively and defend Millett’s case would backfire. One of the Iranian women suggests: “We need to let her decide what she wants to do. A person who is so afraid of everything here; a person who needs to have total control over how she is presented in the media, such that she gets multiple translations done of [every] piece on her in the newspaper, also needs to make

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her own decision on whether she stays or she leaves. If on Saturday they tell her to leave, then she leaves.” As the group gives up on the call to France and breaks up the meeting to go home, Millett, not privy to this conversation in Persian, tries to enlist the group’s support for her press conference. She wants to make a statement regarding her rumored expulsion. “One of the few defenses we have now is publicity,” she writes later in Going to Iran. The old pacifist tactic; shame the authorities into treating you, if not well, at least with less barbarism than if they were not being watched. Since my own government, though unrepentant over its opprobrious relationship with the Shah, is nevertheless very unctuous toward the new regime out of its continual need for oil, it will probably be willing to do nothing to defend my rights. The press is the only chance I have left.1

None of the women she asked that day would say themselves willing to show up for the press conference. “You can just say that you have the support of the Iranian feminists without giving out names,” someone suggests.2 “Paris calls again and I tell Claude Servan-Schreiber we are being expelled,” Millett writes about the flow of the day. “Should they consider postponing their arrival? No, by all means come if they’ll still let you. Feminists must come and keep coming. All the more so if they kick us out.” “ ‘Claude, put on all the pressure you can over there, that we not be expelled, we still have so much to do. And we regard this as governmental harassment of international feminism.’ She wants a statement for today’s press conference in Paris. I comply and then tell her our own truth: ‘Claude, we’re all frightened to death.’ ”3 Having told Servan-Schreiber that it would be fine for the Comité International du Droit des Femmes (CIDF) to come, Millett would now set about ameliorating the rivalry between the

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CIDF delegation, cobbled together by Servan-Schreiber, and Mouvement de Libération des Femmes feminists, who were currently in Iran. On March 19 a delegation of the former would arrive in Iran (see entry ii) under the watchful eye of Simone de Beauvoir.

VII

Chaghaleh badoom Unripe Almonds

CH

“Beans,” Millett speaks into the microphone with glee as she reaches for another green almond. On March 15, 1979, in a car on their way to Nasrin’s office to call the press conference in Paris, the women stop to pick up some chaghaleh badoom from a street vendor. Millett and Keir both love this distinctly Persian treat. “Chaghaleh badoom,” Nasrin says. “How do you say chaghaleh badoom [in English]?” From the front seat: “They don’t have it [in America]. . . . It’s green unripe almonds,” one of the women replies in Persian. Nasrin turns to Millett and Keir: “Chaghaleh badoom.” She translates to English: “Walnuts.” The moment of exchange captures the precise failure to communicate, the missed recognition of what is present and eloquent in its own materiality. It is not only that Millett is unfamiliar with Iran and its ways. Nor is it exactly only a problem of language. Millett’s interpreters have New Year’s preparations to make; they are busy organizing the Iranian women’s protests; they are attempting to hammer out their demands. They have to travel long distances. The streets are chaotic and hard to navigate. They get stopped and searched at various checkpoints. They fail to 62

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arrive, they fail to translate things that are seemingly important to Millett. They are not interpreters. And of course, they mistranslate. But what becomes increasingly clear as I listen to Millett’s tapes is that the things that preoccupy Millett in Iran simultaneously motivate a complete misrecognition of the realities confronting her: in the car, on her way to call her comrades in Paris, Millett has her hand in a bag of unripe, green, unshelled almonds. Four kilos’ and twenty tomans’ worth. The paper bag crinkles and I hear her crunching on the almonds as she speaks into the microphone. Her senses are fully engaged. But her ambitions and preoccupations are elsewhere, drawn to a future that has yet to arrive: the bold presence of women globally. This requires, in part, the cooperation of the media. Headed by Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the postrevolutionary National Television adopted a policy of silence around the outpouring of women in the protests of March 8. Less than a year earlier, in November 1978, the mass demonstrations against the monarchy had experienced blackouts similar to those the women’s movement was experiencing. In response, journalists and the television staff of the National Television station had gone on strike. In light of that, the Iranian women’s movement was increasingly angered by the media’s censorship of their demonstrations. The March 1979 women’s rallies and marches to the TV station were to serve as a reminder to the reporters and producers of the nobility of a national media, which only months earlier had taken a stand against state censorship. The demonstrations at the TV station were also among the demonstrators’ many attempts to bring the attention of the world and the Iranian people to their bold demands. Millett felt censored by the American press as well. Women’s stories were irrelevant to the news cycle, which needed nothing more nor less than a single “foreign” story. The foreign press in Iran was for the most part assigned to “the oil story.” They were

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scheduled to attend the thrice-weekly press conferences given by the officials of the embryonic provisional government in Iran. Bringing the attention of the press to the Iranian women’s movement thus became one of Millett’s most enduring efforts. She staged two press conferences, including one on the morning of March 16 outside the Hotel InterContinental, to bring attention to the plight of feminism in Iran by responding peacefully to the announcement of her own expulsion. Millett’s expulsion from Iran was announced on March 15, a Thursday, the end of the week for the Persians. This Thursday also marked the weekend before the Iranian New Year (Nowruz) and the vernal equinox. Millett’s attempt to rally for the support of international feminism by the Iranian women had to take a backseat to these celebrations. Millett had also enlisted the help of her Iranian comrades for advice and translation all day, making several attempts to speak to a representative of Bazargan’s interim government. The offices were closing, and like the Iranian women all around her, government officials were heading home (or leaving Tehran for the country) to begin preparations for Nowruz. It had been a trying day, filled with anxiety, confusion, and frustration. As she and her comrades get into the car, I hear a youthful joy surging in Millett’s voice and a sense of relief as she turns on the tape recorder. She is happy for a moment of R & R, listening to reggae music streaming from the car’s speakers in the front. “I think we were crazy this morning,” Millett reflects on tape, referring to her surging paranoia after the announcement of her possible expulsion. “We talked to Mina and she reassured us, and we aren’t crazy anymore. We’re with our friends. We’ve been to the university. Not much going on. Leftist meeting. . . . The mountains are covered with snow. Just the setting sun, a quip cream. . . . Ah. . . . Bella bella fantastique! This city has the most beautiful situation in the world.” “Demokrat,” she says, affecting a Persian accent on her English.

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Leaning forward from the backseat, her clothes cover the microphone. “Could you write that down? It’s taken us a week.” “Tudeh Party, CP [communist party],” she interrupts herself again. “We’re also making a list of all the women’s groups in Iran now,” she comments on the tape recorder. “We’re playing the radio, I’m doing the architecture, and Sophie and Nasrin are figuring out the right Maoist terms for things. . . . Here are two . . . three chadori women on the back of a motorcycle behind the male driving them. . . . This is R & R hour. . . . Reggae music, Tehran’s imperial twentieth-century architecture, international feminist eating vinegared green walnuts. Relaxation. On our way to call the French women at the moment of their press conference in Paris. We coordinate pretty well for people who can’t ever get a telephone line. “Also, there’s a minibus of Iran Air,” she returns to her tape. “Well, Iran Air . . . I suppose we’ll be riding round in one of them pretty soon, Sophie, on our way to be ejected?” Giggling, she turns to the women riding in the car with her: “Yankee go home, huh?”

VIII

Hamleh Attack

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In the car with her CAIFI comrade, Siamak Zaharie, on their way to Bahram’s parents’ home, where Millett and Keir would finally meet the feminist Kateh Vafadari, Millett voices her immediate visceral response to the men holding guns at the airport the night before. The fear of an attack sank in immediately for Millett upon her arrival at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, and it never really went away. She records the shock of her arrival in Going to Iran with these words: “Today when we hit the wall of chadori, that wall of women, you know, later they looked like nuns—but at first they were terrifying, hostile, ancient, alien. . . . I never expected these women, full chador, full barrier. . . . That whole wall of black figures, that’s all I saw until the gun pointing right at me.”1 Driving in the car, Zaharie, Millett, and Keir discuss the possibilities now available for the emergence of the independent women’s movement in Iran following the insurrection against the Shah, the demands of labor and of women for their rights. It’s hard to hear the whole conversation on the tapes, but it’s important enough that Millett writes about it in the book: “Before the problem was only to get rid of the Shah. That’s done. ‘There’s now the

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possibility for an independent women’s movement. Now. Not before,’ ” Zaharie emphasizes.2 In the course of the conversation both Millett and Keir note that this is the first time that women have had an opportunity to move in right after a revolutionary insurrection. While Algerian women fought alongside men to win Algeria’s independence in the 1960s, the role played by women was largely curtailed following the country’s independence, the women’s demands left unheard, their rights and freedoms taken away. In the car, concerned for the survival of an emerging independent women’s movement in Iran, Millett asks about the attacks on the women’s movement by Maoist groups already, during the planning meetings leading up to the March 8 celebration: “Like who beat [the women] up?” Millett asks. “Were they Maoists?” A staunch socialist, Zaharie notes that there were Maoists present, certainly, but also SAVAK agents (the Shah’s secret agents).3 “The women’s movement was not repressed per se,” he emphasizes. “That wouldn’t be the right word for it. . . . That’s not the atmosphere here. The women’s meeting was disrupted.” As if to repeat his words in an odd sort of agreement, Millett moves the microphone closer and speaks the word “attacked.” Siamak remarks that Khomeini did however attack a democratic group, the guerilla group called the Cherik-ha ye fadiyan-e khalgh, a militant group associated with the Fedayeen, right after the insurrection. The group retracted its demands for democracy following that attack. “They . . . set up a day for a demonstration . . . [a] couple weeks ago . . . Khomeini . . . accused them of subverting the revolution. . . . [So instead, they] made it a rally, not a demonstration.”4 “That was a setback,” Zaharie notes, especially for a highly popular group that had the support of the people. It was a setback for those who wanted to start a conversation about democracy after finally ridding the country of the Shah.

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In essence, Zaharie tells Millett and Keir, this retraction set the stage for more disruptions of the sort to occur with other popular groups. He recalls on the tapes that the socialist workers’ party meeting was also disrupted “the other day.” Their group would be the subject of harassment, arrest, and interrogation by the komitehs in instances when they had been found to be distributing their newspapers in the streets. “But,” Zaharie emphasizes again, “Khomeini’s komitehs are not repressive in the same way as SAVAK was in the Shah’s era.” “You get harassed, taken to the komiteh. You’re given a line like, ‘Don’t keep doing this’ and then you’re let go. . . . Or [the komiteh goes] on the defensive, saying that ‘no one should have brought you over here!’ and [then] you’re free to leave.” This is indeed what happened on Sunday, March 11, when a number of Iranian women who were scheduled to appear at Millett’s InterContinental press conference were held up by the komiteh while distributing leaflets for the March 12 women’s march to Azadi Square. The komiteh claimed, as Vafadari found out after the press conference by phone, that her comrades’ temporary detention at the komiteh headquarters was “for the protection of the women against the harassment of the opposition.” Millett, too, would experience komiteh harassment in time, but back in the car on March 6 Zaharie tries to explain that what seems like an attack is more like a disruption. It’s not as repressive. “It’s that kind of atmosphere,” he emphasizes. “It’s nothing like SAVAK. The komitehs were set up by the movement. They’re not set up from above. It’s all quite fluid. They don’t want to be repressive. . . . They’re attempting to stabilize the situation,” he observes as Millett and Keir take in their surroundings. Little did the three of them know that that afternoon, on March 6 at his seminary, the Feyzieh seminary in the city of Qom, Ayatollah Khomeini would declare veiling mandatory for women in the nation’s ministries. Female state employees would be the first targets of this statement, which appeared on the front page of

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national newspapers the next day. That day, working women were verbally attacked on the streets by Khomeini’s supporters. According to the French newspaper Libération, this was the first appearance of the lyrically expressive taunt, Ya roosari, ya toosari, “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head.” The spontaneous response of various classes of women to these attacks, and their outraged protests against mandatory veiling on March 8, would jolt the women gathered at the university into action. That might never have happened had the matter been put to the leftist organizations that had staged talks and meetings at the university for International Women’s Day. As far as the left was concerned, if the women’s demonstrations weren’t written into their threadbare Leninist playbooks as an evolutionary stage in the advancement of a socialist revolution, then they were “regressive and counterrevolutionary.” Thus spoke the intellectual vanguard.

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Khomeini

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A somewhat tattered copy of the 1979 issue of Time magazine that had named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini “Man of the Year” remained in Millett’s possession for posterity. It is now filed away in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University along with her news clippings on Iranian prisoners, the mass uprising and insurrection against the Shah, and the women’s demonstrations of March 1979. Khomeini was a prolific thinker and writer in his time. Most of Khomeini’s forty books concern Islamic law. He was the first religious leader to openly condemn the Shah’s White Revolution and the role of women in it as key to the ruler’s program of Westernization. In heated dispatches from his Feyzieh Seminary in Qom, Khomeini called for the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah. The Shah, in turn, imprisoned Khomeini in 1963, leading to a series of riots and finally to Khomeini’s expulsion from Iran on November 4, 1964 (see Timeline). Khomeini spent fifteen years in exile and, like Millett though admittedly in a different capacity, worked largely in opposition to the Shah throughout this period. “Khomeini with his wonderful face, his wrathful beard, his haunted eyes, seemed to us, at this point, like some re-embodiment of Gandhi hurling imprecations 70

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on the Shah adamant that he abdicate, refusing reforms, deals. A man of principles, a man of ideas, above politics. A holy man. Monarchy must go—it was a principle with him that this anathema finally be extirpated after all these two thousand years. The inference would be democracy,” Millett writes, “and that indeed was what he was saying to us from his retreat in France.”1 In exile Khomeini settled in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, sending recordings of his sermons to his students and followers in Iran. When he moved his home to Neauphle-le-Château in the outskirts of Paris, his sermons were called in using his personal landline. Transmitted by telephone to Iran, the sermons were recorded on cassette tapes to be played at mosques and on cassette decks, boomed over the sound of traffic on city streets in the course of the revolution. While Shi’i tradition discouraged clerical participation in government, Khomeini called for Shi’i leaders to govern Iran—to establish a theocracy. As discontent with the Shah’s reign grew, support for Khomeini’s outraged opposition to the monarchy multiplied. Dissatisfied members of labor, the Tudeh (communist party), the Trotskyites, the Mujahedeen, the Fedayeen, and other leftist and socialist organizations joined a radicalized student movement in Khomeini’s call for the Shah’s immediate overthrow. In December 1978, the Iranian army rebelled against the Shah, and on January 16, 1979, the Shah fled the country. With the Shah finally in exile, Khomeini was free to return to Iran, triumphant. The Grand Ayatollah arrived home from his exile in Paris on February 1, 1979, and was acclaimed as the leader of the Iranian Revolution. Khomeini’s March 6, 1979, decree on veiling followed on the heels of two other of his attempts to establish the Islamic character of the postrevolutionary nation against the communist and liberal contenders to power. Khomeini did so by reclaiming religious authority over the politics of gender and the bodies of women. On February 26, 1979, Khomeini abrogated the 1967 Family

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Protection Act to reestablish the decision-making power of the clergy in matters of marriage, divorce, custody, and alimony, eliminating the authority of civil courts in family matters and abortion. This move alone was intended to send a strong signal to any other claimants to power. Less than a week later, on March 3, 1979, it was declared that women could no longer serve as judges in civil or criminal courts. Women were too emotional. The March 6 declaration on mandatory veiling would be the decree to make newspaper headlines. It was in response to these headlines that on March 8 the slogan “Marg bar Khomeini!” was heard on the streets of Tehran. It was a daring move on the heels of a revolution that had hailed the Ayatollah as its leader. After the fall of the Shah, it fell to the women to be the first to chant “Down with Khomeini!” A number of foreign journalists were on Khomeini’s plane when he returned from his exile in France, including the former Libération journalist Claire Brière (a close acquaintance of Michel Foucault) and the Paris-based Newsweek reporter Elaine Sciolino. Remembering the days she spent at the Hotel InterContinental in Millett’s company, a month after her own arrival in Tehran, Sciolino writes, Within a month, Khomeini ordered all women to wear Islamic dress. At first, Iran’s women resisted. I walked through the streets of Tehran as thousands of women marched—bareheaded—to protest Khomeini’s order. Men hurled stones, bottles, and insults. Soldiers fired shots in the air. The American feminist Kate Millett showed up, branding Khomeini a “male chauvinist” and marching with Iranian women. She was expelled. Still Khomeini was politically supple enough to sense the strong opposition to his sweeping dictum. He had called the floorlength chador, the garment that covers all but a woman’s face, “the flag of the revolution.” But then he backed down, saying he had meant only to suggest how women should dress. Eventually, however, head covering prevailed.2

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Back in Paris Khomeini “was still keeping his mouth shut on the specifics,” Sciolino observes to Millett when they met at the InterContinental on March 10 after a full day of demonstrations. “Gandhi-esque,” Millett concurs. This was of course the position taken by the American ambassador Bill Sullivan at the time.3 A referendum on the establishment of an Islamic Republic was put to a vote on March 31, 1979, and by December 1979 a new Iranian constitution was approved. It claimed Khomeini as the political and religious leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Durud Salute

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The Tudeh rally on March 7, 1979, initially presented itself as Millett’s only opportunity to deliver her speech and greetings to Iranian women upon her arrival in Tehran. But she, Kateh Vafadari, and the other women who had been promised a platform were frustrated by the repeated rejection of female speakers at the Communist rally that night. “This is no festival, no celebration,” observed Millett as she looked around the tens of thousands of people, men and women, who had gathered at the Polytechnic in Tehran for the Tudeh Party’s rally. “This is an unpleasant paranoid mass . . . , overwhelmingly male, and what women there are are attached to a male as by a cord.”1 Despite reassurances from the previous day, the organizers of that meeting would provide no opportunity for women to speak to the crowd. In fact, as Millett observes, women seem somewhat anathema to the crowd there, even the language of their women’s bodies . . . [is given to] deference. . . . To see them is to feel defeated. Hard to believe this is a mass of persons pertaining to the left. Hard to believe that this patriarchal bullying atmosphere could even associate with revolutionary, socialist ideas. In fact, it doesn’t. The “revolution,” in this place, is only a word for tribal 74

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patriotism, tribal patriarchy. Revived in the fierce arrogance of the men, the frightened docility of the women. Khomeini is everywhere. Even in the shouted salutes to the guerrillas.2

One could hardly glean from Millett’s book, which I am quoting here, that the entire soundscape of Millett’s whisper tapes from Iran counters these sentiments. The soundscape surges in waves of salutations by women, one to another, even as Millett records her observations and conversation amid the crowds surrounding her in Tehran: “Durud! Durud! Durud! ” the women cry. To Millett’s ears this gesture of salutation and solidarity sounds aggressive at first, and more like “Garout!” “Durud bar parastar!” The women salute the nurses as their sisters. Durud bar moallem! “Salute to the teachers!” Durud bar mohassel! “Salute to the [women] high school students!” Many of the slogans of the demonstrations were salutes cried out to those groups of demonstrators whose professions were specific to women: teachers and nurses. At the rallies women would also salute the government workers and female judges who had recently been debarred by Khomeini’s decree of March 3 and March 6. As Siamak Zaharie, Millett’s socialist comrade (see entry viii), reported when he came to collect Millett and Keir after their arrival in Tehran on March 6, “There have been restrictions, on women judges.”3 The news was fresh off the press, in fact. The decree had only been in effect for three days: “Women judges and attorneys are up in arms. And the problem is, there still aren’t any real independent women’s groups—this is crucial,” Zaharie observed. “During the insurrection, women came to the demonstrations by hundreds of thousands,” writes Millett as she takes note of Zaharie’s report. “Religious groups tried to separate the men and women, not because the women were coming out politically as women, but to separate the sexes for puritanical reasons, like in

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the mosque. There was no issue yet that women would walk under their own banner.”4 Listening to Zaharie, Millett wonders to herself if this segregation of men and women in the struggle had in fact the “effect never intended,” a banner under which to walk independently— women facing danger together, “bands, bands of women,” demonstrating in the streets together “in the safety of their chadors.”5 This was prescient of her later observation (on March 11) that Khomeini was secretly organizing the women’s demonstrations. By the evening of March 7, the issue that would bring the women together in outrage would indeed be Khomeini’s pronouncement on mandatory veiling, and women of all walks of life would be out on the streets, veiled and unveiled, demonstrating against Khomeini’s new decree the next day. In Going to Iran, Millett observes how she would have much preferred to be with them (on the streets) than at the International Women’s Day celebrations. At the Reza Shah Kabir High School auditorium Millett finds herself uncomfortable with the political vibe of the gathering: “Socialist women. Women of many groups and persuasions.” She lists them: “Teachers, nurses, professional women, women in unions, a woman from the Palestine Liberation Front . . . her greetings from the PLO, messages from France, from feminists abroad, women from one field of study, work or industry, political group or another, the Trotskyite, Kateh [Vafadari].”6 Recalling the order of the day, Millett writes that the first woman to speak during the Women’s Day celebrations was the mother of four young men who were, all four, killed in the course of the revolutionary uprising against the Shah: “A great cry goes up for her as she comes into the hall. A wonderful entrance in full chador, the beautiful garment truly costume here, the cloak of mourning and drama. The crowd roars for her. ‘Garout, Garout.’ ”7 What is objectionable, it seems, beyond the political vibe of the event for Millett is the male factor: “The speakers are all women whose thing to say derives from their relation to a man.”8 It is “a

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typical left requirement, tactic even,” Millett observes. “A woman whose husband is a worker in the car industry, he was killed.”9 While Millett was giving her greeting to the women gathered at the Reza Shah High School, high school students were out on the streets spearheading women’s demonstrations. The interim government had also initiated the process of gender segregation in schools, pronouncing educational institutions “centers of prostitution.” The students were outraged (see Figures 11 and 12). Other women marched alongside them in bold resistance to Khomeini’s veiling laws, and in doing so upheld their demand for a free, unsegregated society; indeed, a desegregated system of education. As one formidable representative for the women’s high school students declared in her speech at the rally and sit-in at the Ministry of Justice two days later, on Saturday, March 10, 1979, “Men began the revolution. Women will complete it! We are, all of us, freedom fighters, and what we want is freedom!” The soundscape of Millett’s whisper tapes announces the will of the Iranian women for freedom—a freedom born out of solidarity—and a common stand against all compulsion, whether Eastern or Western. The imposition of the veil meant, to the women, the segregation of the sexes and, in this homosociality, their exposure to harassment. Their demand for “independence, freedom, and a real republic” thus meant for them that men too had their part to play in the articulation of an independent, free, and real—that is, an egalitarian—republic. In the demonstrations of March 12, as women and high school girls in the tens of thousands exited the gates of the university and commenced their march through the streets of Tehran toward Azadi Square, Millett turned to her whisper box to declare that the women’s movement had just passed “its first great test.” They, as women, had emerged as one body onto the streets to make their demands for a free and egalitarian society public. In this moment of emergence, the voices of women all around Millett joined in a resounding chant to establish their demands in

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relation to the men standing outside the university gates. Their voices, confident and self-assured, send sparks through my entire body as I listen: Ma tamasha-chi nemikhahim, be ma molhaq shavid! “We don’t want spectators, come and join us!” And then immediately, as if to emphasize their collective will to solidarity, veiled and unveiled, another sea of voices surges, crying out: “Baradar! Baradar! Rooh-e mobarezat ko?” “They’re shouting Garout to what?” Millett asks confidently, now with four days of rallies and demonstrations under her belt. “No, no, no!” Millett’s translator, Taraneh, interjects, correcting Millett in English: “[They are saying,] ‘Where is your fighting spirit?’ To the brothers!” “Brother, brother! Where is your fighting spirit? Why don’t you join us?”

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Zat Instinct

A vast interior soundscape fills the tape I am listening to after Millett is searched, patted down, and permitted to enter the grand hall at the Ministry of Justice on March 10, 1979. The hall is filled with women waiting for the speakers to take the stage. A woman’s voice, passing Millett, is caught on the tape: Azadi-ye zan, azadi-ye jameh-ast. “The freedom of women is the freedom of society.” In my listening, it feels as if Millett knows her and that she has run into her at the entrance. But the tape recorder was turned off during the pat-down, so there is no way of verifying this from the recording. Millett follows the voice into the interior of the building. A group of women enter the hall in formation stomping their feet to a militant chant. “Marram-e ma azadi, rahbar-e ma Khomeini.” This will be the only slogan to be broadcast on Iranian National Television from the women’s demonstrations. It captures what must be characterized as the zat, the “essence” and “substantive instincts” of the rank and file, who up to this moment have led the women’s demonstrations. It is this instinct that gave rise to a revolution that had toppled the Shah in January 1979, the revolution that had subsequently welcomed the Ayatollah back into the fold. “Our ideology is freedom, our leader is Khomeini.” 79

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Millett and Keir had been waiting eagerly for the arrival of these women into the hall. They had been stuck in traffic as they waited for this procession of women to cross the street ahead of them. Remarking that “our own demonstrations” are delaying our arrival, Millett observes, “They are high school students.” She delights at this and is struck by the ring that the girls and boys have formed around the protestors to protect them as they march (see Figure 12). With their fists raised, the young women now cry out, their rhythmic slogans reverberating against the marble walls of the Ministry of Justice. Rejecting the absolutism of compulsory veiling, the women claim their dignity, modesty, honor, and worth, with and without the veil: Be gofteh-ye mullah Ali hejab-e zan daroonist, “According to Mullah Ali, a woman’s hejab [dignity] is within.” Hejab-e ma ezzat-e ma, “Our own dignity is our veil.” Hejab-e ma, paki-ye ma, “We veil ourselves with our own purity.” Millett is transfixed by the power of their voices, the determinacy of their physical presence. I can hear her excitement on the tape: “chanting,” “shaking their fists,” “stomping the marble floor,” Millett effuses, ecstatic! “Zan-e azadeh-ye ma hejab-e fetri darad,” the women’s voices surge again rhythmically. But Bahram, Millett’s translator, falters when he tries to translate this: “Our free women have an inner purity.” The word for instinct or inner knowledge—fetri—and the word for thought—fekri—have a similar auditory ring in the hall. He knows he has misheard the women, and who knows, they’ve probably misheard each other, but he’s also not certain how to convey to Millett a revolutionary woman’s unwavering command of her inner dignity. “Our free women have an intellectual veil,” he tries. Azadi, azadi, barayash mijangim! “We will fight, we will fight, for freedom!” The women’s collective will to freedom is an instinct born of this revolutionary spirit. It is this instinct and not the compulsion to veil that renders their modesty and dignity sublime. On this instinct, they insist.

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Rooznameh Newspaper

The pages of the Persian-language newspaper Kayhan crinkle on tape as the women pile around it to read the transcript of AmirEntezam’s press conference on March 15, 1979. “Keep reading . . . the rest is on Schoenman.” Nasrin follows the thread of the article across the pages of the newspaper as Vafadari pages through it. “Oh here! The continuation of the piece is here!” “ ‘The spokesperson for the government said regarding Schoenman that any other reporter who works against the aims of our revolution will be expelled. Amir-Entezam was asked if Kate Millett, a member of the women’s liberation movement in America, will be expelled. He answered, she will also be expelled.’ ” Vafadari’s measured voice reads the text in Persian: Har khabar-negari ke kasse-ye sabr dolat-o-enqelab ra labriz konad ekhraj khahad shod. “Any reporter who spills the cup of the government and revolution’s patience will be expelled.” The women chuckle at the Persian expression. “It was nice to meet you!” Vafadari teases, turning to Millett and Keir. “Have a nice trip back!

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Zan Woman

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The soundscape is teeming with voices: “Zan, zan, hamdasteh mard azad bayad gardad.” “Taraneh,” Millett turns to her interpreter in the street demonstrations on March 12, 1979. Taraneh is animated, joining in with the women around her. She can’t hear Millett. “Taraneh, what does ‘zan zan’ mean?” “It means ‘woman woman.’ ” The voices rise again, engulfing Taraneh’s: “Hand in hand with men, women should be free!” There is a distinct awareness in the repeated slogans of the women’s demonstrations that any separation between the cause of women and men would mean the loss of everything that had been gained in the course of the insurrection against the Shah. In Iran this idea had historical roots reaching back to the 1950s and the people’s first attempt to claim national sovereignty. In her talks and in the interviews she gave to the press, Millett would often refer to the constitutional democracy that was in place in the 1950s in Iran, under the leadership of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, as the kind of secular democracy that would have granted women the rights they were now demanding of the interim government in Iran. Mossadegh had valorously resisted foreign domination on behalf of the Iranian people. He had seized the Iranian oil industry from the Anglo-Iranian Oil 82

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Company (known today as British Petroleum, or BP) and in doing so argued for its nationalization at the International Court in The Hague in June 1951. The British, who had been excavating oil in Iran for over fifty years, were outraged. Winston Churchill had fought two world wars on Iranian oil. They insisted that they had claims on it. But Mossadegh was adamant. Iran’s destiny as an independent nation depended on its control over its natural resources: “During the half-century of the former [oil] company’s domination, it has never been possible for the Persian Government to make a free decision in its internal affairs and its foreign policy.” It was necessary therefore to eradicate foreign influence in the country, Mossadegh argued, “to ensure the political independence of the country, while co-operating shoulder to shoulder with the other freedom-loving nations in maintaining world peace.”1 But with the British gone and the Tudeh’s strong support of Mossadegh’s leadership, the United States was fearful of a Soviet takeover in Iran. Thus, in an engineered coup d’état—the CIA’s 1953 “Operation Ajax”—Mossadegh was deposed and the Westfriendly autocratic rule of Mohammad Reza Shah was once again secured. Whether or not Mossadegh’s democratic government would have aligned with Millett’s feminism is subject to debate, as she herself would eventually admit, but it was the still-melancholic memory of the people’s historical loss that led many to believe that the coup d’état against Mossadegh’s government would not have succeeded had there been unity among the different political and religious factions and between the various segments of the population. To protect the nation from foreign interference in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, it was advisable therefore to not provoke disunity. The slogan “Ettehad ettehad, baess-e azadi,” a slogan left untranslated by Millett’s interpreter, Bahram, at the staged rally and sit-in at the Ministry of Justice on March 10, spoke precisely to this fear of external manipulation. National

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unity was key. Any division caused by the women’s movement would pose a threat to the victories of the revolution: “Unity, unity will lead to freedom!” As Nasser Mohajer and Mahnaz Matin point out, when any of the major political factions in Iran spoke out on behalf of the women’s demonstrations, they did so merely to condemn the harassment and abuse of women who refused to veil. The slogan of the women’s demonstrations, Hamleh be zan shekast-e enqelab ast, “The attack on women is the failure of the Revolution,” emerged in response to this kind of harassment on the streets. Fedayeen guerrillas and the People’s Mojahedin both condemned these attacks. They refused, however, to address the more divisive issues that were now confronting the people, including the swiftly vanishing rights of Iranian women and the question of mandatory veiling. The more secular Tudeh Party refused to take any position whatsoever on these matters. It is March 15 on the tapes. After a harrowing day at the Hotel InterContinental and the university, Millett joins a group of Iranian women at Nasrin’s office around 7 p.m. to put a call in to Beauvoir’s press conference. One of the women from the group rushes in late from a Maoist talk at the university. She is utterly disgusted by the experience. The speaker at the university had a veil on, she reports, and she was giving a lecture on the ethics of wearing makeup as a female revolutionary. Listening in, I can hear the entire group of women lean into an exhaustive debate about the fetishization of the female body, the use of makeup, and the revolutionary female. “First of all,” says a spirited Vafadari, as if talking back at the speaker, “what’s it to you [if I wear makeup or not]?” She continues in Persian: “And second, if you want to be revolutionary, why not shut down the whole [makeup] factory?” Nasrin agrees: “All this talk about ‘dolllike’ women [women who dress up and wear makeup] has a long history before Islam [i.e., just because you wear makeup doesn’t mean you’re surrendering to Western influence]. If you look at

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ancient history and work your way to the present, there’s kohl [eyeliner], there’s gold.” “Cleopatra!” Vafadari interjects. “Cleopatra [exactly]!” Nasrin continues, “and there was henna too!” “[Cleopatra] would put on a ton of eyeliner, and she was a queen, and she saved the country,” Vafadari insists in a youthful glow. “The next thing they’ll do is say, ‘Why do your shoes have two buttons? [One is enough!].’ [I think] women should decide what they wear. If today they say, ‘Don’t wear fancy clothes, wear something simple,’ then tomorrow they’ll have you wear Maoist shirt necks: ‘Go on all of you! Make yourselves look like soldiers, be matchsticks, and walk into your matchbox!’ ” The women all laugh. Indeed, as Vafadari humorously points out, regulating women’s bodily comportment within leftist groups during the Iranian Revolution was a powerful way of integrating critiques of Western cultural imperialism with the logics of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. If the choice for women under a Westernizing Shah was objectification, namely staying feminine as a way “to count,” to paraphrase the Shah, or in other words to fulfill the traditional role of wife or mother, then abandoning femininity in the context of the revolution meant the promise of a woman’s parity as a revolutionary comrade. By adjusting their aesthetic choices and demeanor, some Iranian women activists believed that they could create an affective solidarity with men on behalf of the nation. By playing their part in securing unity, they would help forge the movement’s overall success. “Esteghlal, azadi, hoghoogh-e mossavi!” The recurring chant, “Independence, freedom, equal rights!” thus translated for some as the shedding of an incompatible “feminine” comportment as political activists in order to gain equality with men. And while such norms were articulated with secular, Third Worldist politics in mind, the slippage to a more digestible nativism was rather smooth. For even the most secular activist the defense of

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Iran’s Shi’i culture and its religious traditions, such as veiling, became part of the anti-imperialist discourse of the revolution.2 Outside the Foreign Ministry on March 11, an Iranian woman walks over to Millett to give her opinion on Khomeini’s decree on mandatory veiling: “It was too early to talk about wearing the chador,” she says to Millett, who is holding her tape recorder in her hand. “Too early. Imam Khomeini shouldn’t have said that.” “But for us it was marvelous,” Millett counters, thinking as a media strategist, “because women rise up spontaneously. They won’t stand for it!” “Actually,” she writes later, “Khomeini is the secret agent organizing for the women’s movement.”3 What Millett misses here, though, is the religious character of her interlocutor’s understanding of herself as a believer, even though she has spoken to her in English. The woman has just addressed Khomeini as “Imam”—the vocabulary of someone who has been an ardent supporter of Khomeini’s leadership as a “source of emulation” in Twelver Shi’ism and as a mujtahid (an expert in Islamic law). This is ceremonial language, unequivocal, and reflective of a collective will that, as Foucault would observe, “pitted its very existence against that of its sovereign.”4 “Ziyarat-gah, masjed, bazaar. . . . Begoo ma mikhahim chador sar konim vali baraye oon ja-ha na baraye khiyaban-o-kharid,” the woman continues. I hear her laying it out for Millett, who doesn’t register her words. “Tell her,” she turns to her friend to translate the Persian, “we do want to wear the chador, but for pilgrimage and ceremonial sights, the mosque, the bazaar, not to walk around on streets or go shopping.” At the InterContinental, where Millett and Keir visit Elaine Sciolino’s room to pick up a couple of chadors, Millett laughs as she tries on a full-length veil: “If you could wear them for fun like a long dress!” “Well,” Sciolino agrees, “I loved it as a cape. They’re . . . protection! You know what happened in Qom? With dozens of pickpockets, but—”

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“Try to get through this!” Millett interjects cheekily. “That’s right!” Sciolino laughs heartily. “Exactly!” Remembering her time in Iran, Sciolino later writes about her adventures with the hijab: “I found the dress code for women particularly onerous.” Forcing women to dress in a certain way also gives the enforcer a sense of power and keeps women off guard. When I turned up at the trial of Gholam-Hosein Karbaschi, then the mayor of Tehran, in the summer of 1998, I was initially denied entry. I was wearing a green head scarf and loose gray pants under a long patchwork tunic covered by a loose jacket with multicolored appliqués. So it was not a question of coverage. It was a question of color. I was wearing too many colors. “Where does it say in the Koran that a woman can’t wear colors?” I asked the security guard blocking my entry. “Where does it even say that a non-Muslim has to dress like this at all?” The guard was not in the mood for a discussion of the Koran. “You can’t go in like that,” he said and moved on to the next person waiting for entry. It took more than an hour for Ali-Reza Shiravi, my escort from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance who was responsible for getting me in, to accomplish the task. A year later, I understood a bit more about why I had been turned away. It was not just the colors. It was also that in some Iranian eyes, I looked bizarre. Once, when I was traveling with Shiravi to a rural area, he and the driver, Mr. Salimi, laughed when I showed up wearing a purple coat and a yellow scarf. “Purple is the worst color you can wear,” Shiravi explained. “It’s like orange. It’s a peasant’s color. Peasants wear a lot of colors and prints inspired by nature with flowers and trees. It doesn’t matter for them whether the colors match or not. City people wear more somber, elegant colors.” “So that day in the courtroom, I looked like a peasant?” I asked. Shiravi and Mr. Salimi burst into howls of laughter.5

It would seem that no matter which way you turn the matter of women’s comportment in the context of the Iranian Revolution, women’s bodies would become subject to unremitting regulation,

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didactic grandstanding, manipulation, and ridicule. It was in response to these pressures that in the March 10 rally at the Ministry of Justice a group of women hit their stride with this playful chant: “Khanum-ha rusari, agha-ha ammameh! ” If the men, their comrades with whom they fought against the Shah, now decree that women don the veil for the cause of national unity, then shouldn’t men too don a turban to maintain the victory of the revolution? I can hear the timbre change in the voices of the women as they belt out the chant a second time, and then again a third time. Their voices sound more militant with each round: “The veil for the women, the turban for the men!”

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Zhornalist Journalist

“We should take pictures of the press and we should also tape them.” Millett turns to the backseat of the car as they approach the protests in front of the Foreign Ministry late on the morning of March 11, 1979. Millett had, with several Iranian feminists and the French feminists Mulard and Boissonnas, invited the foreign journalists to a press conference that afternoon. “Boy, do they get it correct when they know they are being taped.” Keir concurs, “We should get them in the film.” “They’re a factor,” Millett agrees. Millett was of course traveling with a journalist herself. Keir had received a vague promise that Ms. might be interested in “what she may write” for them following their trip, and that was sufficient for the Iranian embassy to issue her papers. Millett had a similar agreement with Ms. magazine, but once her passport was renewed and a visa issued, it was unclear how she should label herself, precisely (see Figure 7). In Iran she would cautiously introduce herself as “an American,” a label she immediately recognized as dangerous for the Iranian women’s movement. She called herself “a friend” of the movement, a feminist, an international feminist, an anti-Shah activist, a member of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual 89

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Freedom in Iran, a college professor (see Figure 3), an anarchist, an outside agitator, a supporter, a historian, an archivist, and a lesbian. She would also regularly assume that the worst slurs were being leveled at her in Persian by men, who felt both threatening and unknown to her: prostitute, spy, counterrevolutionary, reactionary, SAVAK agent, and thief.1 Millett’s identity became the crux of the issue confronting her at the March 11 press conference, and this indeed would become the central question that, left unaddressed, would lead to her expulsion from Iran. Who was she? Why was she in Iran? What became evident with every passing day was that Millett’s unremitting insistence on closing the gap between the press and the voice of the Iranian women, a body whose demands shifted by necessity from day to day in the course of the six days of demonstrations, backed Millett into the position of “spokesperson” for the Iranian women’s movement instead. This wasn’t an altogether unfamiliar place for Millett to land. The role of “figurehead” had been assigned to Millett by the news media in the United States a mere nine years earlier where, as Vicki Hesford shows, Millett’s “uneasy mixture of feminine and masculine physical qualities,” became iconic of the women’s liberation movement. What emerged from this brew of cultural associations, brimming with affect, was a “potentially troubling cultural figure”—“the figure of the “feminist-as-lesbian.”2 At the Foreign Ministry, as Millett was speaking to a member of the foreign press, an Iranian woman approached her and asked in English if Millett could, “with the help of the apparatus that you have over here . . . support our movement . . . we want it to be reflected all over the world.” She begged Millett to “send this message for your women to protect our movement, because we are alone here.” Undistracted by the media men around her, Millett concurred, “and in danger.” In the weeks and years that followed, Millett would take this woman’s charge to heart and would refer to the conversation

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numerous times at press conferences and in the longer interviews she gave in Iran and abroad. But from where Millett stood, the Iranian women’s movement was by no means alone, as her interlocutor had characterized it. It had her support and the support of scores of feminists around the world. More specifically, it was under the ever-watchful eye of her own comrades in France and the United States. At risk for Millett was the movement’s survival and safety, and it was to this end that she insisted that the press and the Iranian women’s movement close the gaping distance that separated them. This repeated insistence on intimacy rather than distance became the source of trouble for Millett and the movement, both. Millett’s name was brought up by a journalist at the Thursday, March 15, 1979, press conference at which Schoenman’s expulsion was announced. This association would immediately target the Iranian women’s movement for harboring a similar unsavory character, namely Millett, a would-be spy and imperialist conspirator. On March 16, 1979, in the lobby of the InterContinental, I hear Keir approaching Millett for a tête-à-tête on the conversation she has just had with a member of the hotel staff, a staff member who Millett refers to as a “komiteh-looking man.” The French feminists had generously paid Millett and Keir’s bill at the hotel’s branch in Paris, but the hotelier is adamant that the two leave immediately. “You act like you own this place!” he loudly objects to Millett’s attempt to hold a press conference in the lobby of the hotel. “He hates us,” Keir draws closer to Millett’s microphone in a whisper: “People like you, saboteurs, espionage.” The French feminist Boissonnas had left for Paris in a hurry after talk of Millett’s expulsion, and her comrade, Mulard, who was upstairs in her hotel room, begged Millett to keep her business out of the press conference. Keir’s advice to Millett was to lie low, stay quiet, and forget about talking to the press regarding her rumored expulsion. But Millett was relentless; in fact, on the tapes she sounds explosive. This is a significant divergence from how she describes

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herself in Going to Iran as she sits in the lobby hiding behind a newspaper. I can hear her complaining to the journalists around her: the hotel charges a dollar for soda crackers in the room, a hundred for a bottle of champagne in the restaurant upstairs, she bemoans. As paying guests they deserve better treatment. As Keir reports on the hotelier’s verbal lashing, Millett draws the Iranian women’s movement even closer: “At this moment I am feminism in a fight they are calling espionage, imperialist provocation or whatever craziness they can get by with—if I can tell my side, the truth has a chance. I have a chance. The women here will have a chance to go on. Rather than be silenced. Because that’s how it might go. Throwing out the foreign females could be the prelude.”3 Millett would eventually decide to lead the group of journalists who were standing around her in the lobby to the periphery of the hotel grounds and, thanking them for their coverage of the women’s protests in the days following her last press conference, give them a rundown of the dangers she sees Iranian women facing on the streets as she herself has experienced them in her participation in the women’s demonstrations. The noise of traffic overwhelms the soundscape as an Iranian woman approaches the men informally gathered around Millett. The woman takes exception to Millett’s claims regarding the dangers facing women, and as a participant in the women’s marches herself, she wonders out loud what Millett has been doing if she is feeling so threatened: “As an Iranian woman I have not been in danger, without any scarf or anything. . . . Maybe you’re doing something that they are threatening you.” Rattled, Millett asks the woman if she has been in the marches, and as the young university employee, who introduces herself as Simin Saidi, begins to answer, Millett interrupts: “Well, maybe if you’re used to it . . . because of the insurrection you’re used to a different level of danger than I am,” Millett reasons, and asks the journalists around her if there are any other questions. “As a

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woman”—Saidi objects, registering that she has just been brushed off—“as a woman, I have some rights to say what’s happening. At this moment there is so [much] publicity against what’s happening. And I was listening to what she’s saying and she says she has been in trouble. She has been in danger. Why? Was she doing something wrong? Maybe. Otherwise why [am I] not in danger? You know, I’ve never been with the chador outside and nobody, so far, has threatened me! I don’t know what she has in mind. . . . I think that if women have troubles in Iran at this time, they have their own right to solve their problems. We don’t need any foreign person to come and solve our problems for us. I don’t think Mrs. Millett can solve Iranian problems.” Saidi concludes, “She has so much problems of her own to solve!” Back in their hotel room, Millett and Keir review this part of the tape again and again, as I listen. Keir mentions that she remembers Saidi from earlier. She had been hanging around the hotel lobby as Keir was putting up her handmade signs announcing Millett’s press conference. It was there that Saidi asked Keir who Kate Millett was. Keir and Millett discuss how the press might juxtapose Millett’s comments with Saidi’s for television, and then how Keir might want to do it for the film she is making, if they could somehow acquire ABC’s video of the press conference. “I’m sure that people put video pictures in the movies. By what means do they do that?” Millett asks. “Well, there must be a printing process so that they could copy video frame by frame onto 35 [mm], 16 [mm], whatever, but that would be a tremendous expense,” Keir explains. She is meticulous: “What we can do is simply project it and film it . . . this is going to be a use of, on film, all kinds of media.” It was nearly impossible for Millett to get her Iran story out into the mainstream, much as she tried following her expulsion. The women’s demonstrations in Iran had come to a halt by the time she had returned to the United States, and the major papers, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, had reported on

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Millett’s deportation for two days after she had left Iran. Still, Millett had more to say: “One thing to expel and persecute a traveler, but to forbid one a voice is still worse. I am entitled to my opinions, particularly when it appears I may be permitted nothing else,” she complains.4 Upon her expulsion, Millett composed an open letter to her civil rights lawyer, Abdolkarim Lahiji, describing how the Iranian government had treated her while she was waiting to get on a plane out of the county.5 She wanted this piece to be published prominently in the United States and believed that what she had to say would have an impact on diplomatic relations and provide much needed protection for the Iranian feminists she had left behind. She felt that it was important that she be heard. On March 30, 1979, Millett finally managed to reach the New York Times editor, Charlotte Curtis, at her desk. I can hear Curtis being, well, curt, with Millett on the other end of the line, smugly tallying all the things she knows about Iran. I take this with a pinch of salt. My headphones are still on, and I’m still listening to their tense standoff, but I decide that I need to check the facts: in 1971 Curtis had been invited to the Shah’s cocktail reception at the exquisitely tiled stucco Bagh-e Eram, the Shah’s borrowed palace for the 2,500 year anniversary of the Persian Empire. There he greeted each of his guests personally, she writes of an evening of magic and wonder, as if “he were in a private salon, switching easily from French to German and Persian to English.”6 So . . . No! Curtis was unambiguous in the phone conversation with Millett. She would have nothing to do with Millett’s piece. Nor did she think it appropriate for Millett to interfere in the “workings of New York Times” when Millett asked her who, if anyone, would be writing the piece on the Iranian women.7 Iranians were out at the polls voting for a referendum on the creation of an Islamic Republic that day, and as far as Curtis was concerned, the Iranian women’s movement at the moment was “out of the news.” “Out of the news?” I hear Millett repeating Curtis’s words, in

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complete dismay. Indeed, the time for Millett’s piece had gone, Curtis told Millett frostily, and no newspaper had the obligation to publish it: “A great many people write statements, and they don’t always get published.” The piece the New York Times would publish on Iranian women later that month would meticulously describe what the interviewees were wearing, make a mockery of their instincts and gestures, pit various classes of Iranian women against one another, and assert the end of the women’s demonstrations. “Not so much as a whisper from the feminist camp,” and as for the movement, well, the term “ ‘Movement’ might be stretching the happening,” writes Gregory Jaynes for the New York Times Magazine on April 22.8 Millett may have been monitoring the foreign press, directing them to listen, to close the sound gap—the gap of fantasy that joins the inside to the outside—to lose their objective distance, so as to lose hold of their patronizing, orientalist fantasies. But if the press was to ever draw close, it was to indulge in a frankly symbiotic relationship with celebrity, even in its avid attention to everyday life. For as Curtis, who was the first woman to have her name listed on the New York Times’ senior masthead, said of her famous compilation of essays, The Rich and Other Atrocities, “just because you understand Keynesian economics doesn’t mean you can’t understand when someone picks up a tea cup.” Reporting was society-writing for Curtis and her colleagues. “The world was changing, and, for Curtis, ‘society’ was the entire human race.”9 As I rewind and listen again to the soundscape of the protests at the Foreign Ministry, where I found Millett reporting on the activities of the Iranian women’s movement to the foreign press on March 11, I now hear another voice in Persian, quietly weaving in with Millett’s: “Farideh, biya goosh kon bebin chi migeh.” As if to ensure that Millett is getting it right there too, an Iranian woman gently calls an English-speaking friend over to listen: “Farideh, come have a listen to what she’s saying.”

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The popular national anthem “Ey Iran” (O Iran) was sung several times in the course of the women’s demonstrations of March 1979. Recognizing that its melodic and emphatic performance set it apart from the slogans of the early demonstrations and sit-ins, Millett was curious about the anthem’s historical roots. Millett heard “Ey Iran” for the first time during the protests of March 12 as women marched from the grounds of Tehran University toward the monument named in honor of the Shah. Referred to today as Borj-e Azadi (Freedom Tower), this striking landmark was erected in 1971 as Shahyad (the Shah’s Memorial). It was designed by the architect Hossein Amanat. Still miles from the monument, the crowd breaks into song in the distant soundscape. A helicopter hovers, and Taraneh, who has been assigned the role of Millett’s “bodyguard” for the march by Millett herself, closes in to remark that protestors used to respond similarly to the Shah’s helicopters in the course of the revolution. Looking onto the crowd, she observes: “During the revolution when we saw . . . helicopters we knew they were from the Shah. So we just hung our hand like that . . . now it’s the same thing,” she giggles.

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“Ah!” Not particularly struck by the women’s physical gesture nor the assertion of military presence overhead by the newly established interim government, Millett asks instead about the song the women were singing. “It’s a very nationalistic song regarding independence,” Taraneh observes, “a historical song, not something new; it was also sung under the Shah.” Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the directing manager of the National Iranian Radio and Television, had recently banned this anthem in national broadcasting. It had been used for three decades during the Shah’s reign to start the early-morning transmission of the radio’s daily broadcasts. Thus, singing the song during the women’s march was itself one of the ways Iranian women were protesting media censorship under the newly formed government. The historian Abbas Amanat (Hossein Amanat’s brother) traces the roots of the surud to a pastoral melody, a Gilani folk song performed in the Dashti mode.1 The song was recorded by the composer Abol-Hasan Saba and transformed by the composer Ruhollah Khaleghi into his signature musiqi-ye melli (national music) in 1946. The composer, Khaleghi, was educated in the Madrese-ye ‘ali-e musiqi (Superior school of music) established by Ali-Naqi Vaziri in 1924, a musical academy that was dedicated to promoting Persian music using notation and the seven dastgah (the principal musical modalities of classical Persian music).2 The lyrics for “Ey Iran” were written by Hosein Golgolab in 1946, and what is striking about the lyrics of the anthem is that it was written entirely in Persian, using no words with Arabic, French, or English derivation. Unlike other national anthems, such as the one written in celebration of the Shah’s reign and the national anthem composed for the Islamic Republic after the revolution, “Ey Iran” neither celebrates nor reveres any particular system of rule, leader, or government. Golgolab is said to have written the lyrics to “Ey Iran” in response to an event to which he was

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a witness. He saw an American soldier harassing an Iranian like himself. Distraught, Golgolab sat down to write an anthem in celebration of his own people and of their culture. While the lyrics to the national anthem under the Pahlavi rule celebrated the Shah of Iran as the “King of Kings,”3 the lyrics to “Ey Iran,” the ones sung by the women marching toward Azadi Square, are expressive of the love of their country and promise their willingness to sacrifice their lives on its behalf: O Iran, o bejeweled land O, your soil is the wellspring of virtues Far from you may the thoughts of evil be May you remain lasting and eternal O enemy, if you are of stone, I am of steel May my life be sacrificed for the pure soil of my motherland Since your love became my calling My thoughts are never far from you4

On the whisper tapes I hear the long cheers of the women marching in the background as Taraneh attempts to explain the historical roots of the anthem to Millett. Sadegh Ghotbzadeh’s friends, likely longtime supporters of the Nahzat-e azadi-e Iran, a prodemocracy organization of which Ghotbzadeh had been a leading member, are there marching close by. I can hear their voices as they layer Taraneh’s. They ask the women around them to please stop singing the anthem. The march continues and protestors break into another chant: Azadi, azadi dar rahesh mijangim! “Freedom, freedom, we will fight on its path!” “Ey Iran” is sung again by the women when I fast-forward the tape to somewhere on the B side. Millett inquires about it again. Thirsty and grateful for the cakes that the men are handing out to the women as they march, Millett searches the crowd for familiar faces. “Everybody we know is here.” Recognizing the translators of her March 8 speech—“Asad is here”—Millett speaks into

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her microphone. “Rezvan . . . both Nasrins.” From the crowd, in Persian, a woman marching close to Millett sighs and complains about her splitting headache. Exhausted and thirsty, Millett reflects on her surroundings: “I’ve seen a lot of people in stocking feet. Everybody’s feet are tired.” Freedom Square is still miles away.

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On Ralph Schoenman, Millett writes, Some of our other friends . . . actually profess to believe he was an “agent,” as the papers called him. And it is under such a rubric that his summary expulsion was explained this morning. . . . Ralph was a provocateur, an enemy of the revolution, a foreign agent and so forth. All this because Ralph has been fearless in criticism and beautifully nervy in exposing certain generals of past Savak ill repute now restored again to power. And also in saying he knew the names of the members of the secret court and would divulge them so they might be publicly responsible for their actions against international law. The executions. In the past week he has put this government on the carpet: challenging it through the Iranian press to prove his allegations were false. The very first question asked of [Amir-]Entezam was in fact in this vein—would certain allegations about recent military appointments be answered that morning? [Amir-]Entezam replies smugly that Ralph’s expelled, a spy and all that. And the next question’s: “And do you also plan to expel the American feminist Kate Millett?” “Yes, we will be taking further action against her and others.” . . . Something like that.

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The mysterious business of being an agent, a provocateur. The magic words of thought crime. I am not too sure what these words mean.1

The order for Schoenman’s expulsion from Iran occurred at the press conference held by the deputy prime minister and interim government spokesperson Amir-Entezam on the same day the announcement of Millett’s imminent deportation was made. While Schoenman was put on the first flight out to London that very morning, the case against Kate Millett would remain unclear for several days hence. Millett met Schoenman on March 7, 1979, in the lobby of the InterContinental, still exasperated by the way things had transpired at the Tudeh Party rally that afternoon. Schoenman himself had given a press conference at the hotel that morning and would attend the press conference that was organized by Millett at the InterContinental four days later (March 11). He told Millett when he met her again, on the grounds of Tehran University as the women gathered for the street demonstrations of March 12, that he was disgusted at the behavior of the foreign press at her press conference. He wished he had intervened. “Don’t let [reporters] bait you about the question of foreigners or Americans. It’s ridiculous. Sixty thousand Iranian students who played that important role in the war against Vietnam and against South Africa. We shouldn’t be intimidated by this.” Schoenman and Millett spoke only briefly as the men and women who had come for the demonstrations debated whether or not to march toward Azadi Square. The reason for the ambivalence that day was quite simple. Members of the newly formed interim government had retracted on the earlier opinion given by Khomeini regarding mandatory veiling and there was now a division forming about whether further demonstrations at this point would hurt the aims of the revolution they had fought for. “A woman explains that last night Iranian television warned women

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against coming,” Millett writes. “Their rights would be respected [by the new government], it was promised—there was no need to come to this demonstration, no need to protest. Everything was already taken care of.”2 The struggle for women’s rights had, as Schoenman mused to Millett that day, already been “defused.” Schoenman asks incisively where all the men are who fought in the insurrection and all the prominent intellectuals. I listen. Nod. “Exactly!” As Bertrand Russell’s former secretary, a sponsor of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran, and a fierce human rights activist in his own right, Schoenman had been involved in the formation of Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal, a tribunal established to try American leaders for their conduct in the Vietnam war. Schoenman’s passport was revoked by the United States government during these trials. In November 1967 he was deported back to the United States by the Bolivian authorities when he traveled to Bolivia to attend the trials of the French mediologist, philosopher, and journalist Régis Debray, best known for his monographs Transmitting Culture and Vie et mort de l’image. In December 1969, Russell too would eventually repudiate his relationship with Schoenman (“a rather rash young man”), removing him from the board of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.3 Schoenman arrived in Iran in December 1978 in the midst of the insurrection against the Shah. His investigations into the Shah’s regime led him to write several exposés on the torture and imprisonment of a number of anti-Shah activists. Schoenman stayed in Iran after the revolution to expose irregularities in activities and human rights violations of the newly formed Iranian government. It was Schoenman’s insistence on transparency that ultimately led to his expulsion by the interim government. On the soundscape of the tapes, Millett and Schoenman have been mistaken for a pair of journalists, and they are approached by an Iranian woman who is obviously outraged and agitated. She

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speaks to them in English: “We got a call from United States that ABC News has shown a film that the cause that Iranian women are fighting for is the veil or not. This is not true. If we hear that again, we are not going to let you to get film from us and to interview us. They better know that. Especially ABC. We are fighting for equal rights with men. And we want to emphasize that. We fought against US imperialism and we are going to do it until US bases in Iran are gone.” Having delivered her ultimatum, the woman takes a breath and continues: “We are going to unite with Ayatollah Khomeini against US imperialism and other foreign powers that try to suppress us!” “Say to them what you said to me,” Schoenman replies firmly, revealing the persistent character of his own convictions. “Don’t boycott ABC. You have to keep coming at them. Exploit them!” When it came to the question of women, Millett would adopt Schoenman’s strategy as her own. Don’t create distance! Make sure they hear you! Get closer! And by all means . . . close the gap! A dangerous proposition. Always is.

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do-Sefr Si-Sad-o-Si-yo Yek 00331

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00331 is the international telephone code for Paris from Iran. Millett would use the sequence of numbers several times to connect with her feminist friends in France during her stay in Iran. The greatest obstacle for her was finding an open line; a combination of infrastructure and third-party eavesdropping made it quite a challenge. The InterContinental had excellent telephone lines and it alone was considered functional for this purpose. On the tapes it’s March 10, just after the Iranian women’s sit-in demonstrations at the Ministry of Justice. The Paris-based American reporter, Elaine Sciolino, makes her first appearance here. The head on Millett’s recorder needs a good clean. I can tell, because everybody’s voice has sped up and this makes them all sound slightly agitated. Sciolino is trying to be helpful, I realize. She tells Millett, Keir, and Mulard about the foreign press who regularly choose the Park Hotel for their stay because of the InterContinental’s association with American imperialism. She prefers the InterContinental, however, “because the phones are so good here.” Operator number 3, she mentions in passing, is especially good at making telephone connections, which sometimes take between three to six hours to make. Operator number 3 apparently likes women, too. The French feminist Claudine Mulard, who has also 104

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been staying at the InterContinental, hadn’t quite caught on to the phone savvy of operator number 3, nor his proclivities. Waking Millett and Keir from a nap in their room at the InterContinental, Boissonnas1 and Mulard report on their phone call to France. It is March 15 on the tapes. “We were just on the phone with Antoinette [Fouque].” Listening, I am always struck by Mulard’s sunny cheerfulness, even when she is complaining. “We have a message from her: ‘Times are really hard, but we love you!’ . . . She told us to tell you this. We also talked about how the Committee [for the Defense of Women’s Rights] is trying to come [and is] excluding Simone de Beauvoir.” A press conference has been called in Paris to announce the dispatch of the French feminist delegation to Tehran. The delegation wants to come to Iran without Beauvoir. “Well, . . . [Beauvoir’s] sick,” observes Millett as she records her conversation with the French women on her tape recorder. “What they told me is that [Simone de Beauvoir] has agreed to be the president of this delegation in absentia, but she has also agreed to preside at a press conference today announcing their departure.” Like Boissonnas and Mulard at the InterContinental, Millett had managed to put a call in to France overnight. She had talked to Claude Servan-Schreiber, the French editor of the feminist magazine F., to let her know that Beauvoir would be welcomed by the feminists in Iran. As for the others in the delegation, she reports on the conversation with Servan-Schreiber, “it may be better to wait a while until this organization [of the Iranian feminists] is strong enough to have an international exchange.” Servan-Schreiber had been working as a European correspondent for the American feminists Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem’s magazine, Ms., in the 1970s. She went on to establish, with Benoît Groult, the French feminist magazine F. in 1978. Servan-Schreiber was the main force behind the feminist delegation and part of the Comité International de Droit des Femmes (CIDF), which had formed in response to the women’s

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demonstrations in Iran. Some would later see the French delegation’s trip to Iran as Servan-Schreiber’s ploy to bring attention to her newly inaugurated magazine. “I could not make ServanSchreiber understand at all,” Millett tells Mulard on the morning of March 15. “The women are all excited now,” Servan-Schreiber had told Millett. And she was not sure she could postpone their trip and generate the same level of excitement about the women’s demonstrations in Iran in two weeks’ time. As I listen, her words strike me as almost intuitive: one can only hang on to the ephemeral thread of a dream for so long before being jolted by the intruding voices of the outside. On the phone to Paris, Millett had explained to ServanSchreiber that in order to be welcomed by the Iranian feminists, the delegation would need to stand back, to be calm, and refrain from pushing matters. “This takes time. . . . It’s like becoming friends with someone,” Millett continues. “But Servan-Schreiber doesn’t listen: ‘Yes, we understand . . . we’ll be calm, we’ll be oriental.’ ” Millett certainly recognized the impulse and grasped the sense of urgency she could hear on the other end of the line: “They think of it as a great adventure.” That was Millett’s first instinct too: the orientalist dream of Persia—the mossy-sheathed roses of her French chanson; the draped Persian rugs and cushioned cafés; a dreamworld, in other words, that never really matched up with the Iran she found once she arrived. Like Servan-Schreiber, whose stereotype of the Asian female seemed equally applicable to the comportment of the Iranian women whose revolutionary movement the French delegation was coming to support, Millett would often lose herself in the time loop of fantasy. Freud would never tire of mentioning this time loop in his work: “the gap between hearing and making sense of what we hear, accounting for it.”2 Lulled as I am by the drift in the conversation from that morning, I am jolted by Mulard’s sudden interruption of Millett’s report on the tapes. She’s fed up: “It’s very strange . . . they are not

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women of struggle.” Indeed, of the eighteen women dispatched to Iran by the CIDF, few were militant activists like Mulard herself. “The other women who are coming, some of them don’t care about Iran at all,” Mulard, the Psych et Po feminist, cringes. “It’s really disgusting!” Better versed in militant activism and sensitive to the power dynamics inherent in class, gender, and racial hierarchies, the American feminists appeared “more cool” in this situation. They had heard from Iranian feminists that they shouldn’t be in such a hurry to get to Iran. “I thought that was very sensitive,” Millett reflects as she tells Mulard and Boissonnas about her conversation with Steinem from France that same night (see Figure 5). The American feminists will “send telegrams and send love. There will be a march on Fifth Avenue in NYC and in twelve cities in the US. Gloria [Steinem] said, ‘We have our visa and our tickets; when it’s ok, if the women [in Iran] want us there, we are happy to come.’ ” Steinem’s response was indeed much more measured. She had called the Egyptian feminist and documentary filmmaker Laila Said 3 to ask if she would join the French delegation to Iran.4 I hear a call coming through on the tapes: a journalist who wants a sound bite, then, immediately, a knock on the door. The announcement of Ralph Schoenman’s expulsion interrupts the conversation that Millett is having with the French feminists that morning as she learns that she too has been considered for expulsion at Amir-Entezam’s press conference. Panic sets in. How is she to respond? Later that evening Millett confides to the Iranian feminist Kateh Vafadari that she needs to “solve the problem between the French women.” It is clear, already before the arrival of the delegation, that the French feminist scene is a hornet’s nest. While Fouque and Beauvoir had ideological differences from the start, Fouque had laughed on the phone with Mulard: “Simone should come. . . . Iranian women want her to come but they don’t want the other women to come. And she’s all ready. She already has a turban.” “The Beauvoir style, her trademark

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signature, was always and everywhere her turban,” wrote the French journalist Gérard Lefort after Beauvoir’s death. “Beauvoir on television, Beauvoir at Élysée Palace, Beauvoir young, Beauvoir old, from the beginnings to our times, not an official portrait, not a personal snapshot, without the turban.”5 “This morning the delegation arrived,” Millett writes from her holding room at Mehrabad Airport as she and Keir wait to be put on a plane after the confirmation of their expulsion on March 19.6 “If our expulsion . . . has not caused the government to withdraw permission for other feminists to enter. If Claude Servan-Schreiber and the others are among those voices we hear now coming into Iran, we have made it, bridged the gap, completed the relay.”7 It’s getting late in the archives. Moments before closing, I come across a copy of Servan-Schreiber’s Iran issue of F. The image of a black-veiled woman fills the cover of the magazine. Her dark veil and kohl-laden eyes form the backdrop to four words printed in bold yellow ink: Nous Sommes Toutes Iraniennes, We Are All Iranians. Inside the issue, Servan-Schreiber headlines the report she has written on the French delegation’s trip to Iran with these words: A cry was raised on the streets by Iranian women: “Freedom!” Hundreds of women from around the world responded: “Solidarity!”

The delegation had indeed arrived safe and sound, but the bridge called “solidarity” was shaky at best. The Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) had served as an umbrella term for feminist activist efforts in France since the early 1970s, when it took its name from the American women’s liberation movement in the wake of the events of May 1968. After the CIDF delegation’s embarrassing failure to accomplish more than a few meetings with leading male government officials in Iran,8 Antoinette Fouque would in October 1979 register the name “MLF” as the trademarked property of her collective Psych et Po. This legal move on the part of Fouque created a controversy

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among the French feminists that would eventually splinter the movement. “If you leave Paris for a couple of months, you need to be briefed on who is on the outs with whom,” observed one activist in Newsweek in 1982.9 Indeed, Fouque had long believed that Beauvoirian feminism had to be surpassed by a notion of liberation that would take into account a fleshy, materialist, and political stance. She thus posited “female genitality” and the “hospitality of the flesh” (childbirth) as “the very paradigm of ethics.”10 In 1981 Beauvoir, turbaned and all, would publicly denounce Antoinette Fouque by opposing her acquisition of MLF—the Movement for the Liberation of Women—as the nomenclature of a single feminist group. “Keeping thousands of women from speaking out by claiming to speak for them is the most revolting form of tyranny,” wrote Beauvoir.11 As I go back and listen to the feminists talk on March 15, 1979, at the InterContinental, it’s clear that solidarity is a fraught term in the French feminist context, and I wonder how anyone possibly imagined extending it to the Iranian women.

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… T H E R E I S O N LY S O U N D, S O U N D T H AT W I L L AT T R A C T T H E PA R T I C L E S OF TIME. — F O R O U G H FA R R O K H Z A D

Millett and Keir left New York on a Sunday, March 4, 1979, with “cans” of 16 mm film, “bags” of film for the still cameras, two tape recorders including a portable one, which would serve as Millett’s “whisper box,” two still cameras, a Bolex film camera, cassette tapes, “more tape, further batteries.”1 None of this equipment was meant to produce an investigative report, a journalist’s view, which, Keir later teased, is essentially “what the photographer saw”—three quarters of an inch by half an inch. Millett and Keir had spent the last of their savings on film and tape, “the means of making the record,” Millett writes. “The hell with the media’s version of reality—a movement is being born in Iran. When ours came into being we were all of us too busy doing it to record it, too busy talking to run a tape recorder, too busy to film.”2 But now, posing as a historian of the international women’s movement, Millett marvels at the possibility and the instantaneity of the document. “It’s fascinating,” she tells one of the Iranian women sitting next to her in the university hallway on March 15. “Now you can make [a] document instantly. Just at the moment. As a historian this is fantastic!” Millett revels in the possibilities 110

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inherent in the recording technology, to be “both the event” and to also have “the long-aspired” capacity to narrate, to “account” for the event—to be, as women and as feminists, “finally independent, self-enclosed.”3 What becomes clear as I listen to the whisper tapes is the extent to which the process of documentation is marred by the novelty and the spectacle of the lightweight technology. This seems counterintuitive for us looking back, of course. Lightweight technology is supposed to make it easier to record with a small crew. But it is the quality of production attributed to the more professional, heavier technology that becomes the object of both envy and awe for Millett, a preoccupation that at times overrides Millett’s presence to the history she is there to record. “We catch sight of the French [women from Des Femmes] shooting a great big beautiful Beaulieu from the top of a car, the sight of women making movies,” writes Millett, admiring the French crew at the street demonstrations to Azadi Square on March 12.4 She is envious too as she observes a group of Italians, “shooting sixteen-millimeter film with a big movie camera, sound sync” inside the grand hall of the Ministry of Justice where women demonstrators gathered on March 10, because without a crew she and Keir had to leave their own 16 mm Eclair camera at home.5 The equipment they had brought with them was already too heavy for Keir to carry alone during the demonstrations, and Millett was concerned about damaging the better equipment. Even so, she wanted to do it all: still, voice, and sound-sync film, and all this on a limited budget. Novelty always distracts, but as lightweight as this recording technology is, it distracts in other ways as well. As I listen to the whisper tapes, batteries run out, tapes need to be turned, recording heads must be cleaned, and film needs to be loaded and reloaded in the midst of debates, demonstrations, marches, and intimate gatherings. These can’t be restaged for the camera. Burdened with “machinery,” Millett and Keir fall behind other demonstrators and need to scramble to catch up “for safety.”6 On the

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soundscape I hear others being pulled away from whatever they have to do to feed the equipment. People lend Millett cassettes when she runs out. Iranian women take off from animated conversations on the grounds of the university and prior to the street demonstration to get batteries. Jon Randall, a reporter for the Washington Post, loans Millett batteries and tape. Youssef Ibrahim, a reporter for the New York Times, does too. The process of recording is frenetic, “loading and shooting continuously,” and “the frenzy of the chants” alongside the frenzy of the recording forces Millett’s retreat from what is right in front of her.7 The soundscape is so manic, in fact, that one wonders if the technology isn’t distracting Millett, distancing her from precisely the things she shouldn’t be missing as the ethnographer and the “historian” of the burgeoning women’s movement as she sees it. Millett wanted to be the eyes and the ears and the voice of the movement. In recording, she wanted to own the movement, but she buckled under the weight of that responsibility. The lightweight technology she carried overextended her senses and made demands that distracted her from the ideas that were foreign, that were hard to grasp, especially those that were hard for her to swallow—those to do with religion. For what Millett hears in the chants is “the fierceness, the valor of the women shouting down Islamic prejudice, the mullahs’ repression.” What she hears is women “beginning the revolution again.” But as I listen, what is present in the auditory unconscious of Millett’s own voice and, too, elusive to Millett herself is the women’s insistence on their movement’s continuity with the Iranian Revolution, their desire to maintain a vision of a nation that is both free and bound to the life of the spirit. On the grounds of Tehran University on March 12, 1979, when Millett meets the journalist and filmmaker Terry Graham, himself a Sufi and a longtime resident in Iran, Graham immediately underscores the international character of the women’s movement and its address to a global patriarchy. He is keenly conscious of the

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Iranian women’s movement as one for which religion speaks, to quote Michel Foucault, “less of the hereafter than of the transfiguration of this world.”8 For the Iranian Revolution, as for the women who were crying out on behalf of freedom all around Millett, the effort was “to lift the fearful weight . . . of the entire world order,” that order that is bearing down on each one of us.9 As such, for Graham the women’s demonstrations as a continuation of the revolution were not a draconian return to Islam but the most modern form of revolt against a global system of injustice, situated as he saw it at the center of a future international federation. Looking on to a group of high school students practicing what sounds like a new revolutionary song, Graham turns to Millett: “I just hope that Tehran will be the center of this kind of internationalism. This is a stage of nations, in a sense, as long as the nations become stepping-stones for higher things. And Iran itself might become a federation. Like what the Soviet Union is in theory, but in actual practice, a union of sub-states. It is interesting,” he reflects, “that it is also Islamic. Because women’s movements in the West have been antireligious. We just don’t want to throw the baby with the bath. It’s really profound, women I’ve found who say, ‘I’m Islamic . . . ’ ” Listening in, I can tell that he has already lost Millett. She is distracted by the tape recorder, fiddles with it, and asks Graham if he wants to hear himself speak on it. Graham complies. I get frustrated, wanting to hear Graham finish his thoughts. But this is one of those moments that elude Millett. Her attention misfires, and she overlooks an opportunity to engage with what might have been one of the most pressing questions for a still-embryonic international women’s movement: how to deal with profound alterity, that chasm between beliefs, experiences, and spirit, even as Millett perceives similarities in the demands that are being forwarded by the women around her. This admittedly is where Millett’s whisper tapes teach me the

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most profound lessons in agnotology, as well. Attending to the space between Millett’s voice and the voices of the Iranian women and men around her, I am reminded of the ways in which a socially constructed lack of knowledge (be it political, religious, or technological) situates our recognition of the things that are in front of us. Always. This is especially true, it seems, in the recognition of those things that seem intuitive but which are in fact strange, distant, unfamiliar, and unrelated to us. The cries of freedom that I hear on the tapes and that attracted a world of women to the Iranian women’s movement speak of a collective quality of freedom that struck a cord, but that simultaneously spoke of ideas beyond the more familiar and intuitive notions of liberation and individualism current among feminists in the late 1970s. Unconscious, these ideas were left unrecognized. And to me, this is crucial. At the heart of the women’s collective demand was the desire for a planetary transformation. On the whisper tapes, the voices of the Iranian women arrive at a resolute will to leap—a willingness to give up the known in order to gain the unknown. In this moment of revolutionary passion, I hear Iranian women courageously take on the militant men with whom they have fought a revolution, an act historically unlike that of any other radicalized women’s group. Veiled and unveiled, the women dare to stand, once again, at the risk of both death and extinction for the freedoms they have fought for and the victory they have celebrated, prematurely perhaps, together with their brothers. The women’s radicalized voices on the tapes speak to me then of a teleopoiesis, of a will to cross into a self none of them could have ever imagined becoming and to do so on behalf of an as-yet-unseen and unpresent future for all: “Azadi na sharghist, na gharbist, jahanist!” While, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued, the logic of neoliberalism in feminism today has collapsed “notions of collectivity into the personal,”10 eroding both power and political agency into acts of consumption, it is this collective leap toward a planetary freedom that has the capacity of reaching—beyond the politicization of the

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personal—toward a quality of social justice that cannot be satiated by the selective logics of consumption. The women’s chant, “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western, it is planetary!” speaks to this, precisely. On March 16, 1979, at the InterContinental, preparing for her one-woman press conference on the rumors of her expulsion from Iran, Millett sings to herself snatches of a song in French, a little chanson about the roses of Isfahan in their mossy sheaths—“Les roses d’Ispahan.” I recognize it as she hums the refrain. Turning to discuss with Keir the plane route she would need take to leave the country and enter the United States as a Canadian, Millett huffs: “Nation-states! How do we evolve beyond this crap?” It may be, as Graham was attempting to convey to Millett only four days earlier, that Iran’s revolt against the global system, an insurrection that Foucault would refer to as perhaps “the most modern and the most insane,” had in mind precisely this evolution of the planet, an evolution of the highest order.11 Millett, of course, wanted to rewind the tape and listen to her own recording. She couldn’t hear the new song.

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A N E X P R E S S I O N O F LO N G I N G I N P E R S I A N S P E A K S LY R I C A L LY O F T H E B LO S S O M I N G O F T H E N E W : “ T H E W O R L D I S F U L L O F Y O U, W H I L S T Y O U R P R O P E R P L A C E I S E M P T Y. ”

March 8, 1979. Tehran woke up to snow and to the news of Khomeini’s decree. The snow made it hard to move around the capital. Iranian women poured onto the streets regardless, carrying umbrellas with handwritten slogans on them, chanting against the imposition of compulsory veiling. Men were also on the streets. But most of them came in support of Khomeini’s decree and occupied the main streets and squares, blocking the women’s procession and chanting the taunt Ya roosari, ya toosari, “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head.” A high school student broke ranks with the rest of the women, shouting in defiance, Dar bahar-e azadi, jay-e azadi khali! “In the spring of freedom, the place of freedom is empty!”1 This was the ur-form of a chant that in turn evolved, as would a meme on social media platforms today.2 As mediating practices connecting protestors, such chants and slogans would be adopted, reused, reworked, and redistributed on handwritten posters and by word of mouth during the Iranian demonstrations of 1978–79, playfully and strategically creating new cultural ideas in response to changing political and social needs. 116

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On Saturday, March 10, a sign at the Ministry of Justice read Dar tulu-e azadi, ja-ye azadi khali, “At the dawn of freedom, the place of freedom is empty.” I hear Millett’s comrade, Bahram, translating the sign for her. Women chanted it en masse in the marble hall that day. Listening in on Millett’s tapes, I can hear it reverberating against the interior walls of the ministry. By March 12 the words of the young high school student took the form of a slogan in defense of women’s civil rights: Dar tulu-ye azadi, jay-e haqq-e zan khali. “At the dawn of freedom, the place of women’s rights is empty.”

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In Persian the word zaher generally finds meaning in relation to the word baten. Contrasted to what is baten—hidden, internal, or true—the zaher is what is apparent, manifest, and evident. Characteristically external, what is zaher is associated with superficiality and as such is often distrusted in the Iranian cultural context. A photograph, for example, is a form of appearance that belongs to the realm of the zaher. “Pictures are powerful,” Millett proclaims from the front seat of the taxi as she accompanies Keir and the two French women from Des Femmes. Driving from the InterContinental to the Foreign Ministry on March 11, 1979, they are, as Millett notes with every passing minute, “late again” for another women’s demonstration. As I listen to the recorded conversation in a mix of French and English, I get the distinct sense that what the women are actually late for is “a picture.” “It’s infuriating! We get abandoned,” Millett tells Boissonas, who has just arrived in Iran to support the Iranian women’s demonstrations on behalf of the militant French feminist collective Psychanalyse et Politique. “We got abandoned for three hours and we missed one of the great demonstrations when women climbed the walls of Tehran University,” Millett rants, remembering March 8. “Oh,

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imagine that photograph! That would make a cover! Mmm . . . mmm . . . Somebody must have taken that photograph!” Mulard had already heard Millett’s recurring lament over the elusive shot. She had arrived from France with her Beaulieu film camera on hand, dressed for a hot spring day in Tehran. It had snowed that day, the women were cold, and being lost in the “sea of incomprehensible Farsi,” Millett and Keir had decided to leave campus with Mulard.1 “We’ll find [the photograph]!” Mulard chimes in from the backseat. Private citizens documented the street protests and the confrontations that occurred between the people and the Shah’s military forces during the revolution only a few months earlier, and Millett was convinced that someone must have taken the shot of the women climbing the gates. “Some amateur, apparently, because I think very few press were there. In the beginning they didn’t even come to our demonstrations at all.” When thousands of Iranian women arrived at Tehran University on March 8, they came for talks that were organized on campus for International Women’s Day. Different groups had published announcements about their programming in the newspapers over the last few weeks (see the Timeline), and the energy was high with excitement. It was snowing outside, and inside, in the halls, the debate around Khomeini’s statement on mandatory veiling and its implications for the upcoming referendum had everyone in its grip. Incomprehensible to Millett because of the language barrier, these debates were the source of Millett’s frustration. By midday, news had arrived on campus that hundreds of women had been turned away from their offices. They had been asked to return home and to show up the next day in their chadors (full-length veils). High school girls and their teachers had been debating Khomeini’s new declaration on compulsory veiling and, too, the recent announcement in the papers on the segregation of the education system, and many had decided to cancel classes altogether. They joined other women who were walking in groups

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toward the university in protest. Men threatened them along the way, shouting derogatory slogans. Hearing that groups of women were heading toward the university, women who had gathered on campus went out to meet them. They found, to their utter frustration, that they had been locked inside the university gates. “Locked with chains. By fanatic Islamic youths,” Millett writes in Going to Iran, “and so they climbed the great iron fences of Tehran University—if we could have seen that, photographed it. For a shot of that! That is the photograph that defines an uprising of women.”2 As women and men gathered again to participate in the great march for women’s rights from Tehran University to Azadi Square on March 12, the fenced walls of the university beckoned Millett: “The gates, maybe we’ll get a picture of the gates. That’s an important symbol,” she says, turning away from the microphone and to Keir. In the absence of the elusive photograph, the gates of Tehran University acquired a monumental value for Millett. Rising up on the not-too-distant soundscape, I hear the voices of women, chanting in unison, Ma enqelab nakardim ta be aghab bargardim! These threshold voices that are a few steps ahead of Millett, voices that have reached the gates of Tehran University, grasp the depth of the moment in spatial and temporal terms. They are aware of the inner, the bateni significance of the present they are shaping. On the threshold of a different world, a world outside the university walls, on target, on time, the women who have reached the gates join in a chant that communicates in Persian what they want the world to know about their present, that moment’s deepest conviction: “We didn’t make a revolution for us to go backwards!” The would-be photograph, as monument to the emergence of the Iranian women’s movement, is washed and decomposed by the depth of these threshold voices whose ever-forward projection has defied the lens of the camera. For Millett, who was committed to the monumentality of the zaher—the appearance, the photograph—the elusive nature of the women’s movement in Iran would become a persistent irritant.

FIGURE 1. Portrait of Kate Millett. Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

FIGURE 2. Kate Millett would often say that she went from being an “unknown sculptor to a media nut in a matter of weeks because of a doctoral thesis.” Millett was in California working on her “Naked Ladies” sculptures when she received the invitation to travel to Iran to speak on International Women’s Day. This photograph of Millett was taken by the accomplished Japanese photographer Michiko Matsumoto in Los Angeles in 1977. “Kate Millett at Women’s Building in L.A. in 1977” © Photograph by Michiko Matsumoto. Printed with permission.

FIGURE 3. Kate Millett’s groundbreaking doctoral thesis, Sexual Politics—or Sex Pol as she affectionately referred to it—a manifesto-like text on women’s liberation, catapulted Millett into the limelight as the icon of feminism. As a professor with a PhD from Columbia University and a virulent anti-Shah activist, Millett would write with derision of universities in the United States—institutions that relegated their faculty to “the status of employees”—and their “slavish and prostituted service to the state” and business community. Referring to the money that American universities were accepting in the 1970s from the Shah of Iran, a monarch whose corruption and repression were well documented by the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran, of which she was a member since 1973, Millett writes that the “last thing we really need is to sell the campus to a foreign potentate” and criticizes American university students for choosing to be docile and apathetic in response. This photograph of Kate Millett was taken by the feminist photographer Ann Pollon at the Barnard Women’s Conference in 1971. Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

FIGURE 4. Millett is here pictured reading a Des Femmes journal, the imprint under which she first published her book Going to Iran on the Iranian women’s demonstrations, in French. Claudine Mulard, who managed Des Femmes’ feminist bookstore in Paris and ran the weekly and monthly newsletters published by the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF), was instrumental in the publication of Going to Iran. Mulard arrived in Tehran on March 8 to join the celebrations on International Women’s Day and met Millett on the grounds of Tehran University. Mulard had initially encountered the American women’s liberation movement in San Diego before moving back to Paris. This photograph of Kate Millett is taken by Jerry Bauer, who is known for his photography of writers, of which his photograph of Samuel Beckett is the most celebrated. Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

FIGURE 5. Kate Millett poses here with other feminist pioneers Ti-Grace Atkinson, Flo Kennedy, and Gloria Steinem in 1977. Steinem (second from right) who was in steady contact with Millett by phone during her visit to Iran, was instrumental in staging solidarity demonstrations in the United States in support of Iranian women in March 1979. It was also Steinem who invited the Egyptian filmmaker and feminist Laila Said to join the delegation of women that traveled from Paris to Tehran on March 19 under the aegis of the Comité International du Droit des Femmes (CIDF) and the leadership of the existentialist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

FIGURE 6. Referred to as the “Karl Marx of women” in 1970, Millett (not pictured) would call herself a “revolutionist.” “A revolution says there is a better way to live.” In an interview with the Toledo Blade on August 24, 1970, Millett would note that the United States is “going full speed to hell and taking everybody else on the planet, too. . . . We must change the way we live politically, economically, socially and how we relate to every body else. [Women as] half the population of the globe [ought to] cut out being white middle-class” in order to liberate themselves. Equating womanhood with other oppressed groups, chiefly blacks and youths, Millett argued that the solidarity of the oppressed would have revolutionary impact. Collet, a close friend of Millett’s, and a member of the Red Brigades in Italy, sent Millett this photograph, which is now tattered and deteriorating in the archives. Second from the right, Millett’s friend is in the long skirt, holding a handbag. The photograph was taken at the Brigades’ March in Italy. Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

FIGURE 7. On Friday, March 2, 1979, Kate Millett exchanged her old passport for a new one. She took her own last name for the first time after separating from the Japanese American sculptor Fumio Yoshimura and applied for a visa to Iran to join Iranian women in celebration of the first International Women’s Day held in Iran in fifty years. Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

FIGURE 8. An avid reader in arts and architecture, Millett’s critique of patriarchy in her seminal book Sexual Politics focused on the works of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Millett traveled to Iran with a duffel bag full of books on Iranian architecture and art, 35 mm film, 16 mm film, batteries, and audiocassettes. Millett’s handwritten note on the back of this photograph, staged in front of the bookshelf in her apartment in the Bowery in New York City, reads, “Taken by Japanese TV.” Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

FIGURE 9. Kate Millett and her partner, the Canadian journalist Sophie Keir, brought $1,200 worth of film and audio equipment to Iran with a plan to make a documentary on the birth of the Iranian women’s movement. This was not Millett’s first documentary film. She made the documentary Three Lives in 1971 with an all-female crew. One of her subjects in the film was her sister Mallory Millett, who later wrote about the horrors that she witnessed inside the women’s liberation movement. Three Lives opened at the Bleecker Street cinema in New York on November 4, 1971. The New York Times called the film “a moving proud, calm, aggressively self-contained documentary feature” about the different life experiences of three women. The French journal Cineaste wrote in 1972 that militant feminists would be disappointed by the lack of an explicit feminist analysis in the film and the absence, altogether, of Millett’s more radical political perspective. Millett is here pictured on the set of Three Lives with Lenore Bode, the camerawoman on the film. This photograph was taken by Lisa Shreve, the photographer and Emmy Awardwinning and Oscar-nominated filmmaker and daughter of one of the subjects of Millett’s film, the chemist Lillian Shreve. Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. © Photograph by Lisa Shreve. Printed with permission.

FIGURE 10. The only feminist documentary film that was made about the women’s demonstrations in Iran was a short, thirteen-minute film produced by Des Femmes and entitled Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Iraniennes, Année Zéro (Liberation movement of Iranian women, year zero). The French Psych et Po feminists Claudine Mulard and Sylviane Rey left Iran on March 18, 1979. Sylvina Boissonnas and Michelle Muller left Iran immediately after the announcement of Millett’s expulsion at Amir-Entezam’s press conference on March 16 with four rolls of 16 mm film, each about twelve minutes in length. The edited film, which was narrated by Mulard, was first screened at La Mutualité shortly after the feminists’ return to Paris. A four-minute clip was broadcast on Antenne 2 (French television) a few weeks later. While the film is the only film imprint of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF), it has not been officially distributed by the movement. The film has found an afterlife at the Centre Audio Visuel Simone de Beauvoir and has virally circulated online since the 2009 postelection uprising in Iran. Two rolls of 35 mm still photographs (a contact sheet of seventy) of the women’s demonstrations of March 1979 remain in the Des Femmes archives. This is one of the photographs taken by the feminist filmmaker Claudine Mulard of the March 12, 1979, women’s demonstrations in Tehran, also known as the Great Women’s March to Azadi Square. Reprinted with permission.

FIGURE 11. High school girls were at the helm of the Iranian women’s demonstrations of March 1979. They were the first to debate the question of mandatory veiling with their school teachers, to cancel classes, and to take their outrage to the streets and squares of Tehran. Mojgan K. is one of the school girls in the short documentary on the women’s demonstrations made by Des Femmes. In her interview with the French feminist Claudine Mulard in the film, Mojgan says that she is participating in the demonstrations because she wants to “live freely, to speak freely, and to write freely” and that her mother feels similarly. Mulard took this photograph during the women’s march to Azadi Square on March 12, 1979. Reprinted with permission. QR Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Iraniennes, Année Zéro (Liberation movement of Iranian women, year zero), film made by Sylvina Boissonnas, Michelle Muller, Sylviane Rey, Claudine Mulard, and Iranian women in Iran and Paris (English subtitles). https://youtu.be/ulJwXHji6f4 or scan QR code.

FIGURE 12. During the street protests in Tehran, young men and high school girls, like Mojgan (see Figure 11), would form a human chain to protect the protestors from harassment during the women’s demonstrations. This photograph was taken in central Tehran on March 10, 1979, during demonstrations for women’s rights and liberties in Iran. Getty Images.

FIGURE 13. Seated here next to Claire Brière-Blanchet (far left), Élisabeth Salvaresi (right), and Benoîte Groult (far right), the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (center right) chaired the Comité International du Droit des Femmes press conference on March 15, 1979, in which she announced the imminent departure of a delegation of eighteen women from Paris to Tehran in support of Iranian women. The delegation was made up of French, Egyptian, Swiss, and Belgian feminists, journalists, and photographers, who were described by the French Libération journalist Claire Brière as “a group of largely upper class and aristocratic women, disinterested in the everyday life of ordinary Iranians.” Laila Said, the Egyptian filmmaker and feminist on the delegation, describes her arrival in Paris to meet the delegation as taking place in the expensive Sixteenth Arrondissement (a Paris neighborhood), surrounded by “high ceilinged tapestried and wood-paneled rooms” strewn with Persian carpets, mahogany bookshelves, and Louis XIV furniture. According to Claudine Mulard, they were clearly “not women of struggle.” Photo by Daniel SIMON/Gamma-Rapho. Getty Images.

FIGURE 14. The Belgian feminist photographer Martine Franck, who took this photograph, established the photo agency Viva (later Vu) with her infamous French partner, “the master of candid photography,” Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom she met in 1966 while she was covering fashion shows in Paris for the New York Times. Franck traveled to Iran with a delegation from the Comité International du Droit des Femmes. The delegation was eager to see the leader at the helm of the Iranian Revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini. And while Beauvoir objected to the meeting (“What the hell do you want to meet Khomeini for?”), a five-minute interview on the status of Iranian women did take place on Wednesday, March 21, 1979. Khomeini is said to have said nothing in response to the delegation’s questions. © Martine Franck/Magnum.

XXI ‘AY N

Eid Festival

The women’s demonstrations that rang through the streets and sidewalks of Tehran with songs and chants on International Women’s Day, and that continued for six days, coincided with the celebrations of the vernal equinox and hence the Persian New Year, the festival of Nowruz (New Day), marking the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. While Nowruz is celebrated as a secular holiday on the spring equinox—March 20 or March 21 (depending on the year)—the celebrations for Nowruz last for well over two weeks. They have their origins in Zoroastrian traditions, drawing on the distinctions between good and evil and the bonds that join humans to the natural environment. Chahar shanbe soori is celebrated on the eve of the last Wednesday before Nowruz. At sunset, after making bonfires, people gather with friends and family to jump over the flames and declare, Sorkhi-ye to az man, zardi-ye man az to! “Let your ruddiness (redness) be mine, and my paleness (yellowness) be yours!” The tradition of jumping over flames is considered a purificatory practice. Chahar shanbe soori is also a time of ghashogh-zani, “spoonbanging.” Traditionally, people dress up in costumes on Chahar

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shanbe soori and go door to door hitting spoons against plates or bowls, receiving treats in return. Chahar shanbe soori is especially auspicious for a particular form of divination in which I have been engaged in this book: falgush. The tradition of falgush instructs that while standing in a dark corner or behind a fence, one listen to the conversations of the passersby with a specific question in mind. To falgush is to interpret what one hears conceptually or symbolically in response to one’s question. The Sofreh ye haft sin is a traditional table set for Nowruz. The table is decorated with seven items beginning with the letter sin (S, or ‫)س‬: sprouts grown in a dish ahead of the new year (Sabzeh); sweet pudding made from wheat germ (Samanu); dried Persian olive  (Senjed ); vinegar (Serke); apple (Sib); garlic (Sir); sumac (Somāq). Other symbolic items often accompany the Haft-sin. They include a mirror, a book of wisdom (such as the poetry of Hafez or Sa’adi), candles, painted eggs, goldfish, coins, hyacinth, and shiriniye eyd, traditional confectioneries. The Ajil-e moshkel-gosha are problem-solving nuts—a mix of nuts and dried fruit passed around to family and friends during the New Year in Iran. It is popularly believed, as we heard in Millett’s report in the Overture, that by making a wish and eating the nuts, one’s problem or one’s wish will be resolved. Eyd didani is a tradition by which one visits family and friends to inaugurate the New Year. The traditional practice prescribes that the young visit the home of the elders. Sabzi polo va mahi is the traditional dish made with fresh green herbs (dill, chives, coriander, parsley, fenugreek, and scallions), herbs for Nowruz. The dish is an herbed polo (rice) and is served with mahi, white fish. Sizdah be dar (translated literally as “thirteen outside”) is celebrated as a day of picnicking outdoors, marking the thirteenth day of the New Year and the end of Nowruz in Iran. It is

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customary for unmarried men and women, especially young girls, to tie the blades of the green sabzeh before discarding it, expressing one’s wish to find a partner. At the end of the picnic, the sabzeh is typically thrown into a nearby stream. It is considered a bad omen to touch someone else’s sabzeh on Sizdah be dar, and it is inauspicious, however beautiful its green blades may be, to bring the sabzeh back home. Millett, Keir, and the French feminists attended the women’s demonstrations at the National Iranian Radio and Television station on the first Chahar shanbe soori celebrated in Iran after the revolution (Tuesday, March 13, 1979). On the university campus two days later, on Thursday, March 15, Millett was offered some Ajil-e moshkel-gosha—a bag of problem-solving nuts—and heartily partook in its ritual eating. While I have had the privilege of divination and the opportunity to falgush by listening to the conversations of the women and men assembled at the television station on the Chahar shanbe soori that inaugurated this first Nowruz after the revolution, I still wonder what Millett’s wish for the Iranian women was on their festival of transformations, as she ate her own bag of problem-solving nuts. I only ponder this because as the women around her are leaving to be with their families to prepare for Nowruz that Thursday evening, what was foremost on Millett’s mind is the press conference in Paris and her own statements to the foreign press on the rumor of her expulsion. What Millett seems completely oblivious to that night, as I listen, is Vafadari’s worry, a concern that she confides to her comrades in Persian. As bewildered as Vafadari is about Millett’s rumored expulsion, and despite the trouble that this has caused for her and the Iranian women’s movement, Vafadari’s main worry is that Khomeini and the interim government will take away the rights of women one by one. Meanwhile, what the press will write about are celebrity troubles.

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That night, I can hear the women coughing and reaching for the bag of problem-solving nuts as Vafadari puts out another cigarette.

XXII GH

Ghazal Ode

“This great disorder in the town is my Beloved’s tangled hair, and it’s my Darling’s curving brow this revolution everywhere.” —Sa’adi 1

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Fallaci

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I H AV E A LW AYS LO O K E D O N D I S O B E D I E N C E TO W A R D T H E O P P R E S S I V E A S T H E O N LY W AY TO USE THE MIRACLE OF HAVING BEEN BORN. — O R I A N A FA L L A C I

The New York Times Magazine describes the provocative Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci as being seated on a carpet, barefooted and enveloped in a chador, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arrived for his interview with her at the Feyzieh Seminary in Qom in September 1979. Six years separated her interview with Khomeini from her fiery interview with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. She was as unrestrained. Clearly taken with her friend Oriana Fallaci’s courage, Millett kept a copy of each of the newspapers in which the two interviews were published. Born in 1929, Oriana Fallaci was renowned for her interviews with world leaders in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Fiercely private herself, her high-profile interviews included a damning interview with Henry Kissinger in Playboy magazine and lengthy and penetrating conversations with Yasser Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Muammar Gaddafi, Vietnam’s brilliant military strategist General Võ Nguyên Giáp, Ariel Sharon, the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, Pakistani prime minister Ali Bhutto, and the Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. In 1973, opening her interview with the Shah of Iran, Fallaci had asked the Shah why he, a man so powerful, a man who had 140

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everything, looked so sad? A stare, oddly, opened her interview with Lech Wałesa in 1981, to which Wałesa reacted with the question, “Why do you look at me that way? “I look at you because you resemble Stalin,” Fallaci had answered. “Has anyone ever told you that you resemble Stalin? I mean physically.” The Italian journalist’s visit to Qom to interview Khomeini accomplished with brilliance the two goals that the women’s delegation of the Comité International du Droit des Femmes (CIDF) under the leadership of Simone de Beauvoir seemingly set for itself. The delegation that came to Iran in support of the women’s protests had decided firstly to visit Qom to interview “the Ayatollah.” And in a supposedly radical gesture, secondly, to arrive in his presence without veils—a show of support for the Iranian women’s movement. The French journalist for the paper Libération, Claire Brière, who was invited to join the delegation because of her previous experience with Iran’s religious class, described her fellow travelers as a group of largely upper-class and aristocratic women. They were wholly disinterested in the everyday life of ordinary Iranians, and like most journalists blinded by celebrity were eager to meet high-ranking members of the Iranian interim government, those monuments to power. True to form, the delegation was divided over the trip to Qom. Brière, who had previously interviewed Khomeini, insisted that the women would need to wear a full chador (full-length veil) in order to visit the leader. Some in the delegation saw this as unnecessary, especially since Iranian women had demonstrated against mandatory veiling only two weeks earlier.1 “It’s not just a question of disrespect, [his people will] kill you!” Brière warned them. This was altogether too complicated to sort out on the ground, so a call went out to CIDF chair, Simone de Beauvoir (see Figure 13), who advised the women not to veil under any circumstance.2 Beauvoir was horrified by the delegation’s attempt to visit Khomeini in the first place. “What the hell do you want to see the ayatollah for?”3

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Four members of the delegation finally traveled to Qom. They were granted a five-minute interview, which they finally decided to attend veiled (see Figure 14). In that brief time span, they confronted Khomeini “with a barrage of questions regarding the status of Iranian women . . . to which he responded . . . with ‘le silence total.’ ”4 The French delegation’s visit to Qom would be remembered as the biggest failure of the group that arrived in Iran on the day of Millett’s deportation. The flair and flavor of Oriana Fallaci’s visit to Qom created an altogether different experience. She visited Iran in September 1979, when much of the dust of the revolution had settled, and she waited in the holy city of Qom for ten days before she was granted an interview with Khomeini. Fallaci opened the interview on the question of freedom and the frightening fanaticism that she had witnessed surrounding Khomeini’s leadership after the revolution: “Many people call you a dictator. . . . Does it sadden you or don’t you care?” Admitting that he was saddened, Khomeini added that he also recognized that this is the stuff of insults “hurled at anyone who opposes the super powers,” sentiments that should be attributed to the mercenaries of the Shah, who say “lots of things,” he mused, referring to himself in third person, “even that Khomeini ordered the breasts of women to be cut off.”5 Fallaci and Khomeini go on to discuss the role of the left in the revolution, “part of the United States’ attempt to sabotage and destroy the revolution,” Khomeini snaps. Applying pressure, Fallaci inquires about his repressions and the will of the people. “Now that’s enough,” Khomeini responds, worn thin by her questions, and again, “I’m tired, that’s enough.” “Tell me,” because Fallaci wasn’t about to relent, “why do you force [women] to hide themselves all bundled up under these uncomfortable, absurd garments. . . . [Women] fought just like the men, were imprisoned and tortured. They too helped make the revolution.”

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Denying the participation of the women’s groups associated with the Fedayeen, the Tudeh, and various leftist and Maoist groups in the revolutionary fervor of the winter of 1978, Khomeini replies: “Women who made the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress, not elegant women all made up like you, who go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a trail of men. The coquettes who put on makeup and go into the street showing off their necks, their hair, their shapes, did not fight against the Shah.” Very much aligned with the sentiments of the Shah on women’s value to society, Khomeini continues: “They never did anything good, not those [women]. They do not know how to be useful, neither socially, nor politically, nor professionally. And this is so because by uncovering themselves they distract men and upset them.” Fallaci was not referring to a piece of cloth, of course, but the condition of segregation into which women were cast. “This is none of your business. Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” As I think about the flow and direction of this interview, I think I would have demurred, having heard Khomeini’s bark. But why? Fallaci is truly a force of nature sitting there on the ground at the Qom seminary; she persists. “That is very kind of you, Imam,” she says, responding to his insults. “And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done.” I am stunned. “At that point,” Fallaci recalls, “it was [Khomeini] who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me.”6 Fallaci’s rhetorical strategies are as keen as her acts of disobedience toward the inhumanity of oppressors. She had joined the Italian antifascist resistance, Giustizia e Libertà, during World War II and lived her entire life as a political activist. That may be why when Khomeini finally stormed out of the room, she wouldn’t stand for the

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nonsense. In a dramatic move, Fallaci called after Khomeini, asking him if he was going to “make pee-pee.” She then staged a lengthy sit-in until Khomeini swore on the Qur’an that he would return to the interview the next day.7 But why would he do that, I ask myself? When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she’d better not even mention the word “chador.” Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on, rewound the tape, and immediately revisited the subject of the Islamic dress. “First [Khomeini] looked at me in astonishment,” Fallaci writes. “Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed [Khomeini’s son] whispered to me, ‘Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.’ ” Fallaci adored the old leader. To her Khomeini resembled the “Moses” that Michelangelo had sculpted.

XXIV Q

Qom A MAN WILL COME OUT FROM QOM AND HE WILL S U M M O N P E O P L E TO T H E R I G H T PAT H . T H E R E W I L L R A L LY TO H I M P E O P L E R E S E M B L I N G PIECES OF IRON, NOT TO BE SHAKEN BY V I O L E N T W I N D S , U N S PA R I N G A N D R E LY I N G O N G O D.

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—HADITH (A RECOLLECTION OF THE PROPHET MOHAMMAD)

One hundred and twenty-five kilometers (seventy-eight miles) southwest of Iran’s political capital, Tehran, the holy city of Qom is known as the religious capital of Iran. It is by far the largest center of Shi’i scholarship and the site of the Shrine of Fatimih Masumih, the daughter of the Seventh Shi’i Imam. Qom is home to four universities. Its most notable seminary, the Howzih-ye Ilmi-ye, has several hundred research centers and educational organizations focused on the social sciences and on religious and theological studies. The holy city is a regional center for the distribution of petroleum and petroleum products. It is situated close to the Sharjah oil fields and not far from an oil refinery located midway between Qom and Tehran. After his arrival at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport from exile in Paris, on the morning of February 1, 1979, Khomeini moved his permanent home to Qom. His move was announced in Iranian national newspapers on February 25 (see Timeline). It was in Qom 145

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that he received visitors at the Feziyeh theological seminary, including of course the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and the French delegation of women from the Comité International du Droit des Femmes. On March 19, 1979, the New York Times reported that Ayatollah Khomeini, “citing an old Persian belief that rulers should be close to their people, had his home phone numbers in the holy city of Qum published in this afternoon’s newspaper. Anyone with a problem, should give him a call, he said.” Millett had already been expelled from Iran and was on a plane heading for Paris. There were no public phones on board.

XXV K

Kooh Mountain

“I have a special relationship with this mountain,” Millett writes about the Alborz Mountains, the range that flanks the city of Tehran. Covered with snow, the mountains delighted Millett. Though far away from the capital, their presence is such that they feel close, so much so that one feels able, with outstretched hand, to reach out and quench one’s thirst with the snow on their slopes. As the women marched from the university to Azadi Square on March 12, 1979, Millett would ponder this. The mountain glistened in the hues of a quip cream at sunset. Millett would talk to the mountain in her mind during her time in Iran, seeking comfort and courage, “communicating with it as a living symbol, as it must have been for so many people [in Iran] so many hundreds of years; the rulers good or bad or changing or falling from favor and a poet or a water carrier or a courtier or a poor woman talked to that mountain.”1 Although sixty-six kilometers (forty-one miles) from the city of Tehran, Mount Damavand can be seen from Tehran in the absence of pollution. Damavand is a volcano and, significantly, the highest in Asia. It is situated in the middle of the Alborz Mountains, which range from the border of Azerbaijan, along the

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western and entire southern coast of the Caspian Sea, and merge with the Aladagh Range in Khorasan. Mount Damavand is also a significant mountain in Iran’s literary tradition and in Persian mythology. Millett may have never recognized this, since there is no trace of the myth on the tapes nor in her written work on Iran. In Persian poetry and literature, Damavand is the symbol of Iran’s resistance against despotic and foreign rule. In the Zoroastrian texts and the religion’s mythology, the three-headed dragon  Azi Dahaka, or Zahak, was chained within the mountain. The Persian poet Abu’l Qasim Ferdowsi, whose sculpture Millett photographed at Tehran University, depicts this in his masterpiece, the Shahnameh. Damavand is thus known as a magical mountain in his epic tale. It is Halloween 2018, the night of magic and divination, of applebobbing and scrying. It is the night we remember the dead, the saints, the martyrs, and all the faithful departed. I am sitting in the “red room,” the living room that my older brother, Srinivas, loved the most in the house that he shared with Ranji and Nachi; the room where he wrote his books in the evenings when I visited. As I open Millett’s Going to Iran, I land on this ode to Ferdowsi— an ode she wrote on International Women’s Day 1979: I love coming upon him this way, having waited so long to meet him, lonely for sculpture and poets, bewildered with quarreling and ill will. How sane he seems, how literary, how unmoved by time; even the snow does not disturb him. Courtier poet of a past distant enough to be myth, culture, treasure, its own inequities now beyond contention; I frame him in my camera, evoking him, imagining him regarding today’s proceedings.2

Of all the things that Millett loved about Iran, or one should say what she imagined “Persia” to be, it was the mountain she embraced with abandon. As she and Keir’s plane took off, Millett’s

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eyes would “caress the mountains,” and in this moment “the heart pulled back to earth.”3 As I listen, Millett’s deep love for the Alborz Mountains always arrives on the tapes as a form of transference or a biomimesis, as if human bodies could be invigorated by the energies of the natural world. Millett as sculptor (see Figure 2) and storyteller would read the majesty and nobility of Iran’s natural monument into the physiognomy of a people who have chosen at every turn to stand against the forces of tyranny.

XXVI

Guruh-ha Women’s Groups

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The Iranian women’s movement was made up of numerous new and old factions, zasmans or groups, that were associated with radical ideological and political mobilizations such as the Tudeh and the Fedayeen. Some of these groups were unfamiliar to Millett, and that caused her to worry about the sectarianism of the Women’s Day celebrations. As Kateh Vafadari explained, her ad hoc Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights initially consisted of twelve women: “Different groups were in our meetings. It wasn’t only that it was just individual women. You see, women’s organizations have started. But they’re very small. You find ten members here, twenty there. They think they must be the only ones who want to build a women’s movement so they organized themselves; they want to know each other.”1 Having been abroad, Vafadari tells Millett on the tapes, she had a sense of what building a women’s organization would take, and what it would take to bring the various women’s groups together under one banner. These groups helped Vafadari find a location for the Women’s Day celebrations and also proposed some of the day’s speakers. As the historian Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi notes, “With the exception of the National Front, the oldest liberal organization in Iran, and small Trotskyist groups, the members of which had 150

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mostly returned to the country from Europe and the United States, Left and liberal parties remained ambivalent about women’s issues. In a manner typical of so many radical political movements of the time, they considered it to be a diversion from the ‘essential’ objectives of the revolution.”2 Thus the majority of the women’s groups operated as “appendixes” to larger political factions with the aim of furthering the anti-imperialist struggle and the larger demand for social justice in Iran. On March 15, with the expulsion looming, Keir would ask one of their Iranian comrades, Nasrin, for help in constructing a list of the women’s groups—interrupting a meandering conversation the Iranian women in the car were having among themselves about being drawn to different disciplinary fields of study while pursuing their lisans (bachelor’s degrees) abroad, and consulting one another about the process of transferring their credits to get a master’s degree in Iran. What could one do with a bachelor’s degree? Could one teach? “Kateh, tell me the names of the groups,” Nasrin calls in Persian to the women in the front seat of the car as they drive to the “other Nasrin’s” office to join the Paris press conference by phone. The latter Nasrin rattles off three names, before she belts out some profanities at a driver who has put his car in reverse: “Bidari-o-, Mobarez-o-, shomaha,” referring in summary terms to the Society for the Reawakening of Women (Sazman-e bidariy-e zanan, also known as the Jamiyat-e bidariy-e zanan); the Revolutionary Union of Militant Women (Etehad-e enghelabiy-e zanan-e mobarez, also known as Jamiyat-e zanan-e mobarez); and “you.” The “you” referred to here was Vafadari’s group of rank-and-file women, who would be for Millett the first and only independent group of feminists in Iran. Much like the group of women’s lawyers, Vafadari’s group remained unattached to larger leftist organizations, which consisted mostly of men. On March 10, turning to her interpreter, Bahram, at the demonstrations at the Ministry of Justice over a booming soundscape

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of hurried translations to French and English for the news organizations standing nearby, Millett asks about one of the speakers: “Bahram, who is this?” “From the Sazman-e mobarez-e zanan, that is, the Jamiyat-e zanan-e mobarez. Organization of the militant women,” Bahram translates. “Oh, I never heard of it. Is it brand-new? Is it Maoist or what?” “Yes! It is Maoist formation!” Bahram attempts to interpret the speaker’s words: “Our struggle is inalienable part of the struggle of the masses in Iran.” “Typical Marxist speaker. She’s a Maoist,” Millett turns to Keir knowingly and then into the microphone as I draw even closer to listen to the words of the speaker. “This is the same group that told us not to come today. Most of the Maoist factions came to the university [yesterday] and declared that today was canceled.” I hear the speaker in the background outlining the demands of the women gathered in the central hall: “We are fighting for freedom, for equality, and for justice for everyone in this country. Without the active participation of women in the revolution, we would not have won the revolution. We have not yet achieved the main mission of the revolution, which is freedom.” Bahram tries to translate the speaker’s words to Millett. But Millett is frustrated and dismissive of the speaker. Distracted, she speaks into her microphone: “Many women are holding up these sad signs that say. . . . What does this sign say, [Bahram]? ‘At the beginning of the revolution, we lose the revolution’? This sign?” “Where, this one, this one?” Bahram looks around. “At the dawn of freedom, we miss freedom!” Millett repeats Bahram’s translation of the sign for the tapes. “A feeling of bitterness of what the revolution has brought them so far,” she reflects. The fear of losing everything they had won in the course of the revolution would lead many leftists to challenge the women’s

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demonstrations. And not without reason: in its only televised report on the women’s demonstrations, the National Iranian Radio and Television station would focus its lenses on the women in this hall who were wearing “fur coats” and “garish glasses,” visually implying that the Shah’s supporters, taghuti-ha (the idolators) and fahash-ha (prostitutes), had a hand in organizing the women’s protests.

XXVII

Lisans Bachelor’s Degree

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Standing in the courtyard of Tehran University on March 12, the morning of the great march, Millett is frustrated. She can’t grasp much of the ongoing debates. She can’t read the handwritten signs that the women are holding up; she can’t chant or sing along with the women; she can’t get the crowd to get off the university grounds and march toward Azadi Square. It is a planned march and she wants the Iranian women around her to “talk it up.” She wants to get on the mic. She wants the women to know that a march “is expected of them” and that “the whole world is looking to them to march.” She can’t. “God, I wish I spoke Persian!” In the background, I can hear a group of men moving past Millett and Keir as Keir changes a reel of film. They are chanting in unison: Daneshgah mahalleh tahsil ast! “The university is a place of study!” Obviously. “Muslim fanatics have just gone by us,” Millett speaks into her microphone, “shouting whatever they shout! ‘If you don’t wear the chador you’re reactionary. Capitalist dog pig, something. . . . Counterrevolutionary!’ ” It hits me as I listen to Millett’s rant how the word for “study”

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in Persian, tahsil, sonically resonates with the word for “simplification,” tashil. I wonder, as a university professor myself, if Millett recognized at some level, unconsciously perhaps, the ways that her visceral response to the Muslim male—a response that was dismissive, disdainful, and fearful—was serving up a predigested version of a very complex reality facing her as a university professor in Iran. Classes are back in session.1

XXVIII

Mard Man

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“Men, men, men everywhere: Men! So many men making it so difficult!” I hear a man complaining to his friend about Millett’s crankiness on the tapes: “I’m trying to protect the women who are here [at the demonstrations] and she keeps asking me why I am a man!” Millett couldn’t bear the sight of the men at the women’s march scheduled for March 12, 1979. “Shhh . . . Shhh . . . Shhh . . . Men arguing so loudly we can’t hear the women speakers. Excuse me! We really don’t need you here,” Millett informs one of them. In the book, the men she sees around her, one “lovely mustache after another,” are comrades, protectors, friends, husbands, lovers, cousins, brothers. “They are leftists, many of them; young, students, intellectuals.” 1 They are, all of them, in their rightful place, on the university grounds. But Millett has no time for them as I hear her shooing them off on the tapes; no interest in knowing them, nor listening to what they might have to add to her understanding of a tumultuous and transformative moment in Iran’s modern history. The great march had been organized to protest recent curtailments of the rights of women and to insist on the revolutionary 156

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promise of freedom. As Kateh Vafadari said to reporters at the press conference that Millett had organized at the InterContinental on March 11, “We all fought together, all the men and the women with all different ideas, all different beliefs—against the tyranny. We threw out the Shah. Today we don’t want anybody to separate us. There is freedom if all the Iranians are free, both men and women.” Khomeini’s March 6 decree on mandatory veiling had been retracted. After the retraction was announced on national television on March 11, many women chose to stay home instead of joining the women’s march. On the morning of March 12, the women who had come to the university were debating this very point. In the dialogues that I can hear layered beneath Millett’s voice, people seem involved in working out in one way or another the exact nature of the women’s demands. This kind of negotiation, as anyone who knows anything about social movements understands, is an essential part of remaining fluid as a movement. It’s one way to avoid what one might call a “tactical freeze.” “Our women freedom fighters have shown that they are made of a substance that will not bend under the pressure of repression and censorship. Men have seen this struggle as important and have shown themselves willing supporters,” a woman on a megaphone shouts out in Persian to a cheering crowd. “The crowd’s being rallied. My translator’s in front of me. There’s a man in between. I can’t get my translations,” Millett mutters to herself. She sounds frustrated. “Excuse me! You’re really in our way. Could you go over someplace else?” Millett turns to the man as he too attempts to listen to the woman with the megaphone. “God, we can’t even attend our own rallies!” Millett complains. In the background a series of conversations is starting up behind Millett. I can hear them faintly as Taraneh, Millett’s translator, summarizes the words of the woman holding the megaphone in front of them: “We have to struggle against all forms of

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censorship.” “Azadan in-ha! Azadan!” a male voice in Persian layers Taraneh’s, who translates the words from the megaphone into English for Millett. “They are free! These women are free!” a man’s voice jolts me as it breaks through the murmur of sounds and voices on the soundscape behind Millett. The woman on the megaphone continues in Persian: “We demand equal pay for the same work for all members of the family (khanevadeh)!” Taraneh translates for Millett into English: “We are not only to fight for our cause, but also demand a real democracy!” The woman continues her speech in Persian. “We will struggle for democracy on behalf of all men and women and against all forms of imperialism!” There are so many voices all speaking simultaneously now. And so much slippage in the translation. Millett seems quite restless for a march, and distracted, too. She interrupts her translator. She tells the Iranian and French women standing around her about the article on the women’s protests on the front page of the New York Times and about the press coverage of the women’s demonstrations on television worldwide. To march is expected of the women, she insists. Millett is, once again, out of step with the voices I hear in her surroundings: “Be sharti ke vagheiyat-ha ro began,” a woman reminds everyone around Millett in Persian. Her voice is concerned: “Only on the condition that they report on the realities here.” The Persian words remain uninterpreted. I hear a man and a woman start an argument on the soundscape. “Who gave who rights that you’re now saying are being taken away? Who gave you the right to denounce [Sadegh] Ghotbzadeh? No, I’m not coming [to march]! At the very least,” he barks, as the woman tries to get a word in, “at the very least, the differences amongst you [demonstrators] should be resolved!” “I wish the men would leave!” Millett interjects, irritated by the heated debate. “This is a women’s demonstration! Why don’t you get out of here? Shhh . . . Shhh!”

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Millett is perceptibly anxious. She wants everyone to get out on the streets: “I hear or imagine the word for ‘march,’ echoing from the field,” Millett writes, recalling these moments of frustration in Going to Iran. She is eager to get the women moving. “I check again with Kateh. . . . Sophie changes film, losing patience with me as her camera assistant; I am too excited, too involved, too busy wishing myself closer to the action. Rahpaymai, the chant rises from the field. The very word.”2 “Kateh! What’s the word for ‘march’ in Persian?” Millett asks. Vafadari’s voice registers on Millett’s cassette: “Rahpaymayi!” A worrisome, ongoing debate is in the background of this exchange. Vafadari recognizes that the debate will have major consequences for the formation of the emerging nation-state, because woven into the conversations some women in their midst are already reifying the system of government yet to be born as “an Islamic Republic,” as they speak. “There’s a group here that says that they don’t want to vote for a republic that the women are a part of,” Vafadari explains, emphasizing that in using this expression the demands of the women’s movement are being presented as a demand for a theocracy. Millett fails to register the urgency and significance of Vafadari’s comments and practices the Persian word for “march” to herself again: “Rah-pay-mayi!” The women around her giggle. “Why don’t we chant rahpaymayi?” Millett asks, ignoring the more consequential debate taking shape in the moment.3 “It’s important that we are more [people here for us] to march!” one of the women responds. The women are aware of the urgency of their promise to march—that much is clear to me as I listen. They want to march. But it is not safe. Instead, as the women wait for their numbers to grow, they engage in layered conversations about the upcoming referendum on the Islamic Republic, a referendum that is only two weeks away. Millett objects: “They say that there are women

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waiting at Shahyad [Azadi Square] too! If we begin marching, more women would join in.” For Millett, with an eye on the foreign press, a march is far more dramatic. “Goftan azadi!” a woman turns to a man in the university courtyard. “They promised freedom!” They had, all of them, fought for it. Men and women, veiled and unveiled. Together. “Don’t talk to him!” Millett intervenes. “It’s important to ignore men. He is never gonna listen. Why waste your time? You’re at a women’s meeting. We don’t speak to men at women’s demonstrations,” Millett insists. Something shifted for Millett in the course of the demonstrations of March 12, 1979 (see Figures 10 and 12). That much is perfectly apparent as I reread the book after rewinding and listening to this section of tapes again. “It is an odd feeling, a happy one, being on a women’s march with men,” she writes in Going to Iran. Once she returned to the United States, Millett’s frustration had clearly receded and she recognized the solidarity between men and women in revolt in Iran as the immense gift that it was. “Men who are endangering themselves, subject to merciless insult for being with us; men who have risked their safety—for they will be the first attacked when it comes.” Millett writes: “No man in America has ever risked life or limb to affirm his belief in women’s freedom, no man in the West, no man in my world before. And seeing them, one has to love them. . . . Men fighting, albeit peacefully, in our behalf, for our cause. For once.”4 It would be for the men to support the women’s demonstrations and for the women to celebrate and salute “their brothers” as comrades who joined them as protectors as they marched: “Durud bar baradar-e mohafez!”  

XXIX N

Nafas Breath B R E AT H I N G I S A F I G H T F O R S PA C E , S PA C E I N S I D E T H E B R E AT H I N G C AV I T I E S A N D S PA C E O U T S I D E A M I D S T T H E B R E AT H I N G W O R L D, INDEED A FIGHT FOR STRENGTH AND E L E M E N TA L S U R V I V A L — W H AT F R A N T Z FA N O N A P T LY C A L L S C O M B AT B R E AT H I N G . — A N D R E A S P H I L I P P O P O U LO S - M I H A LO P O U LO S

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It’s late night in Nasrin’s office on Thursday, March 15, 1979, and the tape reverberates with coughs. It has been cold and snowing; the women have been outside at the demonstrations, alternately discussing, smoking, translating, strategizing, and chanting their slogans. Tomorrow is Friday, and Nowruz draws near. The demonstrations tomorrow at the National Television and Radio station are to support Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. The rumor is that he has been attacked by two women, and the Iranian feminists gathered in Nasrin’s office want to dissociate themselves from this act of violence. The day after he was attacked, March 13, nearly fifteen thousand women gathered outside the television headquarters, mobilizing against Ghotbzadeh’s new policies, which aimed to purge former royalists, women, and leftists from television and radio.2 Millett and Keir were present that day, filming and photographing the protests, along with the French women from Des Femmes. 161

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But the atmosphere was tense. As I listen to them on the tapes, things feel almost threatening. The women seem terrified. Millett’s cab driver dropped her off with Keir at the TV station; he then locked the car door and went out to protest the demonstrators. In Tehran it seemed even the air had lost its revolutionary innocence, affecting the “totality of the atmospheric conditions of the country.” One of the feminists would observe that Nowruz this year didn’t quite “smell like the New Year”; that scent of a blossoming springtime, the scent of renewal, had disappeared. In colonial Algeria, the psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon observed that the colonized resisted such “monopolizing control” through the pulsations of the breath: “There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.”3 On Friday, March 16, 1979, leaving Millett to do her second press conference in Tehran, the Iranian feminists in her company took a trip to a big, beautiful garden outside the city, in Karaj. They took a day off to take a breath of fresh air. “Areh digeh, yek nafasi-ham bekeshim!” The injunction to breathe anew is not just a yogic practice—it is a revolutionary one.

XXX V

Vafadari

The mythic figure of Kateh Vafadari: “There is a Persian lord in her as well as a lady,” writes Millett. “She is one of the most perfect androgynes I have ever seen. She is also utterly determined; not only quick but patient and indomitable. And her optimism is infectious. I find myself persuaded as well as charmed.”1 Kateh Vafadari was a member of the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran, with Millett, and the committee’s secretary in New York while she lived in the United States. As one of the many Iranian feminists who had returned from their university studies abroad to participate in the Iranian Revolution, Vafadari was at the helm of the ad hoc committee that planned the International Women’s Day celebrations to which Millett was invited. Vafadari’s committee later formed the Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights in Iran, which created its first fluid constitution and established its offices in Tehran on Saturday, March 17, 1979, with a contact list of about five hundred women within days of its formation. While, as the historian Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi notes, “millions of Iranian women marched on the streets during the revolutionary movement,”2 it was the courage and determination in Vafadari’s luminous eyes that Millett looked to so as to gauge the 163

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daring, the courage, and the continued strength and safety of the women’s movement in Iran. A perplexing admission for a historian, as Ghamari-Tabrizi also observes, but Millett, a sculptor who had made the spectacular “Naked Ladies” sculptures (see Figure 2) and, in that sense, a physiognomist in her own right, felt that she could read the possibilities of the movement’s future in Vafadari’s mythic figure. Millett confidently looked on as Vafadari’s various tireless interactions and constant collaborations with women’s groups and governing bodies left their marks on her flawless countenance: “I see in Kateh’s eyes, the future: she has met the new government. . . . And it is not only my fate—tangential foreigner—but the chances for a movement of women here, those possibilities clouding over has put out the light in her eyes. I feel this sickening of hope keenly, like a sharp pain as I watch her.”3

XXXI H

Hasht 8

The Persian number 8 is an upside-down V. Millett realized this, coincidentally perhaps, on the evening of March 8, 1979, while dialing the number for Reza Baraheni in Iran. She had finished the phone interview with National Public Radio (NPR)’s Deborah Amos moments earlier. Millett’s phone conversation with Baraheni would mark the conclusion of a long day of activity in Tehran. “I can’t even tell Reza where I am ’cause I never know,” Millett turns to Keir as she prepares for the call. Millett and Keir had spent the last few hours at the Reza Shah Kabir High School, where Millett had delivered her remarks on the occasion of International Women’s Day. Back at the apartment on Amir Abad Avenue, Millett rerecorded her translated remarks on three different cassette tapes, for good measure. It was late, time to clean the equipment and ready the tape recorder and cameras for the next day. “[We’ve] still got a squat toilet and it’s colder than hell in here. It’s snowing outside and the place isn’t heated,” says Millett, taking in her surroundings before taking the tape out to clean the head. Keir, who filmed the women’s gathering earlier in the evening, muses about the visual record that she is making of their trip to Iran as she cleans and stores her own equipment: “What should 165

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we call this movie?” “The Battle of Tehran . . . No, that sounds too much like The Battle of Algiers,” Millett ruminates on the protests—that spark of the “first real” feminist movement in Iran. Keir’s film would have been a monumental record of the movement’s birth. “[How about] Tehran 1, 2, 3, 4?” Keir giggles. The Des Femmes documentary that would eventually receive the title Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Iraniennes, Année Zéro (Liberation movement of Iranian women, year zero) would remain the only feminist film made of the women’s demonstrations (see Figures 10 and 11);1 Keir’s reel from the great march on March 12 would disappear in the chaos of the expulsion. (For video, scan QR code.) The phone rings in the background, interrupting the couple’s meandering conversation as Millett rushes to the phone to talk to “a girl reporter” from NPR. Deborah Amos, a young reporter who had joined NPR in 1977 as a director and producer on the weekend edition of All Things Considered, is on the line. Amos would in time win numerous prestigious prizes for her outstanding coverage of the Middle East. “You already knew I gave a talk in Iran?” Millett asks, surprised as she answers the phone. Amos had already been on the phone with Reza Baraheni but wanted Millett’s read on the day. The American feminist and artist Mildred Thompson, their common friend, had facilitated the connection. “Aha! I hear you fine! Well, there is a little static, huh? It is all the way from Iran. It’s a long ways away. . . . Most people in the world don’t know where I am,” Millett speaks into the phone. At this point she had been holding the line for about ten minutes. She had smoked a couple of cigarettes and given herself a pedicure, waiting for the sound engineers to patch things through the phone lines for a radio interview. “Well, I was at the university of Tehran where a meeting in QR Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Iraniennes, Année Zéro (Liberation movement of Iranian women, year zero), film made by Sylvina Boissonnas, Michelle Muller, Sylviane Rey, Claudine Mulard, and Iranian women in Iran and Paris (French). https:// youtu.be/pNdWM0DVxn4

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celebration of the International Women’s Day was held by a different group, not the one that I pertain to, which is a feminist group. This other group is a Maoist group and the meeting was filled to capacity. Hundreds and hundreds of people standing outside. It’s snowing in Tehran today, and tonight again. Then came a group of fanatic Muslim men, shouting into the university in columns like soldiers, shouting, ‘If you don’t wear the chador’—that’s the veil—‘you are counterrevolutionary.’ Meanwhile an enormous number of women left the university of Tehran, fifteen thousands, these are grassroots women, nobody organized them, nobody organized this march, and they marched to . . . Khomeini’s central committee, and the guns were turned against them, but they were fired in the air; buses were put in their path so that they could not get to the ministry, and they were finally dispersed. “Then at five o’clock we had the first enormous real feminist meeting that Iran has ever had in its two millennium-and-a-half history. And we had this at a girl’s school on France Avenue, the street of the French embassy. About two or three thousand people, and this was the one I spoke at. And this meeting is the inauguration of a real women’s movement in Iran. Tomorrow there is another big gathering at the university of Tehran and on Saturday there will be a big sit-down strike at the Ministry of Justice. This is sort of kicked off by the International Women’s Day and the few feminists here trying to organize women against the repression coming down on them, but it was particularly inaugurated by Khomeini’s two unfortunate pronouncements: one this morning that women could not go outside without the chador, the veil, and second that abortion had no place in Islam. Women see everything they fought to gain in the revolution and in the overthrow of the Shah as put in enormous jeopardy. . . . The overthrow of the Shah was participated in by women in great measure. These women are not about to put up with this, the loss of their freedom.” Millett delivered a good two paragraphs’ worth of sound bites

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on the events that had taken place for the March 8 celebration in the past seventy-two hours, but the static on the line and the quality of the sound had apparently diminished the value of the interview for radio. The NPR production team suggested that Millett call them from Baraheni’s phone line, or maybe they could just use his interview instead. “It’s a woman’s movement,” Millett reels. “Letting a man who wasn’t even there describe it! I really resent [that].” Millett objects, “He’s a good friend of mine, but I resent it.” Understandably. Baraheni had not spent the 8th in the company of Iranian feminists as Millett had. His interview, which was ultimately broadcast on NPR, was at best skeletal when it came to the women’s protests. Millett had met the writer and activist Reza Baraheni through her own activist circles in New York and in particular through the work she had done with the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI). Best known for his 1977 book The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran, Baraheni was a political prisoner under the Shah’s regime and was the main source for Amnesty International’s damning 1975 report on “25,000– 100,000 political prisoners” in the Shah’s prisons.2 The Red Cross would find a total of three thousand in 1976. Baraheni’s writing and media campaigns in the United States and Canada were significant in turning international public opinion against the Shah. “Reza has been able to organize them at PEN, the New York Review of Books crowd, the literary politicos, Arthur Miller, Kurt Vonnegut. Doctorow wrote a splendid introduction to the book Reza has published. As a writer, I’ve been much less successful here,” Millett admits in the book. “The only thing I ever published was an essay on the collusion of the American universities with the Shah in accepting the enormous grants he was offering them (see Figure 3), but the reason I wrote it is the same one that caused me to urge our academies to have nothing to do with this

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largess—torture.”3 For the pacifist, the only way to confront the Shah’s police state was through the media: And then one day, after all our plodding, some six years of it in Caifi, we began to feel the earth move. We even hoped we had helped to bring it about. That in informing the West through the universities and through publications and television and creating a very different image of the Shah from that which the media here had fostered for years in virtual collusion with our own Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in planting a dictatorship—in airing all this we had made a little difference.4

When Terry Graham ran into Millett at Tehran University on March 12, he was convinced of the efficacy of Baraheni’s efforts against the Shah. “I think his contribution is almost as great as that of Khomeini’s with respect to making people aware of [the independence of the Iranian Revolution] and protecting it [against accusations of its links to imperialism].” Having returned to Iran after years in exile, Baraheni wrote in one of the national newspapers that the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran was the promise of “a permanent and deep democracy in Iran.” His rhetoric was utopic: “Poverty, repression, bankruptcy, hopelessness and capitalist greed” would end and Iran would be saved from economic chaos and bad governmental planning. None of this proselytizing on behalf of Khomeini helped Baraheni’s case, however. He too had been subject to Khomeini’s agnotology. Baraheni would be imprisoned by Khomeini’s regime within two years of this statement and, once released under international pressure in 1982, would be fired from the university under charges that he had engaged in counterrevolutionary activity on campus. “Good God! Do you know that this is in Persian?” Millett exclaims to Keir as she approaches the phone to dial Baraheni’s number, then whispering to herself, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,” as she

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counts the numbers along the dial. Millett’s tape recorder registers the dial swinging all the way back in place and Millett’s whispered count for the next number: “8 ... 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... I’m getting good at it! Well, it’s funny they don’t use Arabic numbers. It’s supposed to be a great achievement.” Arabic numerals, it would seem, are the very numbers that are used on phones in Iran and, incidentally, in America. Imagine what it would be like if we were still using Roman numerals! Be that as it may, Millett reportedly used code on phone calls from Iran, because she believed that they were bugged. William (Bill) H. Sullivan, the American ambassador in Tehran, would confirm this later, saying that his own classified reports to the United States were intercepted and published verbatim on the pages of the New York Times almost immediately.5 At the embassy he stopped sending cables altogether and would use a secure phone line until the end of his term in Iran. Millett took a different approach, weaving in children’s tales— plays, one could call them. “We’ll be arriving with the ladies of Paris, we hope,” I hear her say, as she practices her call with Keir in their hotel room. The windows are opened to the snowcapped mountains in the distance. It is around 6:30 p.m. on March 16, after a full day of work. Millett and Keir have been left on their own at the InterContinental, and if I were to take the temperature, I’d say that they are quite bored. Millett attempts a theatrical rendition of her expulsion as she moves her cassette player, which has been next to the radio for about ten minutes, and places it in the middle of the table. Keir’s voice chimes in: “We’re trying to prevent the curtain call.” “That was their big plea when they spoke to the Kingpins the other day,” Millett giggles, and the ice clinks in her glass. The two of them burst into laughter. “That this is a renowned world author and you cannot treat them like you treat the scribbled people.”

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“There is one problem, though,” Keir interjects, still amused. “Where the organization we might gather around us . . . that is, the movement, might just be made up of two- and threeyear-olds.” I find this entire sequence on the tapes sweet. Trapped in a hotel in a foreign country, the two of them are like kids at play, distracting themselves from the dark clouds forming above them and bursting into peals of laughter. In her interview with People magazine, Millett claimed that in Iran she would also use Roman numerals as part of her code—the right-side-up V for 5, for example. But listening in on this long interview that Millett gave immediately after she landed in Paris, I register the confusion the numerals generate. In Persian, the upside-down V is the number 8. The right-side-up V is the number 7. But then the number 5 in Persian is an upside-down heart. With this colorful yarn of numerals and codes I can see how the French feminists would get the impression that their intervention in the women’s situation in Iran was both urgent and imperative.6

XXXII

Yavash Slowly

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The reporter and former Paris Bureau chief of the New York Times, Elaine Sciolino, was the first to introduce the word yavash—slow or slowly—into Millett’s vocabulary, a good word to use in traffic, in large crowds, and at the women’s demonstrations. She introduced this word along with a slew of other suggestions that she hoped would help secure Millett’s safety in Iran. Millett, Mulard, and Keir had met with Sciolino, then reporter for Newsweek, at the Hotel InterContinental on March 10, 1979, and Millett took great pleasure in “turning the tables” on the journalist. She recorded Sciolino talking about the two faces of the Iranian government, “the religious and the secular,” as Millett notes, recording the names of the major players of Iran’s provisional government for posterity: “Ghotbzadeh, Yazdi, Entezam [sic], Bazargan.”1 The Iranian women’s movement had taken its protests to the Ministry of Justice that day and the foreign crew of international journalists and activists had gathered at the InterContinental to reset and refresh. “The island of the Intercontinental,” Millett recalls the hotel in Going to Iran, still serving French wine, phones that reach all over the world, room service in a country running out of food. It is said that large shipments 172

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of frozen meat have been left to thaw and rot because they were not butchered under religiously correct conditions. . . . There will soon be no more French wine, only Persian and the commonest bottle will be sold for thirty dollars. The Intercontinental is a den of thieves and spies and pirates—you can get a drink there and a bath and talk American.2

Newsweek had rented out two rooms for Sciolino, who settled in for four weeks before Millett’s arrival in Iran. She had arrived on Khomeini’s plane from Paris on February 1, 1979. Sciolino, Millett writes, is “celebrating, ecstatic. None of [the foreign journalists] can bear [Iran] for more than a few weeks.”3 By her own count, Sciolino had been the first American and the first female journalist to interview Khomeini. She had interviewed him in Paris and had witnessed the swift transformation of his character from spiritual leader to politician as he arrived in Iran after years of exile. “I felt much more kindly towards him in Paris,” Sciolino confesses on the tapes. “He would go up to the point of calling for a holy war and then he would pull back. He really knew how to manipulate people,” she recalls. “But you never got a sense, a specific sense, of what was going to happen. Here. That there was going to be this sort of turnaround,” referring to Khomeini’s veiling decree that week. “Portraits and cameos of people in power,” writes Millett, a bit restless with journalists and their endless fascination with celebrity. As I listen, I get the distinct sense that Sciolino was attempting to impress something beyond such portraits on Millett. First off, in seeing the shift in Khomeini’s behavior, Sciolino was noting a tactic common in Shi’i leadership, a technique Khomeini would only later admit to having used during the revolution. He was engaging in khod’eh, a form of permitted trickery in speech by which he would qualify every pledge using phrases such as “in accordance with Islam” or “on the basis of the Qur’an.” His aim? To disarm and destroy, in his own words, “the enemies of Islam.”

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His repeated assurances regarding the freedom of the press, and the promise that he would uphold the equality of women and men under his leadership, were among such khod’eh. He had years earlier criticized the Shah for being a kafir, “an unbeliever,” for his liberal assertions on such matters. Few took the time to heed Khomeini’s qualifications on these promises for the future. And over time, “various political factions began to consider Khomeini as one of their own,” writes the Kayhan editor, Amir Taheri.4 Sciolino’s remarks to Millett were also attempts on her part to introduce other players to Millett, other classes of women, people from other strata of Iranian society; for example, the possibility of visiting Khomeini’s thirty-eight-year-old daughter, whom Sciolino had met in Qom. Millett might benefit from understanding her religious take on the question of women. “She’s lovely,” Sciolino insists, as Millett records her voice. “She’s a friendly, open woman. Unlike her father, who is extremely cold.” Sciolino suggests that Millett may also benefit from a visit to the central komiteh, where she would meet the women who come to the newly formed institutions of the interim period with ordinary grievances about the destruction of their properties and complaints about their men leaving them, divorce, and so on. She would, perhaps, be interested in meeting Bazargan’s thirty-twoyear-old daughter, religious and highly educated, or his wife, who speaks French and who would certainly make herself available. These women have largely different class experiences from those of the women Millett is meeting at the university, Sciolino observes. Other sections, other strata of society. Millett, though, brushes past Sciolino’s suggestions. She talks about the veil as endemic to the East and the divorce laws that allow Muslim men to divorce women without much cost or consequence, about abortion, polygamy, and the possibility of its rise with the recent abrogation of the 1967 Family Protection Act. Sciolino interjects that it might be interesting to go to AmirEntezam’s press conferences, held on Sundays, Tuesdays, and

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Thursdays.5 He’s the deputy prime minister and only answers questions in Persian, she emphasizes. “So bring an interpreter.” “Press conferences—Entezam [sic] gives two a week,” writes Millett.6 Even when she returns to her tapes to write Going to Iran, Millett is done with listening to reporters and to those “factories of misinformation they are working for,” a term Millett uses to describe their newspapers—institutions wholly disinterested in women’s issues. To them Iran is just an oil story: “Press conferences. . . . I sometimes get the impression that these are the only times the press emerge from the hotel. Until our demonstrations disturbed their peace, their coffee in bed, their secretaries and translators and loathing of the place. Their homesickness. They are prisoners of a hotel, fancy but tedious electrical glass box.”7 The university represented the epicenter of the women’s movement for Millett—its vanguard. Every day, new strata joined the movement: the nurses, the office workers, high school students. “It goes lower and lower every day,” she observes, countering Sciolino’s suggestion that she’s not seeing a very large segment of the Iranian population at the university. I feel my own frustration rising as I listen in on this conversation. The headphones start feeling hot and tight. They cramp my ears. I want to slow this conversation down. It is still early on in the women’s demonstration. I want to focus Millett and Sciolino in on the solidarity and collaborations that I can hear so clearly everywhere on the tapes: the collectivity of the women, the solidarity between their various groups, the women’s solidarity with the men. This kind of collective engagement, this solidarity, is so rare in my neoliberal universe as I listen to the tapes forty years later. As far as I can tell, as I work my way through the documents of the period, many of the “strata” Millett is referring to were organizing themselves. They weren’t being organized by the intellectuals. They were organizing for several months during the

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course of the revolution, some coming together actively every week for five to six months before the insurrection. When they met, they met to discuss the laws pertaining to women and to their families and the implication of these laws for their rights. The weekly meetings organized by women lawyers, for example, included nurses and housewives, educated women, women who had only studied up to the sixth grade, women who veiled and women who didn’t. Various women’s groups, including the Jamiyat-e zanan-e mobarez, the Organization of the Militant Women, for example, were embracing women from all walks of life, recognizing that because of the large numbers of women joining them, they had to dissociate themselves from the various ideological and political factions from which they had initially derived, among these the communist party and other leftist and Maoist groups.8 They had fought the Shah in solidarity with men. Men and women, both, had sacrificed their lives for a freedom that was suddenly elusive. These women had fought and, importantly, won a revolution, together. As Millett approaches the gates of the university on March 12, 1979, in the march toward Azadi Square, a vast soundscape crowds my headphones again; voices, chants, and conversations fill in as I listen. Referring to the slaughter of hundreds of protestors by the Shah during the course of the revolution, the women cry out, “Zan-o-mard shahid dadand, har do bayad azad bashand!” Their powerful voices surge through me: “Women and men both gave martyrs, they should both be free!” I rewind and switch my focus back on Millett. She seems distracted. She wants to make sure that she and Keir have a photograph of the university walls. “The walls of this university like the walls of Columbia [University], oh wow! It’s been years [since] I’ve seen a university really alive like this one.” The men standing outside the university gates are also a distraction. Millett is worried

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and fearful of them. Her picture has been in the national paper, Kayhan, and it is the cause of great anxiety. “I should stay a little way away from the edge [of the march] because my photograph was in the paper,” she says to her translator, Taraneh. “Many people recognize me. The bad people can recognize me too now. The fanatics.” Taraneh tries to reassure Millett that nothing will happen to her, as another chant rises and overwhelms her voice in my ears. The women salute the men who walk alongside them as protectors: “Doorood bar baradar-e mohafez!” And then, turning to the men who are standing outside the university gates, their youthful voices confidently challenge the men to join them, to arise and claim their own freedom. To march shoulder to shoulder with them, again: Baradar rooh-e mobarez-at ko? “Brother, where is your fighting spirit?” “The men, too, are forming a chain to protect us. It’s very kind. . . . Now we have exited from the gate,” Millett reports. “This particular courtyard is always full of fanatic Muslims. Now we are out in the big world outside the university.” Her voice, obviously anxious, continues: “There are a lot more of them now than there are of us. You have to slow it down . . . don’t hurry!” “Run! Run!” someone shouts out in Persian as I listen. Frustrated, Millett grumbles, judging the women and men around her, her comrades. “This is stupid! It looks like you are escaping! You should show confidence when you march. Slow it down!” “[They’re] inexperienced,” Millett dismisses them, and then observes the full course of the march: “and no walkie-talkie and no marshals.” As I listen to the soundscape again, I hear both women and men insisting that the protestors catch up: “Hurry! Hurry!” a voice chimes in. “What?” I catch a cheeky female voice laughing in Persian, and it almost feels as if I can see the glitter in her eyes. “Are they serving lunch?” The women around Millett all know that the public squares are

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unsafe. They have confidently brought down the Shah, together, right alongside the men. With months of demonstrations under their belt, they know very well what to do. They know when to hurry it along . . . and when to slow it down. They know when to run and when to go yavash yavash.

CODA

Three days passed between the mention of Millett’s name at AmirEntezam’s press conference on Thursday, March 15, 1979, and the morning of Sunday, March 18, when she was picked up and taken to the airport for deportation. While this lag admittedly stoked Millett’s anxieties, making her increasingly worried about the possibility of having to pay for the cost of two new plane tickets with money she did not have, the delay also gave Millett and Keir ample opportunity to distribute Millett’s tapes and Keir’s films among various foreign reporters and journalists in Tehran. It was easy for foreign correspondents to carry these lighter media out of the country on Millett’s behalf. Everything but Keir’s 16 mm film reel of the women’s march to Azadi Square arrived in New York intact. “Did you know that you are going to be expelled from Iran?” I hear Dicky, a reporter from Reuters, interrupting Millett’s conversation with Mulard in her room on March 15. “Like being hit with a crowbar,” Millett writes, recalling the phone call from that morning in Going to Iran. “The thunderous surprise and then the chilling fear. I feel cold. And sick. The news of a death. A catastrophe. Fatality of a divorce, a lover’s betrayal.”1 As I listen to the timbre of Millett’s voice on the tapes, I’m impressed by the 179

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calmness with which she receives the rumor of her deportation. Minutes later, I hear a knock on the door. Another reporter, just back from Amir-Entezam’s press conference; he wants a sound bite: “Do you have anything to tell the press?” “Well,” Keir intervenes, protective of Millett, “ ‘Goodbye!’ might be appropriate.” “Maybe we get to go to France!” Millett leans into her microphone with a delayed reaction. “This government’s done expelled Katie-legs? Jesus! Katie-legs is shaky legs right now!” Before the interruptions and the intrusion of these voices from the exterior on the group’s dream of revolutionary adventure, Keir had begun discussing with Mulard the possibility of sending her film reels to Paris with her to have the film developed there. Mulard had not arrived in time for the protests at the Ministry of Justice, so those particular reels would be of special interest to her. “Some of it may be terrible, some of it you might be able to use,” Keir confides to Mulard. As I rewind and listen to the recordings of that day and turn to the following day, March 16, to listen to Keir as she meticulously catalogues the tapes and her film rolls; and as I take in the muted sounds of Mulard ripping up all the papers documenting the Iranian women’s demonstrations and then listen to the fury in the tone of the hotelier as he talks about the sudden departure of the tall French redhead, Sylvina Boissonnas, I can only imagine the kind of terror that ensued. The plan to send some of the 16 mm reels home with the French feminists must have been abandoned. Because of the personal and professional character of the whisper tapes and of her notebooks, Millett would insist that she carry these on her. The Iranian feminist, Nasrin, and the Swiss feminist filmmaker, Carole Roussopoulos, who had just arrived in Iran, made two separate media drops at the Park Hotel, however. Most of the foreign journalists and the CIDF delegation that would

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soon arrive from Paris would take up residence at the Park Hotel in the days that followed. The distribution of Millett’s various media happened there, and the whisper tapes left Iran with the foreign press. On March 18, one of the men who had come to the InterContinental to pick Millett up for deportation handed her an envelope. “A tape cassette. The evidence against us presumably. My blood freezes . . . they have a document,” Millett writes. That monument to what Millett saw as the nascent women’s movement in Iran, that “instant document” of the voice of the first twentieth-century feminists celebrating International Women’s Day in Iran had become “a display, an exhibit for court. . . . Proof,” Millett writes, “that they have heard all, seen all as well as eavesdropped and followed? Did they bug the room? Stolen our words, our minds? . . . It is labeled ‘Antoinette’s message.’ How did they come by that? I had loaned it to Claudine [Mulard] to transcribe it for her reports, to translate back into French, since it was first given to me in English over the phone from Paris to my studio in New York. We have come full circle. The joyousness with which that message was given to me to convey to Iranian women, a Frenchwoman and an American, two international feminists laughing and delighted and composing a manifesto of freedom, a greeting and congratulations to our sisters here, beginning a new movement of women, a movement that in so few days would become an avalanche. And then . . . a man holding that tape out to me in triumph, proof that I was captured. Proof, it seems, if I understand him, that my crime is established. Though never named. Five men stand around us. We are taken. The jig is up.2

Millett eventually deposited the whisper tapes at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, in 2002, and they make up part of a collection of documents associated with the feminist movement in the archives of Duke University. I have

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by now listened to all the cassette tapes that Millett recorded in the days before and the years after her trip to Iran: to her press conferences in Paris, in Rome, and in New York after the expulsion; to the tape that was inside the answering machine in her studio on the Lower East Side while Millett was abroad, the one that her friend, the feminist photographer Ann Polon, would rewind and listen to to take down and deliver messages to Millett from publishers, journalists, concerned friends, and family. I have also listened in on Millett’s always very tense conversations with various potential publishers once she returned to New York, and to her exchanges with news editors. I have listened especially carefully to the conversations she had with them about her Iran writings. This accounts for over ninety hours of tape, and in all of these hours of sound I cannot locate the one tape that would approximate “Antoinette’s message.” I inquire with the collection archivists Kelly Wooten and Laura Micham. They can’t find it either. Claudine Mulard laughs on the phone from Los Angeles when I ask her about the tape on a Sunday afternoon: “There’s a lesson here, you know! You shouldn’t be carrying a tape that has the word ‘message’ printed on it when you’re traveling in a foreign country!” What I do find, as I listen, rewind, and turn the whisper tapes from side A to B and back again, is a partially garbled version of Millett’s address to the Iranian women on March 8 and an awkward conversation with the French Psych et Po feminist and MLF leader Antoinette Fouque, who promises but obviously fails to meet Millett in Iran. “Peut-être we rendez-vous? C’est marvelious! Fantastique! Faire une aventure! Le temps révolution est aventure,” Millett fumbles, mixing her English and French. “Maybe we’ll meet up? How marvelous! Fantastic! Have an adventure [together]! The time of revolution is an adventure.” I can hear the excitement in Millett’s voice just hours before her departure to Tehran. Fouque laughs on the other end of the line and agrees, “Oui!”

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Has Antoinette just delivered her greetings to the Iranian women for International Women’s Day? I rewind and listen to the two feminists again, transcribe their words on my laptop, and play the tape over again. It hardly sounds like the kind of conversation where an “Antoinette’s message” would have taken shape. “Ah, je t’aime, Antoinette,” Millett says sweetly of her love for her French feminist collaborator, adding in English that she looks forward to seeing Fouque in Iran, “very much.” I am amused by the exchange, brief as it is, because as I listen to Millett’s deep voice, I hear her affect an odd French accent as she speaks with Fouque in English. Millett’s French accent on her English sounds quite different, less playful perhaps, than the “make-believe Persian” one she uses when she speaks English to the Iranian women. The message that Millett delivered on behalf of the international feminists on March 8 would embrace the tiers-mondisme (third-worldism) of the French intellectual class of the 1970s. It declared to the Iranian women that the hopes of women everywhere rested with them as they arose to claim their freedom; that they were loved and admired by women everywhere and hailed for their courage at a time of danger. That may very well have been “Antoinette’s message,” but on the day that Millett got on the plane to Tehran from New York City, I hear her on the phone telling her friends that she is also taking messages from the American and French feminists Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, and the Italian feminists, too. I press Play to listen to Millett’s greetings and to the powerful Persian translation of her words read by an unnamed, unknown Iranian feminist, a “literature student,”3 armed with the courage and conviction that a polished feminist like Kateh Vafadari would carry in that large gathering of women at a high school near the French embassy on International Women’s Day. “Patriarchy is the oldest and most fundamental of human institutions

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of un-freedom,” Millett begins her speech, true to form, and the flood of revolutionary fervor suddenly overwhelms my senses as I take in the palpable excitement of the women. We [women] were the first properties, the first holy war [which] ended in the . . . defeat of the matriarchy, [in] the erasure of the great goddess, the substitution of male gods, prophets, priests. Only men could speak to god, and god was a male and behind him all social institutions aligned, masculine armies, police and police states, masculine law. . . . We have in this century and throughout the world created and achieved reform through feminism. We will in the next decades see revolution. With the awakening of women in the great civilization of Islam, the Arab world, India, women all through the globe uniting. This is your mission. You will be the first in Islam to arise. . . . You will create a counterforce to reaction. You will make this uprising a gentle revolution. The tyrant is gone. Put no new tyrant in his place; no new tyranny of men over women. Seize this moment of revolutionary unrest. There is no revolution when half the population is still enslaved. Seize your freedom! The women of the world look to you. It is your turn, your moment in our long history. Their eyes are loving, admiring, full of concern for you, fear for you, in a time of danger, decision, daring. Their eyes are proud, almost envious. History has come to you! . . . We hail you, love you, support you! It is for you, now, to begin the revolution!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Sallie Bingham Center holds Millett’s papers along with the records of several of her contemporaries, among them those of her friend Robin Morgan, who became the editor in chief of Ms. magazine in 1989. Unlike the rest of the collection in the Rubenstein archives, Millett’s papers reflect a characteristic intimacy that animates her personal, political, artistic, and academic interests. Millett kept everything and delivered all of it to the Duke archives in boxes that she never reopened or sorted through. Her correspondence with various publishers intermingles with the “While You Were Away” notes left for her at the various hotels she stayed at when she traveled. (I’m particularly taken by the number of calls Simone de Beauvoir made to Millett’s hotel in Paris.) In the boxes, Millett kept a scribbled list of recommendations by the feminist and literary critic Monique Wittig: the best cafés to write at in Paris. Next to it is her own personal handwritten conversion table for Iranian currency. These odds and ends intermingle with her personal correspondence with French and American feminists for nearly four decades—Simone de Beauvoir, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Rita Mae Brown, Antoinette Fouque, Claudine Mulard, Phyllis Chesler, Andrea Dworkin, Cynthia McAdams, Yoko Ono, Alix

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Kates Shulman, and Gloria Steinem—as well as notes and letters written to other activists, writers, artists, friends, lovers, and family. The materials that Millett stowed away on the activities of the French feminists, and those she filed around her interests on the status of intellectuals, political activists, and women in Iran, profile her voracious curiosity and show her to be an avid collector and documenter of the international women’s movement. Millett’s papers include every thinkable news article related to torture and carnage by the Iranian government both before and after the 1979 revolution; little changed in Iran in that regard in the process of power transitions. Millett’s papers also trace the divisions which inevitably erupted within the French feminist movement in the late 1970s and 1980s: newspaper stories on their scandals, program notes from an MLF-sponsored film festival, and also, to my delight, a copy of a leaflet with the printed Psych e Po anthem. (For video, scan QR code.) I used all this material to support my writing of Whisper Tapes and gratefully acknowledge the Kate Millett Estate and David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University for the very real privilege of working with the Kate Millett Papers. I am also grateful to my editor, Kate Wahl, for seeing the possibilities of this project for the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and the eventful International Women’s Day celebrations of 1979. Whisper Tapes is wholly indebted to my exquisitely sharp and uniquely creative mother, Faezeh Seddigh, who had the foresight to read Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex to me when I was only ten years old, a schoolgirl in Norway around the summer of 1978 as the Iranian Revolution was picking up steam. A polished feminist and intellectual, my mother read the first edition of Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter to me in translation as a bedtime story. It was she who, in my teens, handed me a copy of QR

Psych et Po / MLF feminist anthem. https://youtu.be/lIE9HtFv0fc

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Oriana Fallaci’s A Man to read. I have always loved this quality about her. After all that early training in Beauvoirism, it took many long hours of talking with my lovely friend Ranjana Khanna to sort out the fraught relationships of the various factions of French feminism and to understand Psych et Po feminism as a movement under Antoinette Fouque’s leadership in the 1970s and 1980s. My conversations with Claudine Mulard and Sophie Keir were critical in understanding French factions and their activities as well. Ranji’s cheeky amusement at the various details that surfaced with each deep dive into the archives encouraged me to keep going back in, to rewind the tapes, and to listen one more time. I do hope to visit the Paris cafés on Monique Witting’s list with Ranji and Nachi someday, especially the one next to Deux Magot (Café de Flore) where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sat and wrote on the café’s second floor. Sophie Keir, Kate Millett’s lifetime love, generously met with me in Millett’s loft in New York and talked to me about her memories of her trip to Iran. We met less than a year after Kate Millett’s passing in Paris on September 6, 2017, and were both deeply moved by the conversation and the memories it sparked. Sophie told me about Brasserie Lipp that afternoon in May 2018 and, too, of the affection with which she and Kate were always greeted by the staff at that restaurant in Paris, their first stop after being expelled from Iran. That is another place I would love to visit with the dear friends and colleagues, Shilyh Warren, Jeff Wyneken, and Jordan Sjol above all, who patiently read and commented on the manuscript way too many times and who, like Oz Abramovitz, Janet Afari, Deborah Amos, Haleh Anvari, Torang Asadi, Arash Azizi, Narges Bajoghli, Hunter Brady, Chris Chia, miriam cooke, Laurent Dubois, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Talinn Grigor, Kent Harber, Susan James, Pamela Karimi, Roshanak Kheshti, Pedram Khosronejad, Michelle Langford, Bruce Lawrence, Kyle Lohr, Sara Mameni, Leila Mouri, Sara Saljoughi, Amy Sexton, Arvind Venkataramani,

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boojam, Khakestar va nafasam, Ehsan, have shared their invaluable insights and expertise with me on the Iranian Revolution, on orientalism and Islam, on Arab and American feminism, on city planning and design, on psychology and identity politics, on music and musical scales, on historiography and the ethnographic processes, and on film history and media technologies at various points in my writing.

NOTES

OVERTURE

1. Due to variations in the Iranian calendar, this day would have been celebrated on January 7 in the year 1979. 2. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978 [1970]), 31. 3. Kate Millett, Flying (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990 [1972]), 23. 4. “Fantasy functions as a provisional understanding of something which eludes understanding.” Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 136. 5. Mladen Dolar, “The Burrow of Sound,” Differences 22, nos. 2–3 (2011): 129. 6. For an evocative understanding of what I mean by “planetary,” see Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, s.v. “Planetarity,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2014), 1223. 7. Millett, Flying. 8. See, in particular, Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: The Islamic Revolution and the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Nima Naghibi,

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Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 9. Dolar, “Burrow of Sound,” 129–30. 10. See the transcript of the interview with Mehdi Bazargan in “Comité International du Droit des Femmes (C.I.D.F.) Présidente: Simone de Beauvoir, Les iraniennes dans la Révolution (rapport de la delegation du C.I.D.F. en Iran. 19–22 Mars 1979),” in Nasser Mohajer and Mahnaz Matin, Khizesh-e zanān dar Esfand 1357 [Iranian women’s uprising in March 1979], vol. 2 (Paris: Noqteh, 2013), 38–39. 11. See Golnar Mehran, Gender and Education in Iran (Paris: UNESCO, 2004), http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014 /001468/146809e.pdf; and also Eric Leif Davin’s report, “Iranian Women: Women Protest Loss of Freedoms in the Revolution,” In These Times, March 21–27, 1979, 9. 12. Irvin C Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (New York: Verso, 1999), 48–49. 13. Kate Millett, Going to Iran (New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1982), 245. 14. Charles T. Powers, “News Film Leaving Iran Faces ‘Review,’ ” Los Angeles Times, Friday, March 16, 1979, I:20. 15. Lippmann’s letter is part of the Kate Millett Papers in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. 16. I should have known this from looking through the nearencyclopedic collection of papers that are now in the Sallie Bingham Women’s History archives, but the fact that Millett was a Virgo only registered for me when I read that she had died in Paris a week before her eighty-third birthday on September 6, 2017. Keir, who was in Paris celebrating her own birthday that week, is just as meticulous. I hear her on the tapes carefully taking down notes at the end of each day on the films and audiotapes the couple has recorded in Iran, then stowing them away. 17. On the question of “erasure and ephemerality,” much of

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my discussion in this segment is inspired by Melody Jue’s brilliant dissertation, “Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater” (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2015). 18. Dolar, “Burrow of Sound,” 13. 19. In “What Are the Iranians Wishing For?” Sara Mameni writes about the Ajil-e moshkel-gosha in the context of solidarity and melancholia. I have greatly benefited from Mameni’s discussions of and insights into both Foucault’s and Millett’s visits to Iran. Sara Mameni, “What Are the Iranians Wishing For? Queer Transnational Solidarity in Revolutionary Iran,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 4 (Summer 2018): 955–78. I

AZADI

FREEDOM

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 193. 2. Nasser Mohajer and Mahnaz Matin, “The Post-Revolutionary Women’s Uprising of March 1979: An Interview with Nasser Mohajer and Mahnaz Matin,” interview by Eskandar SadeghiBoroujerdi, IranWire (2013), https://iranwire.com/en/features/24. 3. Mohajer and Matin, “Post-Revolutionary Women’s Uprising of March 1979.” 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 195. II

BEAUVOIR

1. Kate Millett, “Eleven Dollars,” unpublished manuscript, Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, 4. 2. Millett, “Eleven Dollars,” 4–5. 3. Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2. 4. Robert Malley, The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 2.

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5. Michel Foucault (1978), “What Are the Iranians Dreaming (Rêvent) About?” in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 203–9; Serge July, “La joie est entrée dans Téhéran,” Libération, February 12, 1979, 5. 6. See Encyclopaedia Universalis France, s.v. “Fouque, Antoinette,” accessed August 22, 2018, www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie /antoinette-fouque/. 7. The bookstore is now located at 35 rue Jacob. 8. The letter appears in volume 2 of Naser Mohajer and Mahnaz Matin’s invaluable two-volume collection of documents in Khizesh-e zanān dar Esfand 1357 [Iranian women’s uprising in March 1979] (Paris: Noqteh, 2013), 71. 9. Gisèle Halimi, “De l’Islam, des femmes et la révolution en général,” Le Monde, March 21, 1979.  10. Quoted in Marie-Jo Bonnet, “Foucault en Iran: ‘Il ne voyait pas les femmes.’ ” BibliObs, February 16, 2018, https: //bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/idees/20180216.OBS2318/foucault-eniran-il-ne-voyait-pas-les-femmes.html. 11. Kate Millett, “Kate Millett,” in Daughters of Beauvoir, ed. Penny Forster and Imogen Sutton (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 22 [additions mine]. 12. Kate Millett’s notes on “International Feminism,” 1984, Courtesy of The Kate Millett Estate and The Kate Millett Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. 13. Claude Servan-Schreiber, “And Now a Word from the Male Leaders of the Islamic Republic,” Ms., June 1979, 95; Claude Servan-Schreiber, “Nous sommes toutes des Iraniennes,” cited in Mohajer and Matin, Khizesh, 2:87. III

PA H L AV I

1. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had, on January 13, called for

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a revolutionary Islamic council to replace the Shah’s “illegal government” from his exile in Paris. 2. From the text of the full statement by Reza Baraheni on the violation of human rights in Iran in the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Congress of the United States, September 8, 1976, 6–7. 3. Oriana Fallaci, “The Shah of Iran: An Interview with Mohamad Reza Pahlevi,” New Republic, December 1, 1973, https: //newrepublic.com/article/92745/shah-iran-mohammad-reza -pahlevi-oriana-fallaci. 4. Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood, 100–101. 5. Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood, 100–101. See also entry XIV in this book. 6. See entries IV, VII, and XXI. IV

TEHRAN

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 52. 2. Bahram is a CAIFI comrade. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 89. 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 73. 5. Millett, Going to Iran, 76. 6. Millett, Going to Iran, 82. 7. Millett, Going to Iran, 82–83. 8. Millett, Going to Iran, 99. 9. Millett, Going to Iran, 107. 10. Millett, Going to Iran, 118–20. 11. Millett, Going to Iran, 120. 12. Referred to as “the other Nasrin” elsewhere in this book, she is a friend of some of the members of the Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights in Iran. 13. The account is in entry XIV.

194

V

N O T E S

SERVAT

W E A LT H

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 54. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 54. 3. Jonathan Randal, who also interviewed Millett, describes Terry Graham “as a reporter for the English-language Tehran Times,” in November 1979. Graham, he writes, “has taken up Iran’s cudgels with a fervor worthy of a revolutionary pamphleteer. Among his favorite targets have been Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and fellow journalists judged to be selling out to the U.S. government.” Jonathan Randal, “American Residents in Tehran Feel No Immediate Danger,” Washington Post, November 30, 1979. Graham was arrested and imprisoned by the Iranian government in March 1980 and accused of working for the CIA. See www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/11/30/ american-residents-in-tehran-feel-no-immediate-danger /3a184f8b-0854-495c-a7af-473666fff866/?utm_term=.8217f2fa35fa 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 104. 5. Millett, Going to Iran, 104. 6. Millett, Going to Iran, 83. 7. Millett, Going to Iran, 183. 8. Millett, Going to Iran, 24. VI

JARYAN

F LOW

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 254. 2. Remembering the criticism she had faced during the earlier press conference held at the InterContinental on March 11—a press conference held “to introduce the Iranian feminists,” of whom Kateh Vafadari was the only one to materialize—Millett was eager to show that she had the support of the Iranian women’s movement. Millett, Going to Iran, 157–58. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 254.

N O T E S

HAMLEH

VIII

195

AT TA C K

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 57. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 64. 3. Sazamane Etelaat Va Amniate Keshvar (Iranian Security and Intelligence Service), known as SAVAK. 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 64. IX

KHOMEINI

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 22. 2. Elaine Sciolino, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (New York: Free Press, 2000), 134. 3. See Amir-Hussein Radjy, “Rewriting the Iranian Revolution,” New Republic, July 6, 2017, https://newrepublic.com /article/143713/rewriting-iranian-revolution. It may come as no surprise, as Vafadari notes on the tapes on March 15 in conversation with other Iranian feminists, that Sullivan was still in Iran when Millett was expelled from the country. X

DURUD

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. XIII

S A LU T E

Millett, Going to Iran, 98. Millett, Going to Iran, 99. Millett, Going to Iran, 66. Millett, Going to Iran, 66. Millett, Going to Iran, 66. Millett, Going to Iran, 123. Millett, Going to Iran, 123. Millett, Going to Iran, 78. Millett, Going to Iran, 78. ZAN

WOMAN

1. On the dispute, please consult Keesing’s Record of World Events, vols. 8–9 (1952), s.v. “Persia,” http://web.stanford.edu/

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group/tomzgroup/pmwiki/uploads/3195-1952-09-Keesings-aOEP.pdf. 2. Manijeh Nasrabadi, “Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do: Gender and the Affects of Solidarity in the U.S. Iranian Student Movement, 1961–1979,” Women’s Studies Quarterly (Fall 2014): 127–45. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 156. 4. Michel Foucault, “Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit: Foucault’s Conversation with Claire Brière and Pierre Blanchet,” in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1979]), 252. 5. Sciolino, Persian Mirrors, 141. XIV

ZHORNALIST

JOURNALIST

1. “SAVAK”: A reference to the Shah’s secret agents, the Sazamane Etelaat Va Amniate Keshvar (Iranian Security and Intelligence Service). 2. Victoria Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 31. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 272. 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 272. 5. The Boston Globe would eventually print this piece in the Sunday, April 9, 1979, issue of the paper. 6. You may read Curtis’s upbeat and rather entertaining report on that visit in Charlotte Curtis, “First Party of Iran’s 2,500-Year Celebration,” New York Times, October 13, 1971, www.nytimes .com/1971/10/13/archives/first-party-of-irans-2500year-celebration .html. 7. A piece would eventually be published in the April 22, 1979, edition of the New York Times Magazine, written by the foreign correspondent Gregory Jaynes. 8. Gregory Jaynes, “Iranian Women Looking beyond the

N O T E S

197

Chador,” New York Times Magazine, April 22, 1979, 37–38 and 98–100. 9. William Norwich, “She Wrote the Book,” New York Times, August 19, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/magazine/shewrote-the-book.html. On “reporting as society-writing”: this kind of writing would be justification enough for the French Psych et Po feminists to insist on their own feminist publishing, women’s bookstore, and feminist media branch. XV

SURUD

ANTHEM

1. Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 377. 2. Varizi’s method did away with the traditional masterapprentice model of learning music by way of memorization and improvisation. Incidentally, Varizi’s musical academy ran two classes for young girls. See Nahid Seyed Siamdoust, Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 23. 3. Long live our King of Kings, And may his glory make immortal our land For Pahlavi improved Iran, A hundredfold from where it once used to stand. 4. Iranian opposition groups both inside and outside of Iran who chose not to recognize the current official anthem of the Islamic Republic of Iran as the “national anthem” also used this anthem in gatherings and ceremonies. “Ey Iran” is the song that ends Jafar Panahi’s film Offside (2006). XVI

SCHOENMAN

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 250–51. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 188. 3. “Bertrand Russell Is Dead: British Philosopher, 97,” New York Times, February 3, 1970, 1.

198

XVII

N O T E S

DO-SEFR SI-SAD-O-SI-YO YEK

00331

1. A close colleague of Antoinette Fouque, Boissonnas arrived in Iran on March 11, 1979. Fouque had established Éditions des Femmes, the publishing branch of Psychoanalyse et Politique (Psych et Po), with Boissonnas in 1974. 2. Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 135. 3. Said’s documentary Where Is My Freedom? follows women’s struggles for self-realization in Egypt. Laila Said, A Bridge through Time: A Memoir (New York: Summit Books, 1985), 219. 4. Referring to the conversation with Steinem, Said reports on attacks and arrests during the women’s demonstrations (see Said, Bridge through Time, 219). Parivash Kahjehnoori, one of the most prominent members of Zanan-e Huquqdan-e Iran (Group of Women’s Lawyers), was in fact harassed after her speech at the Ministry of Justice on March 10. Her husband was arrested. See her interview with Nasser Mohajer, in Mohajer and Matin, Khizesh, 515. 5. Gérard Lefort, “La dame au turban,” Libération, April 15, 1986, 11. Translation into English by Elaine Showalter in Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (New York: Scribner’s, 2001). 6. The Psych et Po feminists had also been expelled. They left the country before government officials could reach them. 7. Millett, Going to Iran, 326. 8. As Said reports on the call placed to Beauvoir from Iran, Beauvoir was horrified by the delegation’s attempt to visit Khomeini. “Simone de Beauvoir says to you all, ‘What the hell do you want to see the ayatollah for?’ ” Said, Bridge through Time, 225. 9. Joseph Treen and Kathy Karmen, “Fractious Feminists,” Newsweek, March 29, 1982, 15. 10. For more on Fouque’s work, see Jean Joseph Goux’s foreword to There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), ix–xiv.

N O T E S

199

11. Simone de Beauvoir, “Préface,” in Simone de Beauvoir et al., Chroniques d’une imposture: Du Mouvement de libération des femmes à une marque commercial (Paris: AMLF, 1981). Joseph Treen and Kathy Karmen, “Fractious Feminists,” Newsweek, March 29, 1982, 15. XVIII

ZABT

RECORDING

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 47. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 35. 3. Millett, Going to Iran,160. 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 198. 5. Millett, Going to Iran, 140. 6. Millett, Going to Iran, 198. 7. Millett, Going to Iran, 140. 8. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 223. 9. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 222. 10. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique,” Signs 38, no. 4, “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory” (Summer 2013): 967–91. 11. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 222. Graham was arrested by the Iranian government in 1980 and accused of attempting to infiltrate the revolutionaries on behalf of the CIA. www.upi.com/Archives/1982/11/09/An-American -citizen-has-been-released-from-an-Iranian/3394405666000/. XIX

TULU’

DAWN

1. Mohajer and Matin, Khizesh, 57. 2. For a reading of the memes and playful appropriations in mimetic practices in modern and contemporary revolts in Iran,

200

N O T E S

see my #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). I find the most illuminating discussion of the meme in Jean Burgess, “ ‘All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?’ Viral Video, YouTube, and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture,” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), 101–9. ZAHER

XX

APPEARANCE

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 245. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 121. XXII

GHAZAL

ODE

1. Translation by Marzieh Gail. XXIII

FA L L A C I

1. The interview with Mahnaz Matin and Nasser Mohajer appears in Mohajer and Matin, Khizesh, 249–50. 2. Mohajer and Matin, Khizesh, 251. 3. Said, Bridge through Time, 225. 4. Quoted in Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood, 99. 5. Fallaci’s interview appeared in the New York Times Magazine, October 1979. 6. Margret Talbot, “The Agitator: Oriana Fallaci Directs Her Fury towards Islam,” New Yorker, June 5, 2006. 7. Santo Arico, “Breaking the Ice: An In-Depth Look at Oriana Fallaci’s Interview Techniques,” Journalism Quarterly 63, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 591. XXIV

QOM

1. A hadith attributed to the Seventh Shi’i Imam Musa ibn Ja’far al-Kazim (d. 799). Quoted in Fouad Ajami, The Vanished

N O T E S

201

Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 25. XXV

KOOH

M O U N TA I N

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 275. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 188. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 331. XXVI

GURUH-HA

WOMEN’S GROUPS

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 77. 2. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran 126. XXVII

LISANS

BAC H E LO R ’ S D E G R E E

1. From what I hear on the tapes, they had been, actually, for a couple of days. XXVIII

MARD

MAN

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 194–95. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 143. 3. Ignoring, in other words, what the philosopher Michel Foucault would call “the elementary obligation to ask oneself what content was given to the expression [Islamic Government],” the forms of desire that it represented, and the variety of forces that were driving it. See Michel Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming (Rêvent) About?” in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 10. 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 196–97. This was Millett’s experience in demonstrations in New York and Washington, DC. But there were men who helped the women’s movement in the United States as well. XXIX

NAFAS

B R E AT H

1. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “The Funambulist

202

N O T E S

Atmosphere,” The Funambulist, accessed August 30, 2018, https:// thefunambulist.net/philosophy/ guest-writers-essays-29-the-funambulist-atmosphere-by-andreasphilippopoulos-mihalopoulos. 2. Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 156; Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) 108. 3. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 65; “Atmopolitics: Slotdijk and Being-in-theBreathable,” The Funambulist, accessed August 30, 2018, https:// thefunambulist.net/history/history-atmopolitic-sloterdijk-and -the-being-in-the-breathable. XXX

V A FA D A R I

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 79. 2. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran, 140. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 284. XXXI

HASHT

8

1. Mouvement de Libération des Femmes Iraniennes, Année Zéro: Filmed by Sylvina Boissonnas, Michelle Muller, and Sylviane Rey, Claudine Mulard, and Iranian women in Iran and Paris. 2. My thanks to Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi for tracing this— an instance of agnotology in its own right. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 16. 4. Millett, Going to Iran, 18. 5. Don Oberdorfer, “Ex-Envoy Raps Brzezinski on ’78 Iran Policy,” Washington Post, September 7, 1980, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/09/07/ex-envoy-raps-brzezinski -on-78-iran-policy/69d8f681-9fd7-4d4d-b680-65f971f484ac/ ?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4bfec87e8470. 6. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran, 150.

N O T E S

XXXII

YAVASH

203

S LO W LY

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 185. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 187. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 185. 4. Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (Chevy Chase, MD: Adler and Adler, 1985), 229–30. 5. It is at Amir-Entezam’s press conference that Millett’s expulsion is first announced on Thursday, March 15. From where I sit today, looking back, attending it wouldn’t have been the worst idea. 6. Millett, Going to Iran, 185. 7. Millett, Going to Iran, 185. 8. For more on this, see, for example, the interview with Parivash Kahjehnoori, in Mohajer and Matin, Khizesh, 507; see also, in the same volume, Nasser Mohajer’s interview with Golnar Badakhshan and Maryam Jazayeri (431). CODA

1. Millett, Going to Iran, 248. 2. Millett, Going to Iran, 295. 3. Millett, Going to Iran, 126.