I achieved a lot by wearing my head scarf !

As you see this is a picture of me      with a headscarf; i am one of those people who is stuck between cultures. In 1995 having finished my university degree, i felt that the only way i could reconstruct my life at 35 was to become a painter and i opted out for a solitary journey into creativity ....

Erik who was a photographer from LA had come back to visit the appartment and old friends. He had been living in Berlin and found it an exciting place after the fall of the wall. I was wondering what to do with my life and wanted very much to go on the  trip he pr(oposed to me.  Perhaps living there  i could finally get a life! Nothing seemed to move forward for me after getting my BA degree in language and literature .  A big part of my heart wanted to go and said lets  try it out !  .....  I loved the german literature and language course and had studied German and liked it a lot .... but as always i worried about not having the money and then the risk of making the move . I prefered to stay and try out venturing on my own in a place i knew well.
Erick and i had a good friendship in Art , eventho he seemed to be  a liberal in his politics and leaning to the left, I wasnt able to connect with him like i had done with Guido ....  probably because Guido had two sisters and he could understand a lot of things emotionally and that was important to me.

This is when i decided that wearing a headscarf was a good idea .....

Here there are some old  pics .....  this is me in 1989 with Joan Thweat living with her husband Fred Doll  in their appartment  in via Santo Spirito in Florence Italy .... i was at university and used to go to her Book group some sunday evenings.  Some years i would shave all my hair off because i thought i was loosing too much of them and i would then have to wait for them to grow to an acceptable close crop .  It was a good way to attract the Arty types!

 Joan came  from Texas and Fred from New york and they had a dog called Sofie !  I had met them while studying at the language school , they had invited me to their place in Piazza del Passero in the center near the river Arno.  Fred worked in the Merchant Navy and was away for months at a time and Joan had to live on her own waiting for him to come back .  Joan had a femminist background . She had had a book store in Texas and she told me that her family had been pretty strict and that she had been a bit of a rebel.  She had opened the book shop even tho her family were well off or perhaps because of it.  She supported my interest in Art.

One summer they had gone back to the states leaving Sofie in the appartment with a young student as their dog sitter .  Sofie was an old girl and very timid .  The young woman who was supposed to look after her , had a nervous break down on the 15 of August because she found that all the shops were closed and since she couldnt speak the language she panicked and left Italy on a plane the next day ! Luckily Joan's  neigbours the Mariotti family saved Sofie because they knew how to get her out from a back window.  I got to know about what had happened and was asked to look after her for two weeks until they came back. I'd never had an experience with dogs and wasnt sure if i could do it .  However Sofie wasnt difficult and my two cats Mooshie and Moshina loved her . She didnt act like a dog at all and  let them tease her and they all got along  well .   

Eventually Joan and Fred decided to go back to the States and that was before the year 2000. I dont think they experienced the "real" Italy and perhaps that is a good thing.  One of the interesting things about this country is that you can float on the top of the flow for as long as you like but the undercurrents of feudal history will always be there.  Even when you cant see it happening it is a feeling that i could relate to and resembles something Asian .  I could hear it at times in a sigh or in an exclamation , which would express:  " can't do anything about that! It is too deep rooted ! "

While the Anglosaxons seemed to have some degree of controle over life and had hope for the future everyone else was hoping to get on their boat ...   including little old me.

This was my studio in via Fiesolana Florence Italy  from 1998 to 2005

In my minds eye i see my  parents  in the various years of their voyage on this earth. My mother loved to be photographed and made it a point to take pics of herself and family  every year .....   there is also one of her in colour showing her at the age of eightyfour.  She would have loved to live a very long life and had my brother lived he would have taken care of her like a baby . However my brother died at the age of 53 and fortunately in his own bed .... he had high blood pressure and he knew this was coming but he didnt care one way or the other  ....  life under surveillance is too difficult when you have lived with the priviledge of having had freedom.  What is happening in Syria today ie the civil war  .... is partly due to the odious surveillance system which is being proped up all over the world since 2001.  It probably exsisted even before this date but people like me and my family didnt know about it .
   In my mother's case i think she loved to live more than "her feelings and  sensitivity for other people" ....   she thought life was a lot of fun , even the difficult patches of it ..... she was a total optimist .... my father on the otherhand wasn't very enthused about having to take responsability  even for his own  family ....  he was introverted and didn't like people in general.




 (I have to put in the pics)




 Here you see a picture of him with myself (in arms) and with my British cousins Ameneh and Nader who were guests at our place before they went off to be with relatives in Pakistan. Their father's family was from Heydrabad and my aunt who was much younger than my mother had gotten married at 18 and had been wisked off to live in the UK in the 50's. She was happy for some years, but then she had lost her husband before she was 30 and had had to bring up her children on her own. Fortunately she wasn't totally on her own and had her brother and his wife who decided that they would live together with her and her children. During the 60's i went to stay with them in their house near Lewisham. Atefeh was the youngest cousin , and i considered her to be my best friend .... even tho she was a few months younger than me, she was very socially aware and a popular child because she was very proper. On Sunday 's she used to serve the entire family tea while they were still in bed. As she was a little girl of seven or eight  .....   i thought it was awsome that she did it because she wanted to and nobody had told her to do it !

 I used to think it was too much for a child to wake up early and then to carry up the stairs a tray full of teapot and mugs. Why bother? I thought children were supposed to be taken care of by the adults ! ... My mother had never encouraged me to take such initiatives in the family. I suppose it was the British way to bring up your children to be independant and my aunt who was a great cook, had taught her children to bake cakes and to take care of each other at an early age.

My mother had taken me on the trip to see her sister in London in 64 and she had had the idea of sending me to school along with Atefeh for some months ...... we had taken a plane and landed in Italy on the way to London and we had stayed in a hotel in Rome for some days and we had gone to visit Pompei  and Capri .  I still remember while having lunch ,  staring  at a man in the restraunt eating his spagetti with an enjoyment which was a pleasure to watch , and a  young Japanese  man who gave me a origami paper swan he had made himself right there.  There was the intense profume of coffee an pizza from the bread shops at piazza Navona and our hotel room with pictures of the Maddonna and the saints.

There is a picture with my brother on the left .... in his hippy years in the 70's , he is carrying my Pakistani cousin Afshan on his shoulder ..... he loved to be around children and play with them. The picture was taken at my uncle Ali Mohammads place. He and his wife had had three sons and a daughter. They were living in a gorgeous top appartment of a house which belonged to relatives ..... Zerang Auntie and her husband and three girls were living downstairs. One of the girls who lived with Zerang Auntie was a guest, she was a daughter of a poor widow and relative and was being helped out.

Sarvegul was married off at eighteen and everyone was happy for her because she had found a family who would take care of her.  She was considered to be a beauty because she was very fair and turkish looking .

The top appartment where my uncle lived looked over some trees in a big garden.The whole family including guests and visiters used to get together on the terrace at five O'clock in the afternoon. It was pleasant to have a siesta after luch and then take a shower and go in to tea .  We would  sit around and have something to drink  .....  and  chat and enjoy the sea breeze.  I only went to visit my uncle's family and to stay with them in Karachi in the 70's, when my aunty J. had decided to move back to live there with her youngest daughter Atefeh. She had a lot of old friends and family there who would help them settle in.

Atefeh settled in to a very good school and was happy with her new friends.  She had grown up to be an attractive and sexy sixteen year old and would have certainly gotten married early had she lived , i say this because in her 17th year she went into a coma and a mysterious ailment took her.  She had wanted to be a writer.



My mother had told me (when i was a child)  ; "I found you in a garbage bin in the street ! I heard this baby crying and i had pity on you and brought you home!"  She was a bit insensitive and couldnt care less about how this would make me feel .... many years later she told some women she respected  in a conversation about this "joke" and how i had cried over it .... I am grateful to these   women because they had been speechless and had not appreciated her story !  I discovered that she had written a whole report about how she had given birth to me in 1959 ....  she was simply not made or trained to be a mother.   where as my aunt who i stayed with in London would spoil her children with deliscious food and a wholesome home education and was adulated by almost everyone who knew her, because she seemed to be everyone's mother .

I always love to remember the sunny but modest appartment where my parents lived in Tehran. Aban Street is still there and so is the hospital which is now called by a new name . This hospital is where my mother went to give birth to me . She then wrote a whole report about how the birth went . Back then the Russians ran the hospital and it was very cheap with peoples prices …. it was something good and run well.


Some of my earliest memories are from this cosy appartment .... one of these is how my father used to carry me in a woven basket when walking in the street ....  later on this basket was used for containing onions and potatoes!  He would put me on top of a cupboard while he was working in the kitchen and preparing food ... so that i would be in a safe place !  and he would be talking to my mother while he was working .... that was the usual thing .... they had a good talking relationship over the years , but my mother would be much more agressive as she grew more successful!  It was embarassing to be with her at times.  There had been a time when there was a swing installed between the kitchen and the hall and i used to dangle on it frequently.  

I dont remember much else except for the orange coloured Tom cat who was my father's pet and companion. Animals seemed to comprehend and respect him.  Many years later in Paris i met Margaret Crowther who told me about how she remembered the songs her mother sang while she was pregnant with her and walking around with this baby in  her belly  ! Unbelievable !  How far back can you remember ?   She said she could remember hearing music and songs  as a fetus .... 

As my parents used to be at work all day , and my brother spent a lot of time at school and with his friends , i spent a lot of time playing with other children in our street . The main street was full of big old Toot trees which had berries which were light green in colour and sweet. In the summer a lot of children enjoyed eating these picking the fresh ones off the trees and the ground. A lot of time was spent in exploring gardens and building dams in the waterways and gutters which run next to the streets . My parents didn't trust to leave me with hired baby sitters and people who they didn't know, and since they weren't there i would go to the next door neighbours house where a young teenage airl had befriended me.

Soheila and her father lived in several  rooms in a piece of land next door to us. I always wondered why they lived in rooms which looked like what you saw in villages  and gave the impression that they were very poor.   They were not living in a real appartment like the one we were living in.  Like myself Soheila too was usually on her own …. she was about 12 and she  took care of me as if i was her younger sister and she showed me how to eat fresh and young wine leaves, and told me about how people cooked dolmehs using the bigger wine leaves to enveloppe a mixture of rice and meat . Although she and her father were kind , my mother had begun to feel uneasy when the neighbours collected me with their own children and gave me hospitality in their own homes. The people in the neighbourhood weren't used to mothers having to go out to work and earning money was mainly a man's job. My mother could afford to ignore these lovely old fashioned ideas since in a sense she was a foreigner and hadn't grown up according to these customs.  That was Tehran  in the 60's . You could smell the perfume of deliscious home made cooking whenyou walked in the residential areas ,  and you could still have fresh yougurt and milk delivered to your door by the milkman who came with his donkey ..... and there were lots of these lovely animals around.

Today people have had to get used to women working outside of the home .... some women are taxi drivers , a lot of young girls go to university and some of them look for and find their future husbands on the internet .....   but most of all you get a sense of caos and  Tehran is traffic jams and the frustration of stepping outside into an overcrowded and unpleasant big city were all you can do is go shopping.   The good thing i found there were the cats ....  i loved them and brought many back to my home.