Living Art As A Work in Progress
The idea of writing stories about my art came to me while i was studying literature. Reading books was stimulating and emotionally exciting and led to my making images. Many years later after i had finished University and didn't feel like reading books for a while i realized that people wanted some images to be explained to them. It was as if the painting itself wasn't enough. I had opened my gallery shop in 1998 thanks to Silvana Grippi the gallerist who had allowed me to have an exhibition at her place in Borgo Pinti in Florence. She was a Photographer herself and ran her gallery as if it were another hobby. Thanks to her i was making and selling my cards and commercial art.
I had met another gallerist who was a prophessional, Laura Accordi, who had accepted to have my "Interiors" in her gallery called "Babele" in Via Delle Belle Donne. she also sold the ecellent Art book editions called Franco Maria Ricci, which i had loved and revered for many years.
Many people came to visit me in my Atelier in via Fiesolana and once while i was talking to an American painter; William Wolf (he was a teacher at a university in Florence) he told me that it would be interesting to see stories about each image i had made.
He was an artist himself, he said “Why don’t you write a story to go with your cards?” His words made an impression on me. I had always wanted to write such a story, but I didn’t think real life would allow me enough flights of the imagination to write stories. The only thing i could do was to write about the times I lived in.
I had met another gallerist who was a prophessional, Laura Accordi, who had accepted to have my "Interiors" in her gallery called "Babele" in Via Delle Belle Donne. she also sold the ecellent Art book editions called Franco Maria Ricci, which i had loved and revered for many years.
Many people came to visit me in my Atelier in via Fiesolana and once while i was talking to an American painter; William Wolf (he was a teacher at a university in Florence) he told me that it would be interesting to see stories about each image i had made.
He was an artist himself, he said “Why don’t you write a story to go with your cards?” His words made an impression on me. I had always wanted to write such a story, but I didn’t think real life would allow me enough flights of the imagination to write stories. The only thing i could do was to write about the times I lived in.
I first
thought about writing when I read my grandfather’s books. He was a historian,
an expert in antiquity and Persia, and although he had had an adventurous life
travelling the world over, his books where very difficult to read. I saw a lot
of him when I was a child and he would talk about the things that had happened
in his life. I always wondered why he didn’t write about them, because those
were the things which I was most interested in. I wanted to know about the feelings
involved, the whys and the wherefores, rather than listen to his lessons in
history.
I would have much prefared to read about the moments of his life shared with other people ..... i was living my life with many people and feelings for friends
and relatives filled my days and my decisions. I would have liked to read about those things.
The times we live in include the common history we live in, shared with a lot of other individuals who are walking the earth at the same time. These are days when we are interested in Climate Change and in immigration from the so called developing countries and the third world countries . About China's "Belt and Road Project" and about Surveillance taking over all "Civilization" as we know it today. As in the past centuries, when the world was not yet a “village”, I would presume to think of Madame de Stael and other women writers who travelled and wrote about the times they lived in.
The times we live in include the common history we live in, shared with a lot of other individuals who are walking the earth at the same time. These are days when we are interested in Climate Change and in immigration from the so called developing countries and the third world countries . About China's "Belt and Road Project" and about Surveillance taking over all "Civilization" as we know it today. As in the past centuries, when the world was not yet a “village”, I would presume to think of Madame de Stael and other women writers who travelled and wrote about the times they lived in.
I would
certainly not have bought a ticket to go to Italy if there hadn’t been the
Iran/Iraq war in the 80s, or had I been born in my aunts’ generations during the first and second world wars. Being
Asian and from a Muslim family, I was born in Iran during the Shah’s regime, when
women were wearing Western clothes. Even then, being a woman meant family ties
and duties were utmost on the list of priorities. As role models, my father’s
sisters, my aunts Homa – who worked as a nurse – and Tahmeen – who was in administration – had travelled to Europe after the Second World War, they were
from a generation which was still oppressed by womanhood and the duties it
entailed.
The older
generation in my father’s family had been brought up in India by their Iraqi
mother who lived in Purdah, and later had moved to Iran. They had arrived in
Tehran in the 1950s, and even though they worked, they were looking after their
ailing father, and Parveen their sister, who perhaps suffered from autism, an
ailment which had not been discovered yet.
With a lot
of luck, I was born in times when I could afford to have time to myself for
some years. Both my mother and her sister and their families were living in
relative comfort, and as modern women. They managed to have a life which
belonged to them, even if they had a family and were raising children.
My mother had had a journalistic career and had written for the Tehran English Daily papers. She had an MA in English, having studied in India. She and my father had both been translators, and were intellectually alivewith a house full of books. The younger generation too had had a university education; my cousins Ameneh and Saadieh who were born in Pakistan had degrees, and were women who were working and culturally part of the middle class. They were positive role models.
My mother had had a journalistic career and had written for the Tehran English Daily papers. She had an MA in English, having studied in India. She and my father had both been translators, and were intellectually alivewith a house full of books. The younger generation too had had a university education; my cousins Ameneh and Saadieh who were born in Pakistan had degrees, and were women who were working and culturally part of the middle class. They were positive role models.
It was different in Iranian
society, having time for yourself and investing in intellectual pursuits was not for women. Only upper class women could afford to have time to invest in such things as books. It was not considered to be a
positive thing to have time to yourself and your individual interests. There was a big difference in attitude with my relatives in the subcontinent and the ones living in the Middle East.
The ideal Iranian woman had to be serving children and everyone else in the family, and had to always be there for other people. Even now, most women have no time to dwell on ideas and want to get on with their day-to-day lives, and they thrive as "consumers". As i was born in Tehran and lived there for the first 16 years of my life i am Iranian, but i don't consider myself as typical one. I was destined to be influenced by the history and culture of my country in the 60s, and the seventies during the reign of the last King of the Pahlavi Dynesty. One of the main productions of this time was a weekly periodical called Ketabe Hafteh (‘The Book of the Week’), in which one could read translations of literary pieces from various countries and times. There were also articles about world art and culture, with the absence of internet, this periodical contributed to keeping people interested in the outside world in general.
The ideal Iranian woman had to be serving children and everyone else in the family, and had to always be there for other people. Even now, most women have no time to dwell on ideas and want to get on with their day-to-day lives, and they thrive as "consumers". As i was born in Tehran and lived there for the first 16 years of my life i am Iranian, but i don't consider myself as typical one. I was destined to be influenced by the history and culture of my country in the 60s, and the seventies during the reign of the last King of the Pahlavi Dynesty. One of the main productions of this time was a weekly periodical called Ketabe Hafteh (‘The Book of the Week’), in which one could read translations of literary pieces from various countries and times. There were also articles about world art and culture, with the absence of internet, this periodical contributed to keeping people interested in the outside world in general.
Even
though Iranians are very involved in their own literature, back then, the times
were allowing many Western and Eastern ideas in. Like many other Asians,
Iranians, both men and women, are brought up “trained” to have to shoulder much
responsibility in the home, especially with the sick and the elderly. Even the
middle classes work hard in the house, and are not like the middle classes
elsewhere, who usually can afford to have help in the house and therefore have
time to spend on their interests.
The home I
was brought up in was totally strange according to the usual Iranian mentality,
because at home the men, usually my father, cooked the meals. It would be
unheard of for an Iranian husband to cook and prepare the meals, but my parents
lived this way and my father would often tell me not to tell anyone about it. It was a family secret and he knew it would be an issue with everybody outside our home. This helped my mother to exercise her talents as a capable business woman. She was good at negotiating and pulling off deals.
This was mostly because she was allowed to have selfconfidence, to use her talents. Her sister, who had married a Pakistani and
went to live in the UK, was very much the same type.
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This was
the background which made my case a special one, and I would describe my art to
be a mixture of various cultures. In 1978 I discovered
London, staying with my mother’s sister Jahan and their family. Her brother Ismile and his Swedish wife Ylva were living in the same house. As a child I spent some years in London with them. I went to the local primary
and secondary schools along with my cousins. Some holidays were spent with my
family in Karachi. These were different influences, and my family has given me
a varied cultural background.
Even as a child, I would
insist on not copying reality. Sometimes I would produce bigger pieces, which were totally from my own
imagination – I mean, not having copied from any source. This made one point of
discord, with a lot of people who thought that copying reality was necessary.
One person
at the foundation course in London which I went to in 1980, (he was a
photographer), told me that the Persian miniatures themselves were the artworks
of people who had looked at reality closely and studied plants, objects,
buildings and people in order to produce their own pictures. In other words,
art was a language and one needed to know the words – i.e. images were words from the book of reality, and you had to learn them in order to then put them
together to express an idea.
Fortunately,
my own tutor Janet, who was a painter, was not hung up on such ideas. She said
that she started to paint one day by simply putting all sorts of objects on the
kitchen table and painting them because she had the urge to do it. I thought it
a much more liberating and fun point of view. There was heart and emotion in
the idea of doing things the way she did. It was a personal research, with her
interest in life as the motivation and the engine. It meant that one could pick
out the objects and things that one loved, put them on a table, and simply paint them.
The important thing for her was that one should work, work, work, and the more
you did this, the better.
Working seriously for yourself was good, and if you were honest with yourself, you were going in the right direction. In fact, Janet’s pictures were so much of herself and very intimate. I thought it was kind of her to tell the young people who she taught that they should work hard at what interested them.
Working seriously for yourself was good, and if you were honest with yourself, you were going in the right direction. In fact, Janet’s pictures were so much of herself and very intimate. I thought it was kind of her to tell the young people who she taught that they should work hard at what interested them.
After the
foundation course, I was going to study further, but then the times had
changed, and even though I had a chance to study in an art polytechnic, I
couldn’t pay for it. This was because of the revolution in Iran and then the
Iraq/Iran war, which had begun in 1981-82.
When the
revolution broke out, I had gone to Pakistan to visit my parents. I had not
been able to return to England because when I returned to attend my course in
Cambridge, I was held at the airport and sent back with the excuse that in my
diary I had expressed the wish to stay on in London, where I had already spent
three years. It just happened that people like me, totally out of the reality
of events in Tehran, were now victims of what Iranian “revolutionaries” –
mostly have nots at the order of people living elsewhere – decided to do back home.
They had decided to get into the American Embassy grounds, which I thought seemed pretty unnecessary for them to do. It was awful to have to be part of "their" story and have to share that passport.
It was my emotional duty to go back to visit my parents who were visiting family in Pakistan ( A lot of relatives lived in Karachi where they had settled after the Partition). I stayed a year in Karachi, living with my mother and her sister. I was lucky because my Aunt Jahan’s house in Karachi was very much a social hub, and was lots of fun and alive. My aunt and her daughter, my cousin Ameneh, were very socially active and great cooks. They would have lunches and dinners, and went to parties which made life lively and full of different interesting people. Through one of my aunt’s friends there, I was introduced to an employment and worked at a graphic agency as an assistant. I was twenty one, and even though my parents wanted to see me settled down, my own dream was to get an education in Europe.
They had decided to get into the American Embassy grounds, which I thought seemed pretty unnecessary for them to do. It was awful to have to be part of "their" story and have to share that passport.
It was my emotional duty to go back to visit my parents who were visiting family in Pakistan ( A lot of relatives lived in Karachi where they had settled after the Partition). I stayed a year in Karachi, living with my mother and her sister. I was lucky because my Aunt Jahan’s house in Karachi was very much a social hub, and was lots of fun and alive. My aunt and her daughter, my cousin Ameneh, were very socially active and great cooks. They would have lunches and dinners, and went to parties which made life lively and full of different interesting people. Through one of my aunt’s friends there, I was introduced to an employment and worked at a graphic agency as an assistant. I was twenty one, and even though my parents wanted to see me settled down, my own dream was to get an education in Europe.
My mother
had studied and was teaching English, and I thought that perhaps a degree in
art wasn’t really good enough for getting a practical paying job. She herself
hadn’t wanted me to go to an art school.
My parents
had been born and brought up in India, in the Persian community which had lived
there for several generations. They were brought up in Bangalore and Mysore,
whereas my grandfather from my father’s side had been born and brought up in Hyderabad
by his Irani parents, and my mother’s father had been a Shirazi, but had a
history in Egypt and Iraq.
It seems
that in their days, people could get on a horse or carriage and travel all over
Asia without having to have specific papers. I have this idea because of my
grandfather’s stories about how he had travelled from India to Iraq and back
many times. He had actually started out from Hyderabad and worked on a ship
taking tea to Japan when he was eighteen. From there, he had travelled to
Europe and then to the United States. He then became a student in a university
in the US, and lived there for a while. He even survived the earthquake in 1906
in California, and came back to Iraq to marry his first cousin, who was a girl
brought up in Purdah and from a wealthy family. He took her and the children to
India, where he was teaching Persian History and Literature at the University
in Mysore.
Now, at
twenty two in Karachi, I had decided that I wanted to go back to Europe.
My mother thought that it would be best if I would get married to someone or the other in the family. She wasn’t really in control and my father wasn’t that interested in controlling my life. I had spent days in London where I was not sure about my future. I thought that I would have to change too much in order to be “a modern woman” if I integrated with the English way of life. It seemed to be too complicated, and I had always the idea that Italy was closer to my heart emotionally speaking. Even the language seemed to open doors of a different kind of modernity, as it were.
My mother thought that it would be best if I would get married to someone or the other in the family. She wasn’t really in control and my father wasn’t that interested in controlling my life. I had spent days in London where I was not sure about my future. I thought that I would have to change too much in order to be “a modern woman” if I integrated with the English way of life. It seemed to be too complicated, and I had always the idea that Italy was closer to my heart emotionally speaking. Even the language seemed to open doors of a different kind of modernity, as it were.
The summer
of 1982, I was on a plane to Perugia and heading for the Universita per
Straineri, where I stayed and studied Italian for three months. Then, since
Florence seemed to be a smaller place than Rome – I couldn’t handle living in a
metropolis like London without family – and it was famous for art. I packed my
bags again and went to a printing studio to see how etchings were made. I had
seen these beautiful etchings in and around Russell Square where I went to
school in London, and I wanted to make some myself, but the technique stood in
my way of immediate expression.
In 1983, I
got a job and started living with Emily, a girl who studied at an American
university and was a photographer. I shared a flat with her in Via Maggio, and started
working as a salesperson.
In 1984 I
put my name down for a course at the university in order to study English
Language and Literature. I didn’t know Italian well enough, but I was living
and learning.
Later in
1984, I had moved to Via Bolognese and was living with a group of young
students. In 1985, I moved to Via delle Cinque Giornate with Jurgen, who was a
German friend, then a PHD student, and his girlfriend Silvana.
I had
gotten to know my fiancé Guido in Rome in 1983 and wanted to get married. My
twenties were flying by and I was aspiring to art, as always, but not getting
much done, since I had to make a living as a salesperson.
From 1984
to 1989, I was beginning to paint big pictures in Via delle Cinque Giornate.
Jurgen had gone back to Germany and now I sub-rented the rooms to other
students and worked as a salesperson in the summer. The apartments I had lived
in had always meant so much to me, and in this last one I lived for fifteen
years, renting out the extra rooms to other students.
At
university I was getting along, slowly learning the Italian language. It was
very hard. Guido had been a great help after I failed to get through the first
exam at university. He made it a point to help me get through the first exams.
He had become my personal trainer, but I found it very hard to study, because
when I studied books, I would want to paint as well, and I was very much
distracted by the different directions that these two interests took me. On one
hand, I had to have a fixed timetable in order to study, and on the other hand,
I needed to get the ideas out on paper or canvas and give them a structure.
My cousin
Ameneh, who was a journalist and working for a newspaper, came to visit me from
Pakistan and asked, “why didn’t you continue going to an art School and study
art?” Why was I studying literature when I loved to make pictures? The answer
was that I was not confident of being an artist, but I had these ideas that
would push me to spend money on canvas and paint. I would collect a lot of art
material for the times when I had the moments of high energy, and I would paint
when I was emotionally stressed out. It was a sort of discipline. I even
refused to get angry and fight for a relationship ,and I would take my energies
to the canvas.
It seemed
that the people I had in my life never listened to me. I mean, I hadn’t a voice
and I found that was a problem in almost every sphere of my life. I suppose
women only find a voice and people listen to them only if they have a tough man
on their side like my mother had, or if they have children or a tough
personality. I kept on asking the men in my life to get married and they would
only come round to doing it after several years had passed. I suppose I can
blame that on my upbringing, which made me have a submissive personality.
My mother had had a strong voice of authority because she was a first
child, and being very bright, everyone gave her a lot of attention. Even Ameneh
was like her. Everyone listened to them. I hadn’t managed to learn to have a
similar voice. Perhaps I wasn’t a fighter, and she was more aggressive and
competitive. I was most of the time struggling with myself, trying to get
myself under control. I think that it had something to do with being very
physical. I mean, I felt that I had an athletic constitution.
I was
really vigorous, and yet I wanted to have a brain and to be an intellectual
like my parents. I hated being in a woman’s body. A female, whose God given
role in life was to reproduce. I thought it was really humiliating to be a
woman because women always seemed to be second class, like myself. They never
achieved a voice until they had children, but I wanted to have respect
effortlessly. I wanted people to listen to what I had to say, but they didn’t.
I suppose
it’s normal to ask for things and not get them when you want them. I have come
to think that the world is pretty much like that – unless you are lucky or you
put a gun to people’s head, you get to be second class. Even when I had been
living in England and I asked my cousin if he wanted to get married, he said he
wasn’t ready because he was a student. I thought, I wish I could save him from
being so far from his own culture. I wanted to save myself too. I thought that
he was missing out on his Iranian and Pakistani cultural roots, but he didn’t
see it that way and, of course, I was wrong in my traditional mentality. It was
like a story from a Jane Austen novel. Later on in life I saw the film ‘West is
West’ and it made me realise the emotional distances and the work that has to
be done before it would have all worked out according to how I saw things.
I was
stupid enough to ask him if he wanted to get married and later on, my aunt –
his Mother – told me that women are not supposed to ask and that they are
supposed to wait until they are asked. And much later, about thirty years
later, she told me that he had had many Indian and Pakistani families who were
after him for their daughters.
I was only a
woman who wanted to express all the things I
couldn’t handle like other women: like Emin’s bed and tent, I was
finding my way through relationships and I also needed to be an artist rather
than want to get a marriage, but social pressure and my traditional side was
making me propose to people myself! Ideally, I would have loved to have all the
time in the world to know a friend who later on would become a partner. My
mother, who was an educated, modern woman, surprisingly suggested that I could
throw myself at the feet of one of her relatives and plead to him to marry me
because all I really owned was my virginity.
I still
think it couldn´t have been her saying such a thing to her twenty one year old
daughter. She was probably worried about what people would say!
However,
later on when I met Guido in Italy, I was crying for ages about what had
happened to me and the humiliation that I had put myself through by asking my
cousin that stupid question. And that is why in Islam, parents have to take
responsibility to marry off their children. No one can twist your arm and make
you do the right thing – most of the time, one has to make decisions oneself.
It is the negotiation part that I find so difficult. My mother and my aunt were
both good at negotiating, whereas I’ve always been totally at loss for words.
Guido was
the eldest son of a lawyer, and he was very articulate. He would want to talk
relentlessly at times. Once I had learnt the language, we would get into these
conversations which were very funny and exhilarating, and that is when I
realised that it is the spiritual thing of wanting to communicate. I never
dreamed of meeting a man who would want to talk to me! But I suppose most men,
even the ones that want to talk, usually have difficulty in listening to women.
Which
brings me back to the subject of art and expression. I suppose art for me was
all those things that I wanted to say, and I was making an effort to make
myself listened to. But I think the first thing that I would tell people is
that if you use art as a message to mankind, then use it wisely. I know that if
you are a black person or a woman or gay, you have always been at a
disadvantage because, only the man with “the gun” or “the power of words” has
been able to put his foot down and has had the last word. It seems that is what
this world is all about. But art too is a powerful instrument. I read an
interview with the German film director Fassbinder some years ago. In this, he
stated that even though he was from the same angry generation as the
Bader-Meinhoff and he knew them, he had chosen a different path in order to
express his opinions through the films he made. I thought that was very
intelligent. Most of my life I’ve seen
that only “power” has a voice. Perhaps having a voice, is powerful too. You can
say something and be heard in art. That’s the beauty of the thing.
And your message has to be a good one...
I started
to make the Inshallah cards in 1989 and1990. Then, in 1992, I managed to get my
degree in English Language and Literature from Florence University. I was
having shows and exhibits in and around Florence. I loved to go to Venice and
the carnival there, and later on I did some watercolours on Venice, which is a
beautiful city and a constant source of inspiration.
In 1998, I
had to leave the apartment where I had lived for fifteen years. With help from
friends and well-wishers I managed to get a studio in the centre of Florence,
and I started to sell my watercolours to the public. My watercolours were about
the city were I had lived for the past twenty years, and the sitting rooms and
interiors I painted were a dream of finding a stable home.
I was
trying to live on my art, producing a lot of watercolours, cards and boxes. My
clients were mostly tourists. I lived in the same place upstairs. My studio was
in a back street in the centre and I was living like a hermit with lots of
cats, who I loved. I couldn’t make money and pay the rent after 2001, but I
paid my assistants to come and help me produce in quantity. I really had no
business sense at all, so in a frustrating way I helped a competitor who had
been watching me to take over my sphere of sales -i.e. the shop I was selling
in. A Vattimo who does admirable etchings became very successful in selling his
art because, out of feelings of solidarity with artists, I had shared my own
distributor with him. Finding that his machine produced work took over my hand
made one and out of naivety I lost a very important source of income. (This
last sentence does not make sense – consider rewording)
In 2001
shops closed down and I had to leave the studio. In 2004, I spent some time in
Viareggio and in 2005 in the spring,
I went back to Iran, to my mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. I
decided to buy property in Dubai, and in 2007 I rented a house in Dubai for one
year. I continued to paint in Tehran, and had the help of young students and
assistants who worked for me in my home studio.
My story is
far from a success story – if anything I am probably the anti-heroine in the
novel who did everything wrong. However, I think it is a story which shows a
generation who aspired to create a new voice; one which is neither Eastern nor
Western, but in the middle of the crossroads. According to President Angela
Merkel, the multicultural society hasn’t worked out in Germany – and probably
she meant Europe – but people like me believe that it is a new project and it
has to be given time. The painting ‘Existence’ or ‘The Contact’ is about
reaching out to get to know the other.
Perhaps in
Asia, where many different tribes live together, you can see this voice; it is
there in many Indian and Pakistani films. The Middle East is something
different and more complex. Israel and its creation marks all the Muslims; it
is a nation born out of European mistakes, and brings suffering to the rest of
the Middle Eastern people. Will it ever be able to integrate – i.e. make
friends with – its neighbours, or will it take over all of the Middle East
through Zionistic pressure groups? My painting ‘Energies and Tendencies’ is
talking about a mutation in geographical terms.
In 2008, I
fell victim to anonymous security people who didn’t allow me to buy property
and move to Dubai. All through the new century, the new world order has wanted
to take our voice away from us. This sense of being made into “puppets on a
string” is in the painting ‘J’aillais me donner’.
I
associate my science fiction planetary paintings with the more detached and
scientific part of my imagination. Planetary science can be a refuge from our
imperfect lives on earth. We have to live in the shelter of our buildings and
sitting rooms and bedrooms, and even though there are now six billion of us on
the planet, our emotional lives hinder us from finding solutions to problems.
Today we are worried about resources.
While
spirituality teaches us that resources are infinite if we aspire to higher
values, the materialistic view limits our potential to find new solutions. It
is the difference between Mao and Churchill’s way of dealing with the food
problem. While the latter called for an increase in positive individual
participation to cultivate and grow food, the former took for granted that some
were going to be victims of the famine anyway. Just as today, some believe that
nature is bound to get destroyed anyway. Here I would like to mention and pay
tribute to the millions of people – some say 45, but I imagine the number to be
higher – who died in the famine during the recent years in China, due to a lack
of interest and energy in trying to save them. The melting down of the glaciers
will happen, polar bears and other animals will die of starvation and climate
change will inevitably change our planet and our life for the worse.
One
aspires towards higher things, but will we ever manage to pull ourselves up and
do the right thing? None of us is finding a solution to the problems, and the
reason is that we lack the imagination to find and implement new ideas to the
vital issues which are decisive for the future of the planet. Meanwhile, we
will be scratching our genitals, and hiding our heads in the sand, being
totally irresponsible and decadent. Like puppets on a string, we leave our
destiny to God, and to the powers that be.
I was twenty-four when I moved from Via Maggio to the students apartment
in Via Bolognese. I had been living and working in the centre of Florence for
nearly a year now. I had a job in the leather store in Borgo Santissima
Apostali*, right next to the fascinating old bridge the Ponte Vecchio. I had
left the apartment in Via Maggio, where I had lived with Emily. This was in
1984, when Italy won the World Cup, and everyone went celebrating and didn’t
allow any peace and quiet until late.
Via Bolognese
I had left the Via Maggio apartment in 1984 because of the noise which
only stopped from 3am to 5am in the morning. Later on, it became a
traffic-controlled area, but I was happy to leave it for Via Bolognese. I loved
the apartment in Via Bolognese because it was close to the countryside.
Lindsey, who was English but married to an Italian, moved into the apartment in
Via Maggio. She was younger than I was and later on got together with Daniele,
the owner of the jewellery store I was working in. She seemed to follow me in
my life.
Via
Bolognese was an upper middle class sort of area; very quiet and conservative.
In the apartment there were mostly people in their twenties, and they tended to
be the student types. Jurgen had rented it, having found the place through his
university where he was a PHD student. This, plus the fact that he was German,
were good enough credentials for the landlord.
It wasn’t the apartment itself but the views, the sights and sounds
offered from the windows. You could see olive groves and fields from the
windows. While other houses were far away, you heard the birds and the breeze
in the trees rather than the noise of human activity. It was totally different
from Via Maggio. We didn’t bother much about the neighbours because we hardly
ever saw them, except for the people who lived downstairs, for they were often
in their garden.
It was a
very big change from Via Maggio, which was a decadent type of deluxe apartment
with parquet flooring and special lights. However, it did have some positive
points. It was well furnished and central. It was very good for going to work
in the centre. I used to walk to work in order to get a feel for the city as I
went past cafes and the shops in the mornings. The buzz of the city, especially
in the mornings, was very exciting.
People
shouting friendly buongiornos to each other as their working day began. You
felt the freshness of the new day. Then there was the Ponte, my favourite place
to cross and go over to reach the commercial side of the town. I went along Via
Gucciardini, looking at the shop windows before going on to the bridge, and
then on to the Por Santa Maria.
The centre
around Borgo SS. Apostoli was a little claustrophobic; a closed in sort
of life. One didn’t get away
from the work routine and reality at all. Whereas, in Via Bolognese, you felt
that you could finally hear yourself think. I was very grateful for the peace.
The tranquillity of the place was true luxury.
In Via
Maggio I had entertained people who I got to know through my flatmate Emily.
Her friend
Deborah was working in the same Por Santa Maria Road, in a shop selling
textiles and materials. I had become friends with her even though we didn’t
have anything in common.
Borgo SS Apostoli
Watercolour, 2003
She was of
a wealthy Californian family and had come to Florence for a holiday. Then she
had decided to stay. She met a man who was working in the central market. A
family man – Guido. He was a tall man with orange coloured hair and lots of
freckles.
We used to
go out together at times and invite them over. They were a little older than I
was. She was thirty two years old and wanted very much to get married to her
boyfriend. However, when she did get married, she was bored out of her mind,
living in the suburbs of Montecatini, without working or having much money to
spend.
“The Thing In The Jar”
(An idea from
a science fiction book) Watercolour, 1983
Deborah had married Guido because she was getting on. She was already
thirty two years old and by the time they got married and when she had a child,
she was in her mid-thirties. She had probably got married for social reasons,
because marriage is still a respectable thing to do and people accept that all
over the world.
It didn’t
surprise me when later on she left Italy, going to visit her parents that
Christmas. She was asking for a divorce when she got to the States. She had
taken their daughter with her.
Her
husband, who was very much a family man, felt depressed about her flight and
especially about her having taken their child. Perhaps it was for the best.
They went to the States because Deborah realised the standard of living that
she had to settle down to in Italy was much lower than what she was used to.
Her husband was crying over the daughter being taken to California by Deborah.
He
followed them to the States to see if he could convince her to return and live
with him once again. So much for money not being able to buy happiness! Deborah
probably did the right thing. For some people, it was such a dream to be able
to go to the States, to learn a new language and try to live in Los Angeles. I
couldn’t understand anyone who didn’t want a better life.
The Metropolis Watercolour Collage, 2008
Mario, Emily’s boyfriend from Florence, was smart, I thought because he
had managed to get married and go to live with Emily in New York. But it took
him quite a few years to do it.
Guido was
told by the American judge to keep away from his wife and child if he didn’t
wish to live in the United States. And so he was packed off to Italy to live
his bachelor type of lifestyle all over again. But this time around, he chose
to hang around with Filipino girls, who were flexible and cheerful.
Mario and
Emily had met in a bar on the Lungarno. Emily
was a young American student, studying with a program at Stanford
University. I had met her through an American girl who was at the print school
at Santa Reparata.
The Kitchen
Watercolour, 2004
I was telling someone that I lived at the campsite because I couldn’t
find an apartment. This kind girl knew Emily was looking for a flatmate, so she
introduced me to her. Emily wasn’t bothered that I was Iranian and Muslim, and
I was happy that we could have a respectful relationship.
One day,
she met Mario, who didn’t speak English, and her Italian was pretty basic.
Since working, I was speaking Italian quite well by now.
They were
getting along quite well, even though they couldn’t understand each other very
well. Mario would make pasta tricolore for us.
Cosmopolitan Time, 1990
Oil on canvas
Then one day, Mario was banging on the door downstairs on the street and
Emily wasn’t opening it. He was banging and shouting and I was wondering what
had happened... It was getting embarrassing. She sent me downstairs to talk to
him and tell him to go away. Later on, we found out that it had been a cultural
misunderstanding.
Mario was
really very nice and gentle. He had been banging on the door vehemently because
he wanted to explain things which he had said and done.
I was to
translate, since I could understand both sides. I found that Emily was much
more structured and law abiding, while Mario was a heart person, moved by his
emotions. It took him quite a few years to persuade her that they could be good
together.
He went to the States several times, and Emily came to Florence several
times, and they eventually became a family in the late 1980s. Emily had done
some wonderful photographs of the Venice carnival in the early 1980s when we
lived together, and later on she came to visit me when I had moved to Via delle
Cinque Giornate.
Our life
in the heart of the city was really mingling with other people. The apartment
next door was very close. It had been one large apartment and now very
elegantly separated with the installation of two separate entrance doors. I got
to know Charles and Gennaro, the two men living next door, through Emily’s
friendship with them.
Emily, who
had introduced me to Deborah, was a twenty three year old photographer from New
York. She had also been a ballet dancer, but told me that due to a mistake she
had made, she had hurt her knee and had lost the opportunity of becoming a
professional dancer.
Charles
was English, and very charming in manner and looks. He also had a posh accent.
We didn’t know what he did for a living, and he didn’t seem to do much.
It was
absurd to think that he was supporting Gennaro who was a simple Neapolitan
young man, but Gennaro went to an expensive art school in town. I used to envy
Gennaro so much for his going to that art school, as it was something I could
only dream of doing.
The Old City Watercolour, 2003
Emily, my flatmate, was fond of Charles, and they were the closest of
friends. She got angry with me when I once suggested that the two men might be
married to each other. One heard of all sorts of relationships other than the
strictly orthodox ones. That was new for my sheltered mind and I didn’t much
like getting involved. I suppose I wished I had had a friend like Gennaro
seemed to have – he had found a true heart; a friend who believed in his art,
and he was doing something that I hadn’t the guts and the courage to invest in
at the time.
I had gone
to Italy with art being my priority, but I had come to lose all confidence in
myself by having to earn a living and having to settle for a life of drudgery
as a saleswoman – a life I wasn’t happy with at all.
The Musician
Watercolour, 2002
My own fiancé, also called Guido, was being difficult and didn’t want to
settle down. He said he wanted to buy a house or apartment first. He was
following me to Via Bolognese and I didn’t want him around and I told him so,
but I couldn’t do anything about him persisting to come along.
The Via Bolognese Apartment
I found Jurgen through some notes left in the language school. He was
sub-renting the rooms in the flat in Via Bolognese. He was a student at the
university, and was trying to finish his doctorate. After having lived in
Berlin, he had got stuck living in Florence and couldn’t leave the place. The
same thing happened to me later on.
Jurgen had
rented the Via Bolognese apartment from a woman who was a countess and a
painter. The apartment had a wonderful view because it overlooked olive groves,
and there were hardly any other buildings in sight. I liked the place and the
people I lived with in this new place. Later on when we had to move, I
continued to share a flat with Jurgen and Silvana, his girlfriend. We moved to
Via delle Cinque Giornate in 1984.
Jurgen was
sharing the flat in Via Bolognese with other young people; Sonia, for example,
was a Greek American girl from the Midwest, and she was engaged to be married
to Franco. She had a cat called Arturo and that is the reason we became fast
friends almost immediately. Arturo had the use of all the rooms, and he used to
use the long corridor for running sessions.
We could
hear him at times when he was energetic and frisky, because during his race
from one end of the corridor to the other he inexplicably jumped off the walls
leaving paw prints there. It was one of those mysterious cat behaviourisms. It
must have been fun for him to jump off the wall. He used to genuinely enjoy the
thrill, as if he were a boy riding a skateboard! We used to comment on him
doing this thinking that he did this as a compensation for his need to climb
trees! God only knows what he was thinking.
Then there
was the English boy called Andrew, who had managed to get his doctorate degree
and he was looking for someone to replace him in the apartment. I was one of
the people who turned up, asking to take the room which was free. Andrew was
going back to London. This room was the closest to the front door near the small
room – i.e. “the maid’s room” – which people used as a deposit for suitcases.
This small
maid’s room set off my imagination. It seemed that before the Second World War,
people still worked as maids here in Europe, whereas now it was only the very
wealthy who had live-in maids. In Asia people were still using such rooms, as
the class of a maid and her social status still existed. I had seen it in
Karachi, where it was usual to have help in the house. Even in Iran, women from
villages found employment in private houses. I doubt that in Asian countries
they would get a room all to themselves, however small it may have been.
The other
girl staying there was a girl from Sardinia, and she was hardly ever in. She
wasn’t a student and was working in a bar and was very busy. The one time I met
her, she told me without any preliminaries, “You are suffering from “culture
shock”. I was speechless when she said this, because we were meeting for the
first – and the last – time and it seemed unnecessary for her to psychoanalyse
my situation in five minutes and say it to my face as well.
This made
me think that she was a witch and a bitch at the same time, but perhaps she was
being kind and wanted to help me understand. It was a very alien attitude, and
I wanted to tell her, “if you mind your own business a bit more, darling, you
wouldn’t have to work 10 hours a day!”. However, I didn’t open my mouth because
I couldn’t be bothered. Later on, I found out that what I had been subjected to
was the
“radiografia” – i.e. X-ray.
Andrew was
still staying in the apartment when I moved in. He was waiting for some time
before he actually left Florence. I was really elated to be in the company of
university students who were so far up in the ranks. They had a different
attitude; it was as if the world belonged to them and they could demand for
things to be given them. They only had to go out there and do things to get a
good life. They were not into personal comments at all, even though once in a
while some visitor would ask me what we produced in the country where I came
from, which of course meant that I had to admit that I was from a country which
was not yet industrialised.
Sometimes
a political discussion would get off the ground, like one I had with Andrew
about Sabra and Shatila. It was 1983 or 1984 when this happened. I was very
touched by what was happening there and I couldn’t believe how Europeans were
so much in favour of sitting at a table to discuss things, which only meant
that no fighting was allowed and people were simply supposed to accept being
defeated by the more powerful forces who were all for Israel, no matter what
happened to the Palestinians.
Later on,
Andrew met my mother, and more discussions followed. He was then telling Jurgen
about my mother being a very well informed person. It was a surprise to them
that women from our part of the world should be able to talk about the politics
of the region we came from the Middle East with passion. Later on I came to
think that perhaps in Europe passion was only allowed in small doses in normal
life; people here usually didn’t take things as seriously as we did, and
perhaps that was a good thing.
Perhaps
people would have strong feelings for football and other sports matches, or for
music, and of course it was cute to have it in your relationships, but
politics? I suppose that was why the Spanish were considered to be a passionate
people in Europe because they could have political opinions, and that was why
they had the Civil War.
At this
time Silvana, Jurgen’s girlfriend from Naples, was telling me that Andrew had
been living on fried eggs for months and that was why he had got through his
degree. He had to save because he had very little money, and he had put all his
energies and resources into his project.
Jurgen and
Silvana were good together. Once we were preparing food in the kitchen and
talking about our lives. Silvana was a very sociable, fun type of person to be
with. I was twenty five and thinking about getting a degree, whereas Silvana,
who was thirty two, was asking me in a confidential way in her “napoletano”
dialect, which I was capable of understanding, earnestly and in a very
expressive manner, “ma io questi figli quando li devo fare?” which translates
as, “at this rate, when am I supposed to have children?” She was thinking about
creating a family; however, she knew well that it was difficult for her partner
to settle into the Italian way of life.
The
Italian way of life meant that if you didn’t have money already, you were never
going to make any in Italy unless you were a genius. Even to buy a small modest
apartment was an achievement, and I admired people who managed to do this using
their own capabilities. Later on I met Steve, who was teaching English at
university, and got his apartment by taking out a loan from the UK. I thought
how lucky my parents had been to move to Iran in the fifties when, along with a
lot of other people from various countries, they managed to get a loan and buy
their own family home.
Sometimes
when everything comes together with the right ingredients and at the right
time, a miracle happens. My parents had left India due to the separation of
India and Pakistan, and had then left Pakistan after a few years and had
started a new life in Iran. They could barely speak the Farsi language.
However, thanks to the Shah – during his Regime people could get mortgages –
and the demand for Middle Eastern oil at the time, and thanks to their
education and good, well-wishing Iranian friends – the population of the
country was 30 million and not the 70 million it is today – they eventually
found a steady occupation in the ministry and managed to put their education to
some use.
The work
situation was not promising in Italy in the 1980s, and you had to get in with
the right circles in order to find suitable jobs. I could see it in Guido’s
family, where it was through connections that people got real jobs. I suppose
that was why Jurgen decided upon a career in Africa, rather than getting
married and settling down in Italy. I thought that was adventurous, but later
on I found out that a lot of people left Europe in order to find work in less
developed countries because the fact was that in Europe the job market was
saturated.
One person
who did get married was Sonia. She and her fiancé Franco got married in the red
room in the town hall, and later on we all went to a house in the country to
celebrate. In a typical silly way some people would whine and ask Sonia, “but
what is his mother going to do now without Franco?”, and she would reply dryly,
“she’ll live”. Sonia was tough in a way, because she would be good at putting
people in their place if they annoyed her – something I always admired, because
I always thought about an answer years later!
My aunt
and my cousin Nadar came to visit me in 1984, when I was living in Via
Bolognese. Sonia really liked Nadar and she told me I should leave Italy and
return to my own family. I suppose, she had seen something of the truth of how
difficult it was for me, as she was a down to earth American from Ohio.
I really
liked the young people who, like myself, were trying to find a way to build
their future, and I was happy to have left the life I had led in the centre. It
had been the right thing to do. These people and their sense of solidarity and
friendship meant a lot to me; however at times, there were some unnecessary
frictions. Sonia was always
criticising Jurgen. In a way, all the Americans I met at that time had
something to say about the Germans.
I didn’t
think that was fair at all. I could imagine how stressful it must have been to
carry the burden of a country because I was experiencing it myself, having to
put up with being categorised as an Iranian, which was not a good feeling after
the revolution and the Iran/Iraq war. As if I had to answer for what was
happening in my country. For instance, once at the hairdressers near work, I
was getting a haircut and the man who was doing the work was saying, “Oh Iran!
It is one of those countries on the news all the time! There is lots of trouble
over there, while we live here in peace like good children!” Of course, it was
my fault for not knowing what to say, and I continued to be sat upon in many
occasions.
My cousin Ameneh,
Jurgen and Guido
It was
natural that I felt a sense of loyalty, because I had found this wonderful
apartment and was living in it because of Jurgen’s initiative. Actually, I
respected Jurgen even though he had decided against my renting the room and
joining them. How and why he changed his mind and later allowed me to stay, I
don’t know. Perhaps it was because Sonia and Andrew had said something in my
favour.
Via
Bolognese was a really enjoyable experience, except for my aunt’s visit, which
was sad.
I had told
my aunt that I had proposed to my cousin during my last months in the UK. I had
finally had the courage of speaking out because I saw she couldn’t understand
why me and my mother were hanging around in Karachi for months in her house. I
realised that the time was not appropriate. Then I had left for Italy, seeing
that I had created a lot of confusion and it was not getting cleared up in any
way. Why hadn’t I realised that many families were looking at my cousin as
God’s gift to their girls?
She and my
cousin were not happy to see me in the position I was in – I mean working as a
saleswoman and living with total strangers. It could have all gone differently.
Had the time been right, and if I had been lucky, I would have settled down to
a regular life among my own people. But in Iran, a revolution burst out of
nowhere and then a war with the neighbouring Iraq. The equilibrium was gone,
and my confusion had bought me to bitter tears many times. How lucky you are to
know the situation and the people you are dealing with. Today, I can see my
cousin’s point of view; I was a nice Iranian girl, but I wasn’t really
attractive or sexy or interesting. Some girls I have met are all that, without
even having had an education. It was probably a cultural difference and
attitude. In Iran and other Islamic countries, it is enough for a girl to be
nice and from a good family. But in the West, it is more complex.
My cousin
was much sought after by people in the family, and I was probably the last one
on his list; contrary to his ideal of himself, I thought that I could save him
from going away from his roots, but he probably didn’t need my help!
The River Watercolour
Print, 1999
Today, my cousin is married to one of his ex-students, from a normal
down to earth English family. They have a beautiful son and I am happy for
them. I am sure that if I had had my way, I would never have been happy with
them. More tears – and I am glad we didn’t get together because we are simply
very different – would be the consequence of that choice.
Moving To Via delle Cinque Giornate
My move to Via delle Cinque Giornate to the apartment of Mr Quercioli
with Jurgen, was accompanied by Guido, Sonia and Franco, who had become my best
friends. Franco was a nice serious family man, a Calabrese and an accountant,
and he was solid and reliable. He was of our generation. Guido from Rome was of
the 1968 generation, who went through the hippy type fashions. The Cultural
Revolution that took place in Europe during 1968 turned out to be very positive
– i.e. men really started to take women seriously. However, many people were
confused in their ideas about life and about who they were and what they
wanted.
The Bridge Watercolour, 2001
My Uncle Ismile, who was similar to Guido had seen the 1960s turmoil and
they were both similar in their ideas. My uncle had met Guido in the Via Maggio
apartment. He wasn’t worried about Guido, but he was disgusted with the nice
bourgeois place I had rented. He thought that I should be living in a students’
pad. He didn’t mind Guido, because he thought that they could understand each
other. At some point in life, you realise that most people really do not care
for other people that much, and when you have experienced lots of life, you
realise that there is a limit to your family and friends caring about you.
You think
that your family care for you deeply. But it isn’t that way at all. Most of
mankind is quite incapable of feelings. It is religion, philosophy and art that
bring out the best in humans and even these fail horribly most of the time.
I realised
this when I came back from Karachi to London in 1981, in order to get back to
studying in Cambridge at the course which I had paid for. I was given a very
hard time at Heathrow by an officer who said that they had read my private
diary, which was in my purse. I was accused of wanting to stay in England and
wanting to find a job. It was the year of the Iranian Revolution and before
leaving the UK, I had been told that if I stayed in the UK for three years I
would receive a British passport, but if I left, the conditions would be
different.
I had
needed to see my family more than anything else, and I had let the opportunity
of a lifetime pass by. The right wing government was doing its duty and sifting
out the people it didn’t want.
The Sitting Room with
Photographs Watercolour, 2005
My uncle didn’t care about me staying on, and so he let me go back to
Karachi without any resistance to this new development. One nice English woman
came to me and said that we could appeal against the decision. She was at least
sympathetic, but I was feeling that I would probably burden my uncle with my
presence.
Anyway, I
liked Karachi and all the new people that I had met there. In Iran, there was
the revolution and the war with Iraq, so staying in Pakistan with my aunt
seemed to be the only solution. Later, I left Pakistan and the prospects of
getting married and settling down there to return to Europe in order, to go to
university in Italy. That was my decision.
Sitting Room Watercolour, 2007
Having lived in Via Maggio and then the Via Bolognese apartments, I now
moved to the Via delle Cinque Giornate apartment. I was happy to move back to
the centre, because I felt that was sort of a protection. I knew that Jurgen
would soon sort out his doctorate and go to work somewhere in Africa. I thought
it was an okay solution to find a place to live for my project of going back to
university. I was really adamant about getting a degree, because I had been
slighted by people for not having one. I thought that if I had a degree, I
could defend myself the way my mother used to defend herself in society.
She had an
MA in English Literature and started working when she was twenty three. She
taught me that a woman had to fight in order to get somewhere in society, and
education was very helpful for this. Though many believed this to be true,
however being respectably married was the easiest way to social respectability
for single woman.
I had four
aunts, my father’s sisters, who didn’t get married. Homa was a nurse who had
studied in the UK after the Second World War, Maheen was a librarian who lived
away from the family in Shiraz, and the youngest of the eight children,
Tahmeen, was a secretary who was living with her father. She drove a cream
coloured Volkswagen around town and travelled abroad on her own. She tried to
keep high standards and compensate for the problem child of the family who was
Aunty Parveen. Parveen was the madwoman in the attic; she roamed the streets of
Tehran with a very focused expression as if she knew exactly what she was
doing, but she was perhaps autistic, or schizophrenic. Nobody really knew for
sure. She was not lucky enough to be born when people knew a bit more about
such ailments.
Her father
had not wanted to put her in an asylum and had made his other daughters look
after their sister. My aunts managed to survive by having a strong personality,
and they looked after their sister in their newly adopted country. They had
been brought up in India and now were in a new country, where getting respect
in male dominated culture was a struggle as it ever was.
I still
see family and friends in my dreams. These people, Sonia, Andrew, Guido and
Jurgen too. Jurgen found a job with the United Nations Organisation and went
off to Africa; I think to the Congo. I thought it was brave to make a move and
do something new, rather than settle down to an unsatisfying situation. He was
paid well and I did keep in touch for a while. He left the Via delle Cinque
Gironate apartment to me and said, “Why don’t you rent the rooms if you need
the money?” He was being practical. I had just enrolled in the university for a
degree course in English and German Language and
Literature. I couldn’t work and study at the same time. I lived by
sub-renting rooms from 1985 onwards.
Working on the Old Bridge
It was 1984 and 1985. I was twenty five years old and working at Ricci’s
Jewellery store on the Ponte Vecchio. I really wanted to be a student at the
university, otherwise I was just another foreign shop assistant looking to
settle down in Florence. I had left Anna Maria’s because I felt very oppressed
in that exclusively “business environment”. Anna Maria, the owner, was a very
charming woman.
She would
ask me, “Why do you buy a newspaper in
Italian if you can’t read it?”
I used to
buy La Republica every day and look
at the pictures and read the titles. I yearned for the day when I could master
the language enough to be able to understand Italian like I understood English.
The Confused Couple Oil
on canvas, 2006
In Anna Maria’s opinion, my buying the newspaper daily was a waste of
money because I couldn’t read Italian. She was the store’s owner, a petite
attractive woman with a huge voice and lots of sentiment. She had a very tall
husband called Renzo. They were very clever in their business, and I learnt a
great deal of her attitude towards selling things. I was keen to learn from
her, because she was full of vitality, good fun and very creative in her
attitude towards life. However her son, who was my age, had problems with
drugs, which was a sore point and made her compare me with her son. The poor
guy had a lot of pressure on him because he was an only child, and I could
understand why he was trying to do everything in order to please his parents.
The Soprano
Watercolour, 2007
Families are sometimes suffocating, especially when parents demand that
their children be successful, like other people they know, without considering
all angles of the picture. I could see how the conservative attitude of this
couple was getting a bit too much.
My parents
too had always been looking towards other people’s children and their
achievements. Being an Iranian and non-European worked against me as far as
finding another job was concerned. People’s attitudes were so different here,
and an education didn’t seem to count for much. When I told them that I would
like to go to university, they said that no one ever made money by studying,
and that degrees are all well and fine but are useless in life.
My friend
Sonia, too, had said, “Oh Boy!” – i.e. that university at twenty five meant a
huge amount of work, and for what?
I felt
there was that air of Fascism that repressed all youthful spontaneous joyous
impulses towards the open sky. Fascists like you to look down at your plate and
never look up from it. It is because if you look up, you might get ideas of
going after a better life. They want to keep you in your place. They want to
fix you like a butterfly by pinning you down in the situation you find yourself
in. That was how it was for me in the shop, and some other places where people
didn’t even want you to buy an intelligent and ambitious looking magazine. In
the new work place, I found, things were different.
I had
found a place on the old bridge, which seemed very professional. However, after
a while they let me go, saying that they were looking for a European.
Through a
Dutch friend’s contact, I had started working in a new shop selling jewellery
on the Ponte Vecchio.
Casa A Serpiolle
Watercolour, 1999
Mr Ricci Senior was never in the shop. He was a sixty year old with a
sensitive expression. He liked women and was rather tuned in to the female
mind. He had been a pianist in the past and so that was why the whole
establishment had an air of old money and refinement. It was Daniele, his very
tall son, who ran the place each day. He was a giant, one of those people who
genetically are huge, but he was well proportioned.
Daniele
used to put a nickname to all the people he knew. One guy who came into the
shop to sell things, was called ‘Piombo’ because he was very depressing. I was
nicknamed ‘Fenomeno’ – i.e. not normal – which I thought was very flattering.
But, I don’t know if it was meant well, because sometimes his snootiness came
out at the most unexpected situations. Rosanna was the manager of the girls.
She was about fortyish and was always knitting beautiful jumpers. I was
grateful for not being directly under the owners like in the other shop.
The view
from the window at Ponte Vecchio was gorgeous, but the shop didn’t have a
bathroom so people had to go the cafes in order to use the loo. There were many
rowing boats belonging to the boat club on the Arno. It was as if the people in
the boat club were sitting on the beach in the middle of the town centre, very
much like what they have in Paris today. In contrast to this, during the early
1980’, artisan and hippy type people used to sell their things on the bridge.
The Old
Bridge Type, Year?
There were lots of artisans on the old bridge. But in later years, all
these people were removed. There was a lot of drugs going around as well, I
think. I never really saw the drug culture, but later on in 2005 I was to know
Jacopo, Silvia and Marina’s story, who was affected by drugs. For many years, I
wasn’t aware of it being such a threat to a lot of young people. For me, I
would finish work and get back home by bus, always seeing the same faces of the
people who lived in Via Bolognese. I would wonder who they were and how they
used to live their lives.
That area, the old bridge, had an air of old families, country people and
good wholesome energies, just like the families I had known. I was so happy
that the Ricci’s were nice people, not controlling and not the type to put you
down.
Energies and
Tendencies Type, 1993-94
Energies and Tendencies is a painting that was sold in Dubai by a person
who worked in Mondo Art Gallery.
I loved living in the spring 14 area of Dubai. It was a very special
place, with lots of families with young children. It used to be fun to go out
and see everyone who lived there doing their thing. This was a very nice area
where people seemed to be well off. I had hoped to move here with my mother,
but she wasn’t destined to see this place.
Dubai has
many different faces to it, after I left the villa, I had taken on rent in the
Spring area. I still visited Dubai often and stayed in hotels.
I had to
leave my house in Tehran often because of the pressures from the anonymous
people. Perhaps some property developers had a plan to get rid of all the
people who were living alone in big houses like myself. I had seen people
sitting in the streets just watching, who came in and out of such houses. If
you were not in the house then it was inevitable that your belongings would not
be protected, because these people seemed to be able to get in one way or the
other. Once I had gone to the police, and the man in charge had told me
blatantly that I had to employ someone to watch the place when I wasn’t
there.
The same
sort of thing had happened to me in Via Fiesolana in Florence. That is why I
had my assistants there all day, and I was working hard to pay the bills. But I
could never understand what was going on and why this was happening. I was very
surprised to find the same thing happening in Tehran. Once when my mother was
alive and we were living in the Tehransar apartment, I had left her on her own
and gone out shopping, and when I came back she said that there had been a
young man dressed in military clothes who had come in on his own accord and sat
there with her for a while. He had then gone away without saying a word.
Now after
my mother passed away I was on my own and I didn’t want to live in Tehran. I
had seen a group of nervous people waiting in a car. It seemed they were paid
to do a job, and I was appalled by what was going on. They were waiting for
their turn to enter an apartment, and who knows do what. It was the new world
order at work; what they call the survival of the fittest. A woman I had met in
Berlin, Suzanne, had asked me with a mischievous smile, “How is it in your
area, and do you get on with the people?” Now I realised what she had meant.
Whatever the plan was, it was probably European.
Dubai was,
to say the least, a liberation. Someone had told me in Tehran that if you
prayed three hours a day things would change for you. Three hours! It was an
expression meaning a long time… Why I was putting myself through this type of
life was because I simply wanted to sell my place and go away, but I had been
tricked by a man who had said he would buy my house, and had then not paid me.
It took me two years to take him to court, after which I realised that it had
all been planned to a T and that he was only part of a huge machine all geared
and heading towards injustice.
Even the
lawyers knew about it. One young thirty year old lawyer had told me that my
case really didn’t look good, because I had to pay very high court fees.
Another less experienced lawyer had told me that he would pay the court fees
himself, and this made me decide to stay on and fight the case. It was a losing
battle, since his generosity and goodwill didn’t have any results. I had waited
two years to get my house back from a buyer who refused to pay me, and my
lawyer had disappeared and gone on a trip to the US, and had no intention of
fighting the case in court because he himself knew it was a game that was going
to result in me having to pay the man – who was supposed to pay me – and a lot
of other useless middle people. After all, it was the survival of the fittest
and I was not strong enough to protect what I had rightfully inherited from my
parents.
On the day
we went to court, the judge, who was a surprisingly young man, stuck out his
tongue; it was obvious that I was wasting my time, dreaming of having justice
done. I don’t blame it on the women’s
condition in Iran. This was an international plan. Later on I heard about other
people who had had to go through the same pressures. The buyer, a Mr
Najjar-Nejad, had told me himself in one of our arguments that even God himself
could not rescue me now. His partner Mr Sarafraz, who said his Islamic prayers
but was duping people as well, said to me that all the words I uttered would be
used against me.
He even
said that to my first lawyer, who quit after several attempts of talking to
them. They had told him that they would peruse him and reveal things about him
which were personal, which would certainly put him to shame. He gave up fighting
for my case after I had had to put up with him for several months. The poor man
seemed to have to scratch his balls every time he was introduced to people. He
embarrassed me, but he had a heart of gold and I know that it was the times we
were living in that made people misbehave. After all, what had anyone to lose
when I was a person on her own?
So why was
it that Robin had come to Via Fiesolana to visit me in 2003, for seeing all
this, and telling me that such a thing would happen to me in 2008? Was it
because she was a Zionist and a Communist?, I wonder. This type of prophecy was
to become a sort of constant element in my life from then on. Some people
simply knew what was going to happen next. That Communists had a part in all
this was clear. It seemed to me that Iran was a satellite, or was on the way to
becoming one, of its powerful neighbour, who was installing nuclear energy. Was
it them who were doing this?
I had read
in the English papers of a bizarre happening in London, where an old man who
was living in a big house in an expensive location was harassed by a man from
an exCommunist state, who later claimed to have inherited the place. It seemed
that some people wanted to get money effortlessly; another lawyer told me that
“they simply were plucking the fruit from the tree”, and didn’t intend to do
any harm to the tree itself.
A lot of people had to feel happy with that explanation.
That is
why my trips to Dubai took me to a country which was a sort of holiday haven. I
wish I had discovered Dubai before going to Italy, because it was a much better
place in the eighties, and people I met who had settled there in those years
were now well off and lived a relaxed lifestyle. I had met Lindsey, who was
English, in Florence, and she had told me that she’d lived in Dubai in those
years. Now I realised that she had been so much more experienced than many of
the people I met in Italy.
I had
found the Mondo Art Gallery in the mall of the Emirates whilst I was living in
the Spring
14 area in a villa I had rented in Dubai in 2007. I had actually gone to the mall that day to meet
Olivier, who was an estate agent. We met in a café and he showed me some
pictures of houses on his laptop, pictures of properties. My mother had just
passed away and I was thinking about moving back to Italy. I had to sell my
parents’ house in Tehran in order to buy a new place. After meeting the estate
agent, I went to the Mondo Art Gallery in the mall to check it out.
I had
always intended to go in and introduce myself, and this is how I met A, who was
the manager of the gallery.
I walked
in, and she was sitting there with a tense expression on her face, which wasn’t
welcoming or pleasant. She looked rather on guard and cross. However, I got up
the courage to go up to her desk and talk to her. I spoke to her in Italian and
she was nice; she told me that she would come to my house and see my work,
since she was living in a villa close to mine. My canvases were at home now, as I had got them sent over from Italy.
This was before I had to leave Dubai due to the problems with the sale of my
property.
In
Florence, Sarina had asked her singing colleague Anne to help me with my
belongings, which I had had to leave behind. Anne had been kind and had kept
them in the basement of the building, which belonged to the Evangelist church.
They were kept there for an entire year. I had gone to Florence to get these
things packed and sent to Dubai, with the intention of living in Dubai,
eventually selling my house in Tehran and moving out of Iran. I told A about my
plans of selling my house in Tehran. Probably that was a mistake. I wasn’t
aware that the microphones were hiding very unscrupulous people behind them.
People’s
interest in selling my property seemed weird. It wasn’t the normal type of
interest as it had a predatory feel about it. Perhaps some people had been
fleecing the population in the middle east for many years, through these
methods of collecting information – i.e. security and control with microphones
and CCTV. Someone was war mongering in the Middle Eastern property market in
this way for ages. How naïve of me to have made the mistake of saying anything
about the sale of my property to anyone at all.
A was a
woman from northern Italy, and she selected some of my paintings and held an
exhibition of them for two weeks.
She managed to sell this painting called ‘Energies and Tendencies’ to a
man who, she said, bought the painting because he liked her! I appreciated the
energy she put into talking about my paintings to the clients. She really did
put her heart and soul into her work, and was very stressed out most of the
time. She had to quit the job several months later. The painting ‘Energies and
Tendencies’ was about Iran and the Middle East. I had purposely not hung the
two canvases on the wall the way they are supposed to be hung, because I was
afraid that the outline of the map of Iran would become an issue with people
viewing it in the gallery.
The two
panels, if stuck together the right way, would give an outline in white and
red, which was the “cat like” outline of the map of Iran. I hadn’t meant to do
a picture about Iran, but there was so much going on in the picture, that I
thought, “Hey! This looks like a turbulent mess, like the Middle East”. Then
there are drawings of the cell division, which meant new births and new
mutations and new life and everything, because that was what was happening in
Iran and the Arab countries of the region. Perhaps there is energy in the
Middle East because of the ongoing struggle to survive.
Energies and Tendencies
(Detail)
There are flowing colours, because I wanted to show the undercurrents to
our political situation. Whether Soviet Russia’s influences through the
indoctrination of young minds or America’s influence, everyone was in Iran
undercover. Even China was now courting Iran, because after the war with Iraq
there was a whole country just waiting to be rebuilt from scratch.
However,
the Middle East is unstable because we have too many pressures from the outside
and are never left in peace to develop as we need to do. Our culture and
traditional ways don’t help us get organised because they are manipulated by
foreign powers all the time. Who knows if the person that bought this painting
knows what I meant to say, but I am sure that he liked the detailed state of
confusion depicted in it.
Detail of ‘Energies and
Tendencies’
I selfishly wish there had been no revolution in the country where I was
born, so that my life would not have had to change. The revolution had some
positive points, but it had made us easy prey to the countries whose people had
no fear of God. While we were praying away, they worshipped the “golden calf”,
and were getting away with doing this at our expense. They were the new gods,
operating from behind the scenes, they were holding onto the strings of our
lives and they really could not and did not care for the suffering they caused.
I can testify to many young people committing suicide or dying of heart attacks
in Tehran for the rough use of this new invisible power.
I can
imagine that the elitist control practiced by the security forces behind the
CCTV and the microphones – their treatment of people’s private lives as their
personal serfdom – to be one of the reasons for revolt in the middle east. In
the month of Ramadan in August 2011 in Syria, people are going out every Friday
to meet their deaths with no fear. How far have they been pushed to not want to
live?
After the
revolution in Iran, universities closed in the country and a negative view of
Iranians took hold and flourished due to the US hostages of the Embassy, and
then the Iran/Iraq war. And now the control of Stalinists with their Stasi
methods. How bad could it get for us Iranians who were trying to live out our
little lives like everybody else? Having lost all our privileges from one day
to the next, who could be happy in this new situation?
My own
life tossed about like a little boat on the ocean waves, destiny had come to put us in our place. We were once
again a tribal people, just as we had always been. The citizen mentality of
Western Europe, which was what we aspired to, was still an ideal to be reached.
The population went from thirty million to seventy million, and the new
generation was bought up on other values – hence the name ‘Energies and
Tendencies’ – a new era had begun for all of us.
One good
thing that came out of the revolution was that we no longer had a stuffy Asian
class system which saw people stuck in the social status they were born into.
The Arab Spring in 2011 was about similar issues. Work and the working classes
were finally discovered.
Today in
2009, the 1st of November, Iran is negotiating with the West, trying
to be accepted by the world as a nuclear country. The many years of war in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and the problems in Pakistan are being kept at bay – here in
Iran perhaps, by the prayers of our saintly people?. Even today, the stability
in Iran is a miracle.
In the
poem ‘Out There’, I want to give the message to people who want to do something
in their lives to just do it, procrastinating because you feel tied by feelings
for others is useless. You have to try your luck one way or the other, because
the individual can be overwhelmed by the immensity of the things that are going
on. This is a tribute to all the people who take that boat and come out trying
to cross the waters in order to seek a better future somewhere else. You risk
your life and no one can guarantee anything.
Out There
Out There, Out There
So many people are doing their own thing,
Walking,
Talking, Working, Calculating And the Cash Register Is always Ringing.
Money is lost,
And Money is gained
That is the eternal story
Of The People walking to and fro,
They are
used and abused They do use and abuse, Out There, out There.
Here
I live in a picture of my own
I Do and Do and Do Dream
Here am I
I am sitting Here
Dreaming of the wide Horizons of Possibility
Dreaming like youth of what is to come
Dreaming of the wide Horizons of Probability
There are so many people Out There
Who think in a logical rational way
They Walk , Talk, Work, Calculate
They
They are changing the world
Money is lost
And Money is gained
In Factories and Chemical Industries
The new science religion of Nuclear Power and Energy
Sends Spaceships to Mars and Mercury
That, is the
Eternal Story Of Destruction, and Construction Out There, Out There.
Here,
Here I Sit in a picture of my own
I Do Dream
And my hands
are tied behind my back Here I sit thinking of the friends that I don’t make Of
the good Music in me that no one hears Yes!
They are changing the face of this earth And I am embarrassed.
Here I sit in a picture of my own
Dreaming of
the wide Horizons of Possibility Dreaming like youth of what is to come
Dreaming of the wide Horizons of Probability.
And Hope still lives in me
Now;
Now is the Time
For my Dreams to step out
It is Time Now
For the paintings which live in my imagination
For the children who live in the center of my cells
For the Music which plays my sentiments so clear
And for the Poetry which wills to have its own way
It is Time now for them to step out
And give me a Face; a Place; an Identity
In the reality Out There.
Out There,
People Do Dream, and Dream, and Dream
They Listen intently at the throbbing of their hearts
They Sit and
Register on their Souls center, They register like Seismographs The reality.
Here
We Sit
Looking out of the Windows of our Homes
We Sit Here
Dreaming
Dreaming
Dreaming about the wide Horizons of Possibility Dreaming like Youth of
what is to come,
Dreaming of the wide Horizons of Probability.
Oh rational self,
You always
want to control life with your Horizontal and Vertical lines, Lines which go up
and down, left and right,
So that you
can protect yourself from suffering In the immense Sea Of the irrational.
The irrational life which throws you here and there and everywhere.
A Page From A Diary
21st OCTOBER 2003?
The linden trees on
Independence Day
Fascinated dreamers
They cast a spell (with their
giddy perfume)
You have to struggle to resist
their magnetic force
Their temptation
Sprinkled mercilessly in the
atmosphere
I am the only one who
understands them
Perhaps because I am alone
This array of trees
They are
Unscrupulous and base
Predators
Who want to bend our will to
their wishes
They want to make us give up
resisting them
Their accomplice, cropped
grass
Has a fresh perfume
Seemingly innocent
Together they are trying
to…make me become like them
But they can’t make me
You poor deceitful trees
Standing tall and ambitious
With your branches tensely
reaching out Out-towards the limits of the sky Are you trying to hide-your
fears?
You are unable to walk
The linden trees on
Independence Day
I try to escape their smell
I struggle
In order to resist their
temptation
Their magnetic force
Is in the giddy perfume
They sprinkle mercilessly in
the atmosphere
Theirs is a difficult game
Perhaps because I am alone
like them
They army of trees
They are
Cleverer than me
Unscrupulous and base
Predators
Who want us to bend to their
wishes and whims
Who want to
Make us give up
Resisting them
The cropped grass
Fresh perfume of seemingly
innocent
Is their accomplice
Together they are trying to
make me become like them
But they make me…
Can’t
You poor deceitful trees
standing there
With your branches
Tensely reaching out
Towards the limits of the sky
Are you trying to hide
Your fears
You even recite poetry
Saying that you enjoy graceful
occupations Claiming for yourselves
Quiet greatness and noble
simplicity…..
You make me pity you
Can you tell
Like primitive warriors and
hunters
You are pulsating predators
prowling
Looking out for fresh flesh
So that you can suck vitality
and life
And turn into stone a creature
who was roaming free
Even so, you claim to be
graceful
Reciting the poetry, of
Quiet greatness and noble
simplicity
You make me pity you
I can see you are like
Primitive warriors, or
Hunting predators
Prowling
You search for fresh flesh
So as to suck vitality and
life
And turn into stone a creature
who was roaming
Existing in freedom
A minute ago
Walking this earth one morning
In the Piazza
I saw you and you were not in
your usual sombre files
Seemingly old and static
Standing-solid
I observed you from a hidden
place
While you began to dance
A dance of servile devotion,
as if
You were dancing in a humble,
servile fashion
Desiring to please
A severe judge – You were
dancing trees
Who bore coloured fiery
flowers
Born out of the tension of the
test
Which made you sprinkle
Your perfume in the air
While you pretended to be
Quiet and simple seemingly
noble creatures
You were adoring a presence
Your funny trunks
Ridiculously rigid
When moving in the rhythm
You were trying to please
An invisible being
You were in prayer
To a divinity unknown
I saw you…
Whilst you held up above you,
your thousand branches
Wantonly moving with the wind
in
Voluptuously undulating
movements
From root to each and every
leaf-dancing in silent reverence
You were dancing in a humble,
servile fashion
Desiring to please
A severe judge – You were
dancing trees
Who bore coloured fiery
flowers
Born out of the tension of the
test
Which made you sprinkle
Your perfume in the air
While you pretended to be
Quiet and simple seemingly
noble creatures
A minute ago
Existing…
Walking this earth one morning
In the Piazza
I saw you and you were not in
your usual sombre files
Seemingly cold and static
Standing tall and solid,
placed on the ground.
I observed you from a hidden
place,
While you danced
A dance of servile devotion,
as if
You were adoring a pagan god
With rhythmical movements
Of your trunks
So ridiculously rigid
You were trying to please
An invisible being…..
A divinity
You were in prayer
To a being……..unknown I saw
you, did you know?
I saw you whilst with your
thousands of branches
Held up above you harmoniously
With the wind blowing in
undulating motion
Moving
Your bodies were from their
Roots to each and every leaf,
in silent reverence
You were dancing in a humbly,
servile fashion
Desiring to please
A severe presence (who judged
you)
You were dancing trees
Who bore fiery flowers
The tension of the test
Made you sprinkle your perfume
in the air
While you pretended
To be quiet and simple, even
noble creatures
You were dancing in a humble,
servile fashion
Desiring to please
A severe judge – You were
dancing trees
Who bore coloured fiery
flowers
Born out of the tension of the
test
Which made you sprinkle
Your perfume in the air
While you pretended to be
Quiet and simple seemingly
noble creatures?
I am fascinated by you
Trees in love
But I try to escape from your
spell
Song For Big Brother
Living In Big Brothers Surveillance Society
“If You Stick Out Your Tongue”
Maybe I won´t hurt you
Cause by doing this
You are admitting submission
To the powers that be
You are adhering
To my point of view
The way I see things You have
got to play the game According to my rules:
Weaknesses
Vulnerabilities, and your
problems
Are good for my purpose
And when you are down
I am there beside You To make
use of the situation.
Each and every one of us
Thinks… Quite naturally
Live and let die…
Cause we have only got one
life to live And none of us wants to be caught by “Caligula”
(He is not a nice person at
all)
(He used to watch with
pleasure the Christians thrown to the animals)
So we say: “Why not adhere”?
And each individual
Will do exactly as they are
told
We all have a lot of things
We would like to achieve
A lot that we´d like to hold
onto
Some people adhere
Because they live at the
bottom of the social ladder
They like the power: Women
Women love having power
They love the power of putting
the fear
The fear of God in you
“God” can take away your loved
ones
God can reprimand you when you
are having sex
Little “gods” are in all the
nooks and crannies of your life
Streets full of CCTV´s
Rooms full of microphones
In Your homes and offices Just
so that we can control You Big Brother
is Here!
This is the way the decadent
century begins
Say Goodbye to the free-world
as you knew it
Security and Surveillance
Are here to stay
You might as well get used to
it
Privacy is a luxury
The future is full of
Information manipulators (who
put microchips where ever they please)
Microphones and CCTV´s
Will cover our cities and our
lives
Spies and stalkers in the
streets
Listening to every word
Reporting moves and political
opinions
(Doesn´t it remind you of
North Korea ? )
(Or military rule in Burma?)
People in many countries have
lived,
With Big Brother watching them
for many years Why should You be Free?
Why should you live a
spontaneous life?
Where love and anger and other
emotions
Were not speculated upon
Now that we have gotten a TV
Watching every bodies life
Like little gods behind the scene We sit:
Omniscient and omnipotent….
If You stick out your tongue I
promise I won´t hurt you
If you are one of “Us”
We will make sure that you are
well connected
We will look after you;
See to it that you get things
done (you get more information)
Carry out my orders
And I will give you the right
instructions
In order to get on in the
competition
I can read your innermost
thoughts and fears
So Fear and Love
Your beloved protector and
benefactor.
Be loyal to me
So that my voice shall be your
voice And I will allow you to use your PC I will allow you to get on with your
life.
“You must stick out your
tongue”
You must reassure me
That You belong to Me,
You are saying that the
cultural differences between us don´t exist
You are assuring me that you
fear
The “Islamic Bogymen” That You
are not a nuisance
Or a dangerous minded person.
That you will not dare to
“believe “in anything else.
Stick out your tongue (at the
corner of your mouth)
And I will give you Joy,
Joy in Business and material
gain.
Oh Big Brother!
I know which way my bread is
buttered
Please don´t mess up my life
You exercise pure Power I know you are here to stay!
Cause you are protecting us
By milk shaking our brains
Rightly you are creating
Homogenized… Zombies
Big Brother says:
I want to create a New World
Order
Where feelings of humanity are
banished for ever,
My Religion is based on
Profit,
You have to realize, that
nothing is for free Not even the breath you are taking.
You have to pay for
All the benefits you are
receiving.
Like Abraham’s God
We want to rule your hearts
and minds
(Abraham broke the Idols in
the Temple if you remember)
“Stick out your tongue”
And I promise I won´t hurt you
Or your beloved ones
And the benefits are
That you will be connected
And perhaps I will allow you to live A little.
(I am taken aback by the self
confidence
And yet I dream
That one day
The situation will turn
around
And I won´t have to be eating
humble pie
One day soon the wheel of
fortune will do justice
And I hope that I will have
the last laugh
There have always been unjust
big brothers in the world
Like in Hamlet
They think they can get away
With all the sufferance they
cause
I hope that God who has
created the universe
Will finally look at us
And make Big Brother Back Off
Cause we just want to live in
peace
And love our neighbour as much
as one of us…
The persecutions and the
Inquisitions
Did manage to succeed
But why do we always have to go
back to those things?
Mr B a famous politician says
he has chosen this policy
Of “the survival of the
fittest”
Because he wants to save
“Our way of life”
But meanwhile he gets paid for
giving talks
About how he would solve the
questions on the table
And then he politely bows out
Having contributed nothing at
all
And yet we idiots believed in
him.)
May 2012
I started writing this poem when I was in Tehran, in 2006. I had come
away from Viareggio and had started to live with my brother and my mother again
in 2006.
I had had
an Art Studio in via Fiesolana from 1998 to 2004 and had experienced a lot of
pressure from anonymous people who used to get in and out of my studio when I
was not in it myself. They used to take things which were important to me. And
afterwards someone would appear and stare at me hard. This always frightened
the life out of me. Once a young girl came in and she had such an omnipotent
expression on her face while she was staring… It was very strange, and I wish I
could have asked her, “what do you want?”,
But I had
no strength to protect myself from such hard hearted gazes.
Another
time a smiling girl came, and I will always be grateful for her smile. A lot of
inexplicable things were going on. One day at the bank I saw a non-Italian
white woman approaching the bank manager all tongue, she was rolling it out so
much … in front of everybody watching her …. And I thought “what is going on
here?”
One of my
friends said that it meant “do you want to have sex?” The married women I knew
were all into it. In my mind I was really confused. If I had had a TV I would
have probably caught onto what was going on…. But I had not watched TV for ten
years and I had painted and read books and prayed. It seemed too diffuse and
common when I was out in the world again in 1998.
I was
pondering the meaning for many years, even in Tehran it was the biggest trend.
So much so that you seemed to not get anything done without doing it.
That’s why
I thought about putting my feelings of fear and my suffering from not having
adhered to it in words.
I will never
forget all the harm I received by this
“religious” group. Their persecution will probably never leave their
victims alone.
This is the poem “pages from a diary” in Italian
I have written them in this language to begin with and then translated
them into English.
Pagina
Dal Diario
“Canzone agli Alberi della piazza d´Indipendenza”
Subisco il fascino
Ma cerco di fuggire l´incanto
Ogri giorno cerco di resistere
alla tentazione
Ogri mattina lotto contro la
forza magnetica;
Il profumo inebriante ´degli
alberi e´ sparso impiestosamente nell aria
E´ un gioca difficile
Io sono sola di fronte
all’esercito degli alberi
Loro sono pin furbi di me;
“Ignobilmente senza scrupoli”
Vogliono assoggettarrni alla loro
volonta’
Cercano di rompere la mia
resistenza
E hanno la complicita’
E l’amicizia dell’erba appena
tagliata
Albei; poveri paralizzati
creature…..
Sempre con le vostre mani estese
in tensione
Verso il limite dell’atmosfera
Mascherate la vostra vita
interiore con
“Stille grosse und edle einfalt”
con la tranquilla grandezza e
nobile semplicita’, mi fate pena sapete?
Mi fate pena perche come gli
antichi cacciatori, oppure gli uomini
primitivi
Cercate la viva carne fresca e
pulsante
Una preda cercate
Per sbranarlo e succhiare la
linfa vitale di quella
Che prima esisteva in libero
movimento
Una mattina mentre passavo dalla
piazza
Vi ho visto e non eravate pin
eretti e fermi come sempre Di nascosto, vi osservavo dall’angoli degli occhi,
mentre
Voi in un balletto devoto e
servile
Come gli adoratori pagani
Con movimenti ritmici di vostri
tronchi rigidamente ridicoli
Cercavate di compiacere
A un essere divino ed invisibile
Voi alberi freddi e marmorei Adoravate
un essere Frantumato…..sapete?
Vi ho visto…..sapete?
Vi ho visto che con le mille mani
In estensione verso l’infinito
Con le vostre braccia
E movimenti
Armoniosamente ondulanti
Pulsavate dalle radici sino
Alle estremita’ delle foglie…..
Di una volutta’ soffocata
Eravate servilmente umili e
ardentemente
Deridersosi di compiacere ad un
essere divino
Un severo gindice per il quale
danzavate
Danzarate o alberi e ogni
mattina,
Dalla tensione della prova
Vi nascevano dei Fiori di fuoco
che spargevano
Impietosamente il vostro profumo “Stille grobe und edle
einfalt”
Subisco il fascino di voi alberi
in amore,
Ma cerco di fuggire l’incanto…
11th February
1993
Al Noor, oil on canvas, 1989
From the Holy Koran
The Chapter Al Noor (meaning
Light) v.35, 36
“God is the light of the heavens and the earth, his light is like this:
there is a niche, and in it a lamp, the lamp inside a glass, a glass like a
glittering star, fuelled from a blessed olive tree from neither east or west,
whose oil almost gives light even when no
fire touches it – light upon light- God guides whoever he will to
his light; God draws such comparisons for people; god has full knowledge
of everything”
4. Al-Noor
This is one of the first paintings, which I find has balance and equilibrium.
The point is that when one paints abstract paintings without having a
direction, the painting is an adventure and happens on its own. It isn’t an
action painting, because this intuitive painting has certain guidelines and
isn’t totally left to chance like action painting. Rather, it is an image which
you have inside of you, and you project it on the canvas – fishing it out, as
it were. I remember that was what some romantic painters thought of painting;
the image was there in your subconscious mind somewhere and it just had to be
captured.
This
painting I called ‘Noor’ – i.e. ‘light’. But it is very dark and only the
centre yellow patch can justify it being called light, meaning that in a world
of darkness and confusion, when there is light, things have outlines and one
can distinguish ones surroundings; that is what light does.
This is a
very stern image, really earthy with the browns and the greens, and it reminds
me that mother nature is rough and unkind most of the time. Mankind is
perishable and nature has always been a force which he has had to struggle with
in order to survive. The prospect of death and disease has always made men and
women search for ways to prolong their stay on earth. Centuries have passed
with humans clinging on to gods of one kind or the other before coming up with
the concept of an abstract God. One wonders why humans have been and are so
materialistic. And yet, they have reached a point of abstraction.
But then
there is that something which is unfathomable and ethereal in this painting. In
the midst of the heavy as it were; down pulling weight of reality. Light is
uplifting in a miraculous way. It can fly above the flesh and the sinews and
the issues of being alive on this earthly dimension.
It is as
if I were walking with my soul hanging out for water; I walk the desert
dehydrated as a plant and then all of a sudden, I come to an oasis where there
is water and the safety of the trees and vegetation. This an analogy to our
spiritual need for hope in a difficult world, described so well in the first
chapters of the novel The Source or Hawaii, written by James Michener, where
humans would do anything to have rain falls or to keep negative times and
situations at bay.
Noor, the
light, is hope, and it is also good news, a sort of light at the end of the
tunnel; a gift from God the creator, who declares himself a friend of the
believers.
I have
written the verse from the Holy Koran around it in a Persian, which is not at
all refined. It is more the handwriting of a child. This is because I wanted to
represent an every man or woman who is not necessarily refined, or even
educated. Perhaps because I think God isn’t classist or sexist and appreciates
the heartfelt feelings of the believers.
The verse
describes the feeling of light – i.e. of God’s presence. It is such a
mysterious way of comparing the light of God to a light of something material.
The light of God would be like this, it says, rather than describing God
itself. “God is the light of the heavens and the earth. His light may be
compared to a niche that enshrines a lamp”.
This
painting was given as a gift to my childhood friend. Today in August 2011,
there is the prospect of famine in Somalia. People have lost their animals and
thousands are leaving their villages in order to take refuge in and around
cities. It is a hopeless situation. Who can sustain these thousands, and for
how long? It reminds you of the biblical stories about Egypt and the story of
the Prophet Joseph. The seven lean years have perhaps returned.
Robin &Sarina
After the divorce, Robin had sold her house and had lots of millions in
old lire in the bank. Now she was on her way to a new future. I’ll never forget
the little apartment she had bought in the Via delle Pergola, No. 50, in front
of the hospital, because I had spent some days staying there. I wished that I
was as practically minded as she was. She could organise her life, and even
having a terrible private life didn’t touch her deeply. How did she keep
buoyant? After all, our emotional life is our ship which keeps us floating on
life’s ocean. My prayers were my way of navigating the waters of life. But
what did she have? Relationships with people?
The thing she did was to visit a psychologist, who seemed to have told
her that our friendship was bound to fail. So, instead of saying, “I’m sorry if
I hurt your feelings”, she just continued on her way, dropping me out of her
life. I’m sure I knew that this relationship/friendship would go like that. I
hadn’t altogether invested too much in it, as I knew I was going in a different
direction.
I had
liked her for her qualities, her sense of humour and her indefatigable energies
in work and play different directions – so it was inevitable. However, we did
have some good times before we fell out.
I was working in a jewellery store in Piazza S Croce that summer, and
she called me one day and said, “Why don’t we go on holiday to Maremma
together”? I was enthusiastic, but what was in the news then in 1993 and 1994
was that some people were throwing stones at moving cars on the Auto Strada. It
was on the news all the time, and that made me afraid, but it didn’t bother
her. She had a new red sports car and we had been going around looking at
houses for her to buy. I had volunteered to go with her, because I thought one
day I might want to buy something in Italy. It was just to do something
interesting and to be in her company. I was happy to have a friend from New
York, because Robin was interesting and of another background. We drove down to
the Parco del Uccellino and had a little adventure in the countryside, trying
to find a place to stay the night. We found this house in the country with a
strange man who professed to be a witch doctor. It was very scary, to say the
least. Going on that trip inspired me with very sad feelings.
I had a
much more fun time with Sarina and Eric. Even though they didn’t have money,
they had the spirit and were sort of innocent and had self-absorbed
originality, and that is what makes fun. When they were preparing to go somewhere
like a wedding, Eric would shout up to Sarina to ask what she was going to wear
with enthusiasm, as if it was of the greatest importance to him as well; what
she wore and how she looked. Eric had lived in Pietra Santa, as he professed to
be a sculpture.
I thought
that Sarina’s living in Piazzas Spirito was the reason I found her exciting to
be with, even though I had known her before that. But it was not that. The
place contributed to the social life that she loved with all her singing
friends. A lot of people sang in the church choirs like her. Through singing in
the choirs and at weddings, she had become a known personality. In her own
sphere, people knew her and she went to all the parties, which were the right
ones.
She hung out with the artists, or the aspiring ones. I think her
attitude of working hard towards a goal was admirable. It really reminded me
very much of a humble way a person in love approaches an unreachable beloved.
She had made up her mind to enjoy whatever life gave her on her way to her
goal, that had always been to become a professional soprano. Unlike
Robin, she wasn’t at all demanding. How did she manage to do everything?
I couldn’t understand how she found the time to sleep, with the few hours that
she got to be in her house. It was extraordinary! My life was certainly the
laziest life of the three of us because I absolutely needed to sleep a lot. I
had learnt to do that from Philippe, who was sort of a dormouse.
My mother
too always said that it was best to sleep as much as one could when one got the
chance to do it. Robin and Sarina however were not into wasting time sleeping
at all. They both went jogging in the morning – ugh!
Sarina,
too, did these superwoman type things. But she really had a strong Latin sense
of life as well. The Anglo Saxon part of running after achievements and being
matter of fact was a part of her personality. She disliked Eric not
having money and not working.
But she did like to be sociable and to be right in the middle of the
action, and to know everybody in the world, especially the people who were the
“in type”. She was in with such a wide range of people through her singing
friends. It was mind boggling how many people she knew and the circles she
moved in.
But her
heart was in the small intimate private life, and that wouldn’t allow her to
use relationships in order to move up socially. She couldn’t be mercenary in
her friendships, even if she wanted to. I suppose being an artist means that
those heart issues and feelings are very important. I appreciated her being
childlike in that sense. I think that we were similar in that way. In that, we
hadn’t lost that little girl inside, and that that child was still walking with
us through our life, hindering us in some ways, but still making us look up in
wonder at the stars in the night sky.
Eric was
an idealist too and in that sense he liked Sarina. One could tell that he was
very irresponsible. He had lovely long hair, braided down his back Indian
style, that made him look very romantic. Together with Marco the photographer,
who looked like someone out of Led Zeppelin, they were a team of hippy type
idealists. Did anyone I know work in Florence? A lot of people that I’d known
in their thirties didn’t really work at all. Many of them stayed at home and
had no money. It required courage to go out there and participate in the world.
I had
worked as a saleswoman, but preferred to rent out rooms like Marco had done for
many years. It wasn’t a healthy life at all, and people didn’t respect that.
Eric too was the type that wanted a good job, and not just any old type of
work. He used to talk big about space and spaceships and it was top quality
that he was after. It was refreshing to talk to someone who still hoped that
good things could happen in the future. I think that it may be the pioneer
spirit of the Americans that is so attractive. Because whilst Asians and
Europeans are tied to the ground by their feudal history, always interested in
who owns land and who doesn’t, these new continent people I knew had a totally
different attitude. The ‘can do’ attitude in Eric and Sarina didn’t last. There
were too many people after Eric, and they didn’t have the stamina to make it as
a couple.
I mean
Patriza, who had met Eric at a party at my house, fell for him. That was why
Sarina blamed the party at my house, for bringing Patriza and Eric together,
resulting in Sarina losing him. Sarina then met Curro who was Spanish, into
opera and owned a Harley Davidson type of motorbike.
He was working for a noble family in Florence, and was much more
together than the rest of us. Eric was expensive, and Patriza had the money.
She appreciated him because he was an American and in a sense different. She
put up with a lot, because one could tell that Patriza and Eric worked really
hard to keep up the relationship they had started. Patriza had always liked the
idealist types and she was into nobility, like Eric’s previous Italian
girlfriend.
Socially
it worked, and Patriza then went to the States with him. She became a better
person having gone through that experience. One thing about Eric was that he
did care about other people – his group, as it were. One day, after I had got
my money – the ‘reward’, as Steve called it – for doing the case against the
jewellery shop in which I had been harassed, Eric came to Via delle Cinque
Giornate on his own, like I had read in the Surat al Yasin – a man came running
to give Moses the news. He said to me, “You must start to work, because the
money is going to soon disappear”. He was right, because the money was only
twenty million old Lire. I knew that if I paid all the rent money that I owed
for the apartment, I could keep the apartment forever, according to the Italian
laws then. However, I decided against this, as I didn’t want to make the
apartment, which wasn’t mine, the centre of my life like Marco had done. It
made me feel bad about what I was doing to the owners.
I thought that it was God’s wrath upon me that I didn’t feel happy with
my life and couldn’t find a way out of my problems. I thought about Nadia and
how courageously she had lived and worked in the hotel as a receptionist for
some years, but had decided to go back to France. She had made a strong
decision and taken responsibility. I felt that I was becoming too Italian.
Living with compromises makes one weak and tired. That is why I decided to let
the apartment go and to eventually get evicted from it. I had lived in this
apartment on the ground floor of Via delle Cinque Giornate, No. 6, for fifteen
years.
I could have married somebody and settled down and had children. But
that wasn’t why I’d come to Europe at all. I had come to Europe because I
wanted to become a person who produced good art, and achieving that was utmost
on my mind.
It was posterity that I was thinking of because I thought that all
children in the world could be my children if I had a good message to give
them. I disliked the idea of thinking about reproducing one’s DNA in a world
which had always been a difficult place. I mean, if I’d had the strength to do
that, I would have had a family. But, I was usually the one that got hurt in
relationships.
Mr X said
that he thought of getting married, but that I would have to wait. No one was
crazy enough to want to get married to someone like me! I thought of myself as
being very depressing. I had lost the chance of my life, when Philippe had once
politely asked about us getting engaged. I had been flippant about it and had
ignored his serious words. He had always been very sweet so it was my own fault
for not knowing what is was that I was after.
I spent
the next ten years thinking about Philippe every day, and desiring to be with
him in every relationship I had. Even when I was with Sarina, Robin, Mr X and
Nadia, I was wishing to be with him. I was one person with two hearts. It was
amazing, like having two photographs that didn’t sit right together, even
though they were the same. I thought about my Islamic background and how that
would hinder me from being with anyone from the West. Also, how any Islamic man
would hinder me from being free to grow as a person.
1. Santo
Spirito & Sarina & Marco
In any case, no one was asking me, “What is it that makes you feel happy
because I want to make you feel happy or be part of your happiness”. I recently
saw that in a film and I thought I’ve always been so selfish and self-centred.
I suppose I have never been out there trying to make anyone feel happy but
myself. Only once in a surge of enthusiasm ,which I couldn’t understand myself,
I thought that I could teach Mr X English and that would have made a difference
in his life. But I thought it too much of a mad idea, and as he was so much
into his own routine, it didn’t seem to be realistic.
What am I,
some sort of teacher? I thought to myself, that he talked about his friends at
the market ‘liking him just the way he was’. So I came to the conclusion that
he wouldn’t have tried to make an effort. The market stalls are where people
fall in and out of relationships, and he had a lot of friends at work. He was
saying how one Italian girl had come and sat on his lap one day and how they
called him nicknames. I thought that there is so much that I don’t know about
this person and so much he isn’t telling me – and so much he will never tell
me.
I had a
feeling that there was someone very important in his life, and that I wasn’t
such a hot item for him after all. Then I thought, well, I’ll ask him to get
married, and he knows how important that is. I can’t be hanging around here
waiting for him to decide, so I will have to go ahead and do my thing.
As I guessed, he didn’t pursue the issue much and we left it at that.
That was in 1994, after my mother had come to visit me and I had told her about
him. She met him and told me that he was a bright person who wouldn’t stay in
his social position but would go further. I thought that was so generous of her
to say that – thank you Mum! I was really grateful that she was optimistic
about him. But at the same time she said, “You know you must find someone who
is from the same background”. I don’t know if she said “like us”, but I think
she meant educated. An education had been so important to myself, and to the
people in my family. Even my uncle had got a degree at forty after having
worked at the travel agency for many years.
He started to go to university late and got his BA, and then started to
teach. I understood where she was coming from. Karina had told me some years
back when we were sitting in Piazza Santa Spirito to go and talk to Philippe
when he had approached me. But that was just before my degree, and I thought
that I couldn’t afford to get into an emotional tangle after such a lot of hard
work. I had let him go. He had definitely been very important to me.
I realised that I had such an important thing to finish and that I would
lose it if I kept running after people all the time. I had wanted to get a
degree because of my parents as well. I suppose in order to make everyone
happy. I had left home for this purpose and I was delivering what I said I
would do. I am sure that my parents would have been much happier if I had
brought children into this world and made a family for myself.
Life in
post-revolutionary Iran had lowered the standards, and people didn’t expect
much from woman. Making a family was a prestigious achievement for a woman. In
fact, after all my efforts for getting a degree, all my mother had to say was,
“So you finally pulled yourself up to my level”, which was a sign that
my family weren’t very impressed at all. I know that a BA degree is for when
one is twenty three and not the age of thirty two. I had given up my happiness
on the way, but I was happy that I had finally understood what was good for me.
My Swedish
flatmate Karina, who was a very smart woman and who seemed to be observing my
life, had also told me that I didn’t seem to have much time to spend in a
family or a relationship anyway. Even if I had wanted to, I had too many things
that were important to me. She had been right. I was on my way to producing an
art studio, and that needed all my strength and concentration. Philippe was
important as an inspiration and I wish that I had had the strength to help
other artists too.
Karina,
Robin and others had helped me on the way to establishing the studio; so had Mr
X, so had Patrizia, Enzo, Paola, and Silvana.
It was a
help to my survival, and so had many others. However, spiritually they hadn’t
given me the strength that Philippe had given me. Through him, I had found my
identity as an individual and my forefathers and their dedication. He had been
a source of energy as only some special people can be. When I was in his
company I thought that everything was beautiful and intelligent, even plants,
and everything had stronger colours.
It was as
if I had taken enhancing drugs. I thought perhaps that it was the same
sentiment. It felt like being in an Indian movie. As usual, I declared myself,
it was in a coffee shop in Piazza Santa Maria Novella. It was raining hard.
There was thunder and lightning like never before. I thought the weather was
expressing my state of mind. All Indian movies have rainy scenes.
He said, “you are lying!” Then he took my arm. I had these gold bangles
on and he examined them as if they were horrible
things. It was as if he was thinking, these can’t be real gold! How disgusting
if they were! I was ashamed of my gold bangles then. My mother had bought them for me
in Karachi in Pakistan. They were 22 carat gold, they weighed a lot and were
worth a good sum. When he looked at them that way, I tried not to wear them
anymore. In the West, people don’t wear gold like we do in Asia or Africa. I
saw the Somali girls sometimes wearing their gold with pride. Here I was, being
crossexamined because of them, as if no one could understand the necessity of
wearing such a lot of gold. It wasn’t safe, I thought, so I put them in the
bank and they were there for many years after that.
The
declaration didn’t go well as usual. He said, “why do you kill things as they
are growing, and why are you such a rock?” I thought, I cannot very well change
what I am. Then he said, I have an Israeli girlfriend that is slimmer than you,
and on to the scene came the Israeli girl who was his best friend’s wife! That
was another story. I thought here I am being sincere, and he is playing games
with me! I suppose it was a bit like what Picasso did with his women. Many
years later, I read that Picasso used to make women fight over him in his
presence and he enjoyed that.
What
really was unpleasant then was that I didn’t really have any money, and he was
very sure that he didn’t want a woman weighing on his life and on his pocket
and he didn’t want any problems. That was what he told me. At that point, I was
sure that I didn’t want any problems myself because I was just a few steps away
from my last exams, and then I had to write my final paper. So I thought, okay,
this is going to be tough, but I have to get out of this relationship.
I was
thirty and I didn’t want to waste anymore time getting through my project.
Later on Cristiana, who was modelling for Philippe, asked me, “I suppose you
don’t really believe in love?” She said that because maybe she would have dealt
with the matter in a different way.
Cristiana had been married to a French man, and could speak French and
Spanish fluently. She could understand Philippe on a different level. I said,
well, I have to answer to my family and I can’t throw everything away in the
name of love. Here was all my family expecting me to give them a result, and I
really didn’t feel like letting them down for someone who really didn’t care
for me that much.
Plus there
was competition from a slim Israeli woman, or perhaps many women, because he
was an attractive thirty two year old, well-bred and a bachelor from a
seemingly bourgeois family. I am sure he didn’t get married to any of the women
I saw him with after that.
The slim Israeli woman went on to have two children by her Italian
painter fiancée. The man who was Philippe’s friend, looked as if he walked out
of a film about Italy in the 1800s. He had a huge, long, old-fashioned beard
and didn’t look like normal people – he reminded me of the Amish people in the
US who still live without cars. He had taken a book out of his car, and I had
commented how much I disliked the artist the book was about. I really hadn’t
expected my humble opinion to mean anything to him.
However,
he was quite offended and told me that on the contrary he was an admirer of
Giorgio Morandi, the painter who painted bottles. Canvas after canvas. I
couldn’t see the point of bottles being the subject of the paintings.
I hadn’t realised that this man really liked Morandi. He seemed to be
irremovably placid most of the time, but turned red all of a sudden when he
heard my opinion. “How dare you say that?” he said, and he showed me a huge
book of thousands of pages on his favourite painter. I was humbled by my
mistake.
Morandi
had spent the whole Second World War painting pictures at his home in the
countryside. Perhaps the ugliness of the war makes us concentrate on the few
things that we can control, which still are absolutely innocent and clean.
Perhaps that was Morandi’s message; he was saying, “I don’t really like this
reality but I will make up my own”. He was such a charitable person, because
later on people who had his paintings would become rich. I actually met an
Italian couple who had bought an expensive apartment having sold one of his
paintings.
Sarina
Sarina’s kitchen and her life, in a way, were my surrogate for wanting
to be with Philippe. Sarina was much like myself, trying so hard to make it to
her goal. One can always get lost upon her way. Sarina was one who was
suffering for her cause, like myself. Right before she finally got though the
exams, she and I met in front of the Santo Spirito church steps, and she was
desperately crying, saying, “I know that I can sing I just have to make it through
this”.
I had
never seen her so depressed. Making it meant lots of studying, lots of hard
work at her piano and on top of that, working at her teaching job in order to
make a living. Cristiana was another surrogate for Philippe. I became friends
with her when she was modelling at the Charles Cecil Art School. She had long
hair which she dyed blonde, and a very sexy gruff voice, which reminded of the
actress Monica Vitti. She wanted people to think that she was sexy like
Brigitte Bardot.
Cristiana
wasn’t really sexy at all when one got to know her as a person. I mean, she
wasn’t false and calculating. She was actually a nice girl from a nice family
in northern Italy, who wanted to create a family with some guy. She told me
that she had been married to a French man and had lived in France for some
time. But now she was separated.
Cristiana
had a studio in Via Guelfa, a really seedy part of town in the centre near the
railway station. She painted copies of paintings by the masters. They were
usually renaissance paintings, ones with lots of books and musical instruments
and Persian carpets. I went to visit this apartment and studio often. I liked
her paintings. She borrowed this art book from Philippe and really messed it
up. It seemed as if she didn’t care to hurt his feelings at all.
I would have had more respect for that book,
whoever it had belonged to. However, Cristiana could get away with a lot,
because she was a warm-hearted girl and she did have good intentions. Her
voice, I found, was very attractive.
I had told
her about my experience as a painter. I told her that I knew Philippe, and that
is why she allowed me to go to her studio and she taught me how to use gold
leaf. I felt that I should have paid her for it, only I didn’t have any money to
show her how grateful I was. She was one of the people in
Florence who had been generous and nice and hadn’t wanted anything back.
As luck
would have it, she found a young Scottish girl who had tried to open a gallery
in Florence, who had actually bought some of her canvases and paid for them up
front! It was unbelievable. No one used to do such things in Florence – at
least, no one we knew about. I asked this young gallery owner, “are you
actually buying paintings with the idea of helping artists?”, and she answered
that it was incredible but true. I could feel that she had taken a huge burden
upon herself.
In the
meantime, whilst I was studying for my last exams, Cristiana had found a
partner, Leonardo, who was a Florentine IT expert. He was living in an
apartment right next to the Porcellino Square in the centre, and he had a
degree in mathematics. Her fiancé was very much a leftist and a pleasant
person, with a sense of humour. Cristiana had found him because she had gone to
a party in the European University with a Dutch PhD student. Leonardo had asked
her to dance, and she had dropped the student and had made friends with
Leonardo.
Later on, they had two children and got married. It was unbelievable. I
pitied the Dutch man, but it was typical.
Later on,
she told me that she liked the men who wore suits and ties, but they were very
demanding and were after women who had money. She didn’t have money and she was
looking for someone who wanted to have children and who could look after a
family. She knew what she wanted. It was Cristiana who told me that some people
could get special permission for getting a divorce from the pope, in order to
get married to someone else.
I suppose
those kinds of men in suits and ties like rich women like Patriza, who could
afford to spend lots of money on fashionable clothes, who had a car – a new one
– and an apartment, and a father who spent money on them. I hadn’t realised
that the money game was a worldwide thing. If a girl seemed not to have money,
then she would probably not be able to pick and choose.
I looked
at Cristiana with admiration because she was so much the woman who wanted to be
very feminine, and she knew what was required of her – i.e. to be slim, to be
blonde, to be flexible, to wear short skirts and appear sexy – such a lot of
hard work! She was now thirty years old and had made up her mind that she
wanted children and that this was the time to do it.
I was
thinking how in the Middle East, woman have it easy in a sense, because
families think of getting the young people married off through arranged
marriages. No man or woman, however unattractive or poor, wastes time searching
for the right partner. After all it is all about procreating the genes – so
everyone, ugly or attractive, with defects or illnesses, rich or poor, educated
or unemployed – everyone could get married because it was done as a social
rule. But in Europe it seemed so difficult. People had to find the right
partner and very few of my girlfriends ever did find the right people.
They actually had to go through various experiences and mistakes in
order to settle for the least satisfying partner. In the Middle East, I was
surprised that even people that couldn’t afford to have children were having
them and bringing them up somehow or other.
In the
West, many planned to have kids but couldn’t because having kids was expensive
and you had to give up a comfortable life if you wanted to have a family. My
Italian friends from university had their own homes and could afford to get
married, but they took years to decide to settle down together seriously. A lot
of woman I knew didn’t find a partner at all, and just had a child with
someone, just to enjoy being a mother. What worried everybody was finding a
steady income; it was the 1990s, and things were not looking so good.
I was working at Piazza Santa Croce at a jewellery place in the summers,
and there would be days when there was no one in the square. In the late 1980s,
there had been a lot of Russians who had brought lots of money. They would
carry lots of cash with them and invest it in gold. It was when the Soviet
Union became Russia. It was 1988 and 1989, and Mr Gorbachev was on the news all
the time with Glasnost and Perestroika being the key words in the news. It
crossed my mind that Gorbachev wouldn’t last long because he was a university
professor, and too much of an idealist. Then the siege of the Palace happened
and Yeltsin took over.
The shop
where I worked was owned by an Italian family. The owner, who was Florentine
was called Mr C. He had married a Russian women called Vera; she was nice
looking then. She had big blue eyes and long frizzy hair and a very triangular
face. She was very feminine. Soon she got to take part in the business in a big
way, because all our clients were Russian. When she had worked in the shop for
some years, she cut off all her hair and kept it really short, and she started
to become masculine in her ways. I think it was because she was carrying more
responsibility on her shoulders. She was very modest about her education, but
she was an aeronautics engineer. She use to talk about Moscow and it was
fascinating for me and my colleague Nora to listen to her stories of life
before Italy. Right then, there were a lot of Russians coming over to Italy,
who were on their way to the states. Vera gave them hospitality and one of her
Jewish guests who hadn’t a penny and used to sleep in the car, later on went to
New York and became very rich. According to her, he had established several
supermarkets there. Something big was happening, and we were unaware of what
was brewing in the pot.
Cell phones had just come out, and Vera had one. It was very such a
fashionable thing to be seen trotting about with a phone pressed close to the
ear. This made one feel rich and important, because not many people had one.
The cheap ones were huge and heavy things which had batteries that didn’t last
long at all. The mobile revolution was just beginning but answering machines
were still an item of importance, remaining from the 1980s. Robin, in her new
wealthy situation, had bought one of those new phone/fax machines, which had
everything including an answering machine.
De La
Soul, the band, was really in vogue because of the bit in the song with the
beep of the answering machine. It was very hip. We used to read about Yeltsin
and his drinking habits. The Russians were educated and cultured, but were
stuck with these leaders, who failed to deliver stability to their country.
Moscow was supposedly a terrible place to live in; we heard about the poor and
the old – i.e. people who had been used to a welfare state; they couldn’t adapt
to the new pace of life. There was news that the youth were forming gangs, and
that was making life very difficult for the ordinary citizens.
It was
Russia in the limelight, and Vera was a real Russian from that planet. Had she
not started to get overenthusiastic, I would have really thought of her as a
friend and an acquaintance, and would have been keen on keeping in touch. It
was inexplicable to me when she and the young fellow working there started to
treat me with less respect. I suppose they wanted me to stop working there on
my own accord, as opposed to them sending me away. I suppose that was just
after Nora’s wedding.
I used to
be fascinated by Vera’s stories about Moscow, as much as my Columbian colleague
Nora, who would talk about Bogota and Medellin. They were now ruled by the drug
lords and were in the news every day, those beautiful places that she had grown
up in. She had worked in the shop selling emeralds to American tourists. The
way that South Americans talked about the nature around them when they were
growing up reminded me of India and Pakistan.
The sea and the wilderness of the undeveloped land with lots of
undiscovered beaches, and places still untouched by tourism, were full of wild
people, with machine guns in their hands, rebelling against injustice by living
in the forests. Nora’s family were in the retail business, and she was already
married and divorced. Now she was getting married a second time, to a Turkish
man who was working in the shop next to us. That shop was a Turkish shop. Her
husband happened to be blue eyed and blonde, and he had chosen to call himself
with a Western Christian name.
There were
some Arab men as well working in that shop. One was an attractive Egyptian
called Mehtad. I though Mehtad really resembled the antique statues of the
ancient
Egyptians; he was really, truly one of the most beautiful people I have
ever seen in my life, but he was modest about it. He was married to an Italian
girl who worked as a guide in Egypt, but it was obvious that he was on his way
to a divorce. I liked Mehtad as a person. I was thinking of introducing him to
my Algerian friend Nadia who was twenty four, and who had said that she wanted
to get married to an Arab. But that wasn’t to be.
It was
funny how, on Nora’s wedding day, I had gone into the loo at work and had cried
my heart out. I was thirty-two, still a student and felt like a total loser,
utterly alone and incapable of ever being able to find a suitable partner. But
I wouldn’t take any steps in the direction of working something out with the
people around me, like Nora had done. I wouldn’t go out to parties like
Cristiana, and I wasn’t trying at all to find a remedy to my ailment.
I had tried to introduce my friend Mr X into my life, but it hadn’t worked out
at all. Even Cristiana had tried to give me a few tips about how to put the
relationship in the right direction.
Later on, I realised that sentimental issues are really difficult.
Mehtad had found a Palestinian girl whose father had told him that his daughter
was in love with him. Her father actually worked for this lucky girl, in order
to make the connection. I thought it such a precious thing that one could have
a friend like that. He put them on the path as it were, so Methad went on to
get married a second time, and was happy with his new family.
I was harbouring so many pressures in those years from personal and
university life that when an Arab colleague from Yemen, a salesman from the
shop next door, started to act as a watchdog on me, I thought him strange, but
didn’t take much notice of it. Just as much as I was aware of the microphones
in the shop controlling us, I thought that they all went together with the fact
that Mr C the shop owner was a declared fascist. He used to tell us about the
time when, as a young boy, he would go to Piazza della Signoria in a black
shirt and the Fascist salute to take part in the rallies during Mussolini’s
regime.
Mr C was
sixty years old and had the wizened face and expression of a renaissance
painting. He reminded me of a Gozzoli fresco in the Medici Palace. Like these people
that had lived in these cities centuries ago, Mr C was wise and careful about
what he said. He took his wife Veras naïveté in his stride. In a way, he had
psychological insight into people’s feelings.
Even
though Mr C was a fatherly sort of figure, I felt that I couldn’t very well go
and complain to him about what had happened to me. My feelings of being
molested in the shop were difficult to express. I thought people would have
laughed it off and made the insult seem of no consequence. That’s why I thought
I would sue them and get money out of them, because it was the least I could do
to defend myself.
When I
told my Aunt Ylva, she said on the phone let bygones be bygones. But she hadn’t
felt the humiliation and suffering like I had. I thought that it would make
them think twice about it before they made a pass at someone else at the work
place. They might have thought that it had been a joke, but I didn’t. I was
determined in having justice, because my only fault had been to be a single
woman with no one defending me. I had always dressed decently, covering up, as
opposed to my colleague Nora, who had worn really short tops which were very
fashionable, revealing her belly button.
On the
last day of work at the shop, I had an appointment with Robin and I had gone to
the supermarket to buy biscuits. I found Mr C standing there as if he had
something to say to me. Should I have lamented like a child and told him about
Vera and Enrico’s joke of touching my derrière? I am sure that they also had
CCTV in the jewellery store, so they probably saw what had happened and knew
about it. It was a sort of practical joke. Later on, after some years, I saw a
woman doing this to her young girlfriend in front of me, and I was appalled by
the innocent girl’s confused look.
Mr C wasn’t stupid; he knew that if I had talked to him, I probably
would have let the whole unbearable thing go. But there was the shame that I
felt about the whole thing, as if I had to put up with such nonsense in the
work place. That is why I went to the lawyer’s office belonging to Mr F. We
discovered that we had a common friend, and that young Mr F knew my friend
Sarina from her singing in choirs around town.
In 1996,
my American flat mate Eric Black came back to Florence and he came to visit me.
I had painted the apartment blue, and for me it was the house of the ninety
nine names of God, because I had written those names in all the rooms. It was a
crazy time because I was living in my own world and far away from reality.
Perhaps Robin was trying to tell me this when she came to visit, and her words
meant to tell me that. I should have taken it upon me to point out that it
hadn’t been nice of her to tell me off like that; that I was an artist and
therefore not as capable as her to deal with the real life issues. Most
probably, she couldn’t fathom why I was sitting at home with a degree when I
could have been working like she had done. I hadn’t told her or anyone else
about what had happened at work. I thought it was too embarrassing, and many
people couldn’t understand my point of view at all.
Eric took some pictures of the house, the paintings and the rooms, and
even asked me to go to Germany with him. He had been to Berlin and that was
after the wall fell in 1989. He was very enthusiastic about Berlin and the
construction that was going on there. I was very tempted because I could
understand
Eric very well, we could have been good partners but I was on a certain
path and I thought that I would continue on it. 1995 and 1996 were also the
years of the war in Yugoslavia. The only person who was interested was Robin,
and I was grateful to have her and Nadia to talk to.
Some
Jewish people wrote articles of protest against the rape concentration camps
and the religious conflicts that were taking place there. Even Eric was
politically aware of what was happening. The rape camps were places where
Muslim and Croat women were impregnated forcefully by the Serbs in order to
humiliate their opponents. I was glad that I painted two paintings with
Sarajevo as the subject. However, after the war ended, it seemed pointless to
paint political pictures because it was useless to protest.
Marco, who was a professional photographer, took the photographs of my
paintings. He was practising Buddhism so he did it for free, but I gave him a
painting in return. Marco was living a life very similar to mine. He stayed in
his room and prayed. The Buddhists had a group and they met every week to pray
together. We could hear them when they prayed together in his room.
He had a
large room, which had a window looking on to the face of the Santo Spirito
church. I was aware that the apartment he lived in must have been worth a lot,
because of its position on the Piazza. It overlooked the whole square, and
Marco had done rent control like myself. He made a living by renting out rooms.
He was a homely type of person, you could tell, because he had very nice new
Persian carpets in his room, and the place was always nice and clean. He would
take care of his personal things, but he didn’t care what would happen in the
rest of the house. Eventually he bought himself a computer and started to work
at home on his artistic photographs.
Mr X and Myself – Tizano and Robin
I had met Mr X in 1989 or 1990, and even though he was just a young
Iranian man from a simple background which was very working class, I preferred
him to the Kurdish Mr Changeez, who had a degree in architecture and knew all
the right things to say because he was a leftist. He was a cultured and
educated type. I’d met them both at the Cultural Centre in Florence during the
Iraq/Kuwait crisis. These two men symbolised the class division in Iran. On the
one hand there were people in the majority who were uneducated or less educated
belonging to the rural areas, and the working classes who were usually very
pious and who supported the government and the revolution.
The other
group of people were educated leftists and middle classes, who felt that they
deserved privileges and that they were superior to the masses and the main
population. Changeez represented the latter.
Changeez
was very attractive and charming, but he was utterly and hopelessly self-centered,
penniless and unemployed. He could quote Shakespeare and was an expert on
cinema, but he was a man who wasn’t earning – nor was I – and didn’t have any
prospects. Another point which wasn’t in his favour was the fact that he was in
a sort of close friendship with his Italian friend’s American wife. Anyone
could tell that she liked him a lot, so he was able to pick and choose.
One day, I
went to visit him in the Cultural Centre, and he took me to the house of his
American girlfriend. She was a soprano opera singer like my friend Sabina, and
she sang in the Maggio Fiorentino. One could tell that she had put aside her
husband and was really into Mr C. In fact, people have said since that they
eventually married. I was astonished to see that this Italian man put up with
their friendship going on right in front of him, between his wife and his best
friend. I really felt sorry for him, but I thought that he must be a very
generous man – or a cold-blooded, reasonable person -, to be able to watch
other people’s happiness eat into his marriage. So even if Mr C asked me, I
didn’t accept.
Mr X was
different. He was a pious praying kind of person who worked. He had managed to
live a regular life and he pursued his interests, which were sports and cinema.
I was awestruck by the fact that even though he was poor, he had managed to buy
his parents an apartment. I think that is why I sort of respected him a lot.
However, later on I found out that he had a woman in his life, although he said
that he wasn’t married. I didn’t want to fall into having a husband who was
already married. But by the age of thirty and thirty one, everyone around me
was with someone. There was a voice within me that said he wasn’t good for me.
I suppose I found out why when we went to Rimini with Tizano and Robin.
Via Delle Cinque Giornate
Apartment, 1995
I had been friends with Robin since my degree party in 1992. We had
common friends who had introduced us. Jeff and Steve were people who were
teachers of English at university and who were into theatre. I had known them
for many years, since starting university. My degree party in Via delle Cinque
Giornate was a big do, so they had invited their friends Robin and Sarina. They
were all teachers of English. I really had a lot of respect for these people,
as they were socially superior to me. I was an unemployed student and a renter
of rooms. I had a lot of respect for Robin and Sarina because they were
teaching, and even as language teachers they were following their artistic
interests. Sarina and Robin were into singing and classical music and opera.
Pulsar Watercolour,
1998
They were friends of Steve to begin with, and I had spent an entire
summer listening to Steve complain about his Italian girlfriend M, who was
already married. She was a wealthy lawyer and it seemed that there was no
future in the relationship. Steve’s private life was well known to his friends
– it was an ‘event’, and I suppose everybody watched his life with interest
because he was an attractive man and with a very good sense of humour.
Geoff,
too, was attractive, because he was the more middle class posh accent sort of
person. Even though he wore a ponytail, you could tell he had a solid
background. Geoff eventually got married and went to live in the States with
his family. We were all dreaming of doing something big with our lives then.
Steve dreamt about being an actor and he defined art wistfully: “those sort of
things that people who don’t work seem to afford to do”. Robin too thought that
teaching had its limits. Sarina’s attitude was more positive; she took teaching
as a temporary situation, which was soon to change.
Serena and Elena and
myself in the market at Santo Spirito, 1995
I liked Robin and Sarina immediately because they had a similar sense of
humour. Steve was very lighthearted, and when he was in the mood he could be
very pleasant to be with. He was well liked because he was sociable and ready
to mingle.
In 1992,
when I met Robin, she was just about to separate from her husband who she had
been married to for some years. They had renovated an old house together and
had fallen out of love when they had finished the job. Some people say that it
is not good to renovate old houses with your spouse because of the pressure it
puts on the relationship. But marriages and relationships were falling apart
with many couples we knew, regardless of whether they were working on a project
together or not.
Robin
revealed herself to be a woman who was very capable of starting a new life at
thirty. She wasn’t at all the sweet and simple type, and most Italian men
usually like their women to at least pretend be one step behind them, rather
than boasting to be running in front of them. I could see that she was feeling
stifled in a women’s traditional role in her marriage and she had already made
the decision. When she got her divorce, Titziano had come into Robin’s life as
a consequence of her wanting to replace her husband. Titziano was a very
attractive Italian, thirty years old, from the outback of Prato. He looked just
like the famous actor Nani Moretti. He was also someone who really liked cinema
and intellectual things.
Robin was
just out of divorce and she was sharing her experiences with me and Sarina,
talking about her research for a new man, and Titziano sounded very good. Even
if in the process of finding him, she had broken a heart or two.
Tizy, as
me and Sarina called him, was tall, dark and handsome, and had swept Robin off
her feet. He took her on sightseeing trips, things which she hadn’t done in all
her years of marriage. He was a bit too good to be true! She was very flattered
to have found a sensitive man, who was also alive and had an interest in the
world around him. He wasn’t boring and he had made it clear to her, that he
wanted to be the only one in her life. That was a pretty committing type of
statement for someone to make just after her divorce.
Mr X was
very sweet and had a sincere heart, but he thought that he still had time and
could shop around. I was dating him because I wanted to get married. He was
sensitive and smart, but didn’t have the Italian leftist education that most
educated or even uneducated people share in Europe. The jargon about cinema and
any other art form is usually leftist in fact. Being an intellectual in itself
belongs to the left. Only business people seemed to lean to the right. So Mr X
didn’t fall in place with these educated friends of mine, who were surprised
about my choice.
After many
years of living alone, I’d settled for someone so far from myself. People could
tell that he wasn’t the right sort of person. On one occasion at a friend’s
dinner party hosted by M, her friend, who was a Romanian and had lived many
years in Germany, a very cultured man in his 1950s, started to say very
unpleasant words which seemed to be directed at Mr X. Then again, before our
trip to Rimini I could sense that people were not really accepting this person,
and were putting up with him only for my sake. It seemed that I was being
tested to see if I could defend him.
Titziano
called us, in a general way, ‘babuini’ – i.e. ‘the Iranian Monkeys’,
criticising us because we were imitating Western ways. He said quite a few
unpardonable things on that trip, which were hard for me to bear. I did jolt
when I heard his comments on the Serbs being the good guys in the war that was
going on in Bosnia. Me and Robin had just written a letter about the plight of
the women in the so called ‘rape camps’ installed by them. They were
provocative comments, and suffice to say that if I had felt totally helpless
and full of rage by the injustice and insolence of his comments. However I kept
quiet on both occasions, only feeling cold and distant. It was really not worth
my while to get angry.
Poor Mr X
could not defend himself at all socially. He was a meek type who needed a
mother. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t have someone by my side who could be
strong for me. I should have been strong enough or clever enough to respond to
Titziano’s insults. He had really got to me, and I was ashamed of myself, for
not being able to defend anything or anyone, not even myself. Robin didn’t say
anything either, as if she had taken it in her stride. But she did know, the
enormity of these gestures and words. I realised what women had to put up with
when they have a partner.
It was
sometime after our trip to Rimini that Robin came to my place one day. She said
she was upset because Titziano had told her a terrible thing and had expected
her to accept it as well. He had told her this thing about himself in a
lighthearted manner, as if she would have to accept it if she wanted to have
him in her life. Later on she quit seeing Titziano, as she couldn’t agree with
such an attitude.
Now I
wonder if a dark force wasn’t already operating in those years as well, putting
us to the test, as it were. Titziano was not at all unmanly in his ways. I was
an idiot for telling Steve what had happened between Titziano and Robin. But
Robin hadn’t told me to keep quiet about it. I mean, I was shocked myself and
couldn’t bear this burden of Robin’s words which weighed on me, and I felt
confused. I was astonished to hear Steve agree with Titziano. That was an
extremely revealing conversation. I was like, “Am I the only person who can
understand how Robin must feel about this?”
That was
in 1992, 1993 and 1994, and the war in Bosnia was raging. The war in Kuwait had
brought me out of my room to meet people and I had met Mr X. He was more
spiritual than anyone else I knew in Italy, except for Nadia. Nadia was living
in the front room in Via delle Cinque Giornate. She was twenty three
when she took the room, and she was a very reserved young lady. She had been
born and brought up in the north of France, but her family was from near
Algiers. It was fascinating because she brought a totally new experience and
point of view into my life. She didn’t know any Arabic, not even enough to read
the Holy Koran. However, she said her prayers and tried her best to be Islamic.
We had many conversations about the
state of things in the Muslim countries, especially since in those years a
strange phenomenon was happening in the Algerian countryside, whereby villages
and their inhabitants where being attacked and burnt by ruthless mercenaries who
were absurdly called Muslims by the media.
We were both sure that such strange things could not be
perpetrated by Muslims, since in the news they said that the new non-religious
government was not allowing the inhabitants to have guns to protect themselves,
nor was it doing the job of protecting itself. Furthermore a free general
election resulting in the people’s choice of an Islamic tending government was
inexplicitly cancelled. Why was this happening? I remember once we were walking
in Via della Pergola and we were talking about this situation and she was
hysterically asking if this was Islam that was practiced in her country, “is
this Islam?” I was trying to explain to her that at times the people who
actually did the horrible things blamed everyone else and got away with it. It
was really a well-known strategy.
About the same time, there was an article in the papers
about a young mercenary who had been captured after such terrible acts, and he
confessed that he had done all sorts of things under the effect of drugs, and
was not aware of what he had done afterwards. Which made sense. Much more than
Islamic militants killing innocent locals, it was the greedy people who wanted
the villages to themselves who had paid him, he said. This article was in the
Italian papers.
Nadia stayed at home and locked in her room most of the
time, reading and learning languages, while she was looking for a job. She was
a practicing Muslim, even if modern, and she didn’t want to get involved with
anyone. She was even wary of me and treated everyone who wasn’t her family as
“a stranger” and not to be trusted.
In one respect, she was right. It seemed that one took a
risk every time one trusted a friendship because loyalties were very fragile,
to say the least. She was right in staying in her room all the time and trying
to work out what she had to do next. I realised that she was trying very hard
to get a grip onto her life. I suppose she was realistic in not dating anyone,
because even though she was an attractive twenty something, she knew that
finding the right partner was an arduous task.
Robin was very disappointed in me for having talked to
Steve about her private life and her experience with Titziano. She looked at me
with new eyes, as if I couldn’t be trusted. She did not realise that I was as
shocked that she had confided such a delicate matter to me in the first place.
She had put a burden on me which was too much for me. I really felt things
deeply, and I felt sympathetic to what she had gone through.
And she hadn’t told me to keep quiet about
it.
Later on, when I met Hans, the blonde Danish boy at
Sarina’s door in Piazza Santo Spirito, I wasn’t thinking of
Robin at all. Hans was being introduced to
Florence in the Piazza by an Italian woman who said that he was looking to rent
a room. I was always on the lookout for renters, and since I had just finished
my thesis, I needed to rent the rooms again. Hans was not a very pleasant
person, especially when he said something about me prostituting my rooms when I
showed him the room. This was very impolite, to say the least. I had known
another Hans from Denmark who had been a Catholic and a very special person. Therefore,
I thought this Hans would be okay, since I had had a positive experience with
northern people in general. Hans turned out to be educated. He was a computer
person and had a degree in engineering, but liked to introduce himself as a
blacksmith. Why did I ever think of putting Robin and Hans together? God only
knows.
Had I been a calculating woman with my head screwed on the
right way, I would have cultivated this bachelor even for getting myself a
European residence – something which Robin had done – and would have tried to
get rid of my Iranian passport. It was always a problem for visas and stay
permits. Any red-blooded Iranian would have seen Hans as an opportunity not to
be gifted to other women. However, Hans had uttered a dark series of words which
made me feel wary of him. He had also told me that I would die by taking my own
life, and that, was not sweet of him at all!
His being an educated man made me think that that was what
Robin needed in her life because she herself was into education and was
bookish. I sound like a do-gooder and a matchmaker, but really I was sorry that
a woman of Robin’s calibre should be wasting her time on people who were very
much inferior to her, I thought it such a waste. I acted as a real Eastern
friend, someone who cared. Nobody except Carina had cared for me; if I was
alone and rotting away in solitude, it was my own fault entirely, but I was
living up to the philosophy that had I acted positively, I would get the good
energies back from the universe.
Hans wasn’t charming at all in his manners, but I felt that
he was a person who was worthy of being helped and that is why I introduced him
to Leonardo, who was an IT consultant, and was looking for someone to help him.
Later on I introduced him to Robin and sent them off to the movies together –
he had asked me, but I wasn’t interested; I was still thinking along other
lines.
I was actually surprised pleasantly by Hans some weeks
later when he commented on how some people in town used bad language in relation
to the Prophet Jesus (may peace be upon him) and the Virgin Mary. He thought it
was a scandal to hear such insulting language and had stood up in one
conversation and had left the room, saying that he would not tolerate such
things. In fact it was surprising to find some people saying that they didn’t
believe in any of the biblical stories and that these two revered names had
been ordinary people, under the rule of the Romans. Such people believed in the
power of the secular society and its rules more than anything else.
I had a new respect for Hans after that, and I was grateful
that someone had stood up for the revered Prophet and the Virgin Mary, because
in Islam we feel a great deal of reverence for them, and it is a great sin to
speak of them as normal, ordinary people. For Hans, behaviour in this matter I
felt that he had well deserved my help and friendship. My having introduced
Robin to him was good too. Later on I fell out with Robin for having done that.
She came back from a holiday in New York to visit me, and during our relaxed
conversation she had suddenly become very stern and had told me to “grow up”;
however she had said it in a way which couldn’t be pinned down. I couldn’t
accuse her of having said this to me and ask her to explain.
She had been totally weird, as if talking to a wall and not
a well-wishing friend and I thought to myself, “naturally! My doing good was
not appreciated at all.” I wasn’t competing with anyone over anything and yet
here I was being sat upon in my own kitchen by this woman. I suppose I had
foreseen this and I was not going to be unpleasant and fight, but I let it go
and I thought, “good luck to you, you obviously don’t need me in your life
anymore.”
Later on, I thought that it was probably a different point of
view on life in general which separated us. I noticed a lot of people were
uttering absolutely absurd things and getting away with doing so; it was as if
they would somehow get promoted for saying the most horrible things and
uttering the biggest lies, and I was wondering why this was happening. Then I
read somewhere that it had something to do with Stalin. Or was it to do with
Europe? A new era had begun,
All religions and philosophies talk about the concept of
“caring for each other” – “treat others as
you would like others to treat you”. We are here to care about each other/ I
mean, people read books but do they think about values? Human feelings, all the
good things of the heart belong to the religious minded and if we don’t live up
to the rules of God, who will? No materialist gives away the things that they
need themselves.
Since my biggest dream had been to live in New York, I was
very happy when Robin called me from New York where she had gone for the
holidays. But when she came back, she was pretty hard on me and told me to
“grow up”.
We were sitting in the kitchen in Via delle Cinque Giornate
and she was just back from her trip. I was being very wishy-washy, talking
about Eric and Sarina and how it was going for them, whilst I knew that Robin
and Hans were now together. In a sense, I was in a weak position because I
didn’t have anyone in my life again. I had given up on Mr X. My first reaction
to Robin’s intellectual somersault when she criticised me was that I was
totally dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe that she could be harsh and unkind to
me after my being thoughtful about her. I mean, no one was introducing me to a
nice young man, but I was being generous to her life as a whole. I mean I know
the worth of what I had done for her, because I so much needed a partner in my
life myself. And this woman had the gumption to come to my house and tell me to
grow up! How ungrateful can one get? I got the feeling that she was thinking,
“You are such a loser! You haven’t got
anything going for you”. Was that an acceptable attitude? Today I compare that
to Mr Sedley’s fate in Vanity Fair,
where he says, “Some people don’t like to be reminded that they have been
helped”. I didn’t even expect a thank you, but I expected her to understand the
positive thoughtfulness that I’d had for her and to take it into account.
I suppose the tide of the concentration camp attitudes or
Zionist jig of heartlessness had already been there for a long time and that I
was experiencing it for the first time. Good luck to you, I thought. But that’s
all the time of the day that I can give you.
The
Zionist jig is a condition whereby a good relationship is blown away by
actively sowing the seeds of hate rather than love.
‘Existence’ was sold to a Danish couple in
2008 by Roberto. I am worried about these fascists having my paintings at all.
Especially this one, which has always meant so much to me.
This is another painting that I started at one corner and
didn’t know about the outcome.
It is a violent one, with the soft cell amoeba in the
middle and the needle-like things representing life’s difficulties for all
creatures in order to survive in the blue earth and oceans which we are living
in.
The amoeba is a living unit, and in it there is the writing
of Sure Hand, the first Sure in the Koran. Because as a living unit, me being
the amoeba, I had this written in me when I started out. But the needles
promise a difficult time. One of the unexpected geographical twists and turns,
ups and downs, where a voyager finds that in the next corner and angle of a
street a block of houses or a mountain or a valley, there is something
unforeseen waiting for us little creatures. Even though the amoeba is fairly
big – however, it is totally vulnerable and flexible – it tries to roll over
things, bumping into or bouncing over all needles. It tries to survive by being
adaptable to any shape. That is why the soft cell can survive.
I was working on the images ‘Existenz’, ‘Da-sein’, ‘Being There’,
and ‘The Invisible Pillars’, and I thought that my life as a woman at thirty or
thirty two years of age, was never going to work out. I was living in the front
room in Via delle Cinque Giornate. Nadia had been living in the room next door
to mine. Then there was Verena in the room at the back. Nadia and Verena were
in my life when I started to do these images, as was Mr X.
I asked Mr X, why don’t we get married? I suppose Mr X had
problems in his life. He said in the beginning that he didn’t want to ruin my
life! I suppose he was a good guy, and now I understand what he was saying. I
had gone looking for him that August of 1990 or thereabouts, and he wasn’t
there. He said he’d been to Austria for a week’s holiday. I could tell that he
was pretty self-centred and that he wasn’t that much into me. I suppose that I
wasn’t that much into him either; he was just my nostalgia for my family and
the past.
That was existence. I thought I wanted to go back to where
my roots are, I wanted to seek my identity in him and his little world. He was
so organised in his little world, and I admired that so much. I admired the
fact that he’d sent money to his parents and they had bought a house with the
savings that he had sent them. Such dedication was sort of Japanese – very
loyal and very sincere, and I respected this young softly spoken man, even
though I felt that he really wasn’t up to the mark. I mean, even physically, he
was a weakling and very cold, I thought. But, the fact was that he wasn’t that
much into the relationship because he had another woman, who wasn’t going to
let him go easily.
Such emotional strain made me believe that men were all
double crossing shits, and one couldn’t really expect any better. Because, I
suppose, I was the unlucky girl who couldn’t find a partner. Philippe was the
one who was so out of reach, and he had actually asked me to get engaged! What
was it that made me fly over the treasure that I so much desired? I went on
thinking about Philippe for over a decade, following his shadow everywhere. I
think that I was overawed or I wasn’t up to the responsibility. I have never
been one who listens to people anyway, and I never follow.
But I did follow Mr X, because he was the sort of man who
prayed, and in a way he was humble, especially in front of his creator, and I
thought that he was a good boy. Whereas with everyone else I knew that it would
be a struggle, with him and I knew there would be peace. However, as life would
have it, he had gone away on holiday without even thinking of telling me, which
showed that he really couldn’t care less. Such a typical situation. But my
prophetic soul, I knew he wasn’t good for me just the first few times when he
expressed the opinion that “women were smelly”, which was really offensive. His
other opinions about women were downright sexist – a wife shouldn’t get a
chance to dominate or influence a man’s opinion and ways of his life. Words
that made my hair stand on end! So why did this guy follow me around when he
knew that I was a free spirit? Looking back on it all now, I think that it was
probably planned that way.
I thought about Francesca and her ‘muratore’ boyfriend.
This guy was very good looking, one of those Florence people who have antique
features. He had big doe-like eyes and seemed to be a sensible type of person.
When she met him, they were always together and she wasn’t alone, like she used
to be. She even got him to study her English Literature books and got him to
get a degree in English Literature. That was amazing, and it was refreshing to
think that someone in this class-ridden world of ours could be different. Love
could make a difference after all and a middle class girl could contribute to
the uplifting of a boy from a working class family and share him and everyone
who he had in this world, the fat of the land. So, why couldn’t it happen with
Mr X? I suppose, because he already had one forty year old middle class lady in
his life, and didn’t need another one just then.
That was one of the most difficult summers in my life, and
I am glad that Verena was there for me. Verena was my sweet angel, and she was
a true sister in the solidarity that she showed me, whereas Nadia, was probably
judging me to be a loser. I guess it was pretty obvious which direction it was
going to go and she was already onto the results of this – God’s exam. She knew
that these kinds of men couldn’t be fair minded because she had several
brothers herself. So she knew that I was going to have problems because some
sexist men are not there and not friends of women. Usually they are antagonists
and they can only at best be indifferent, but never sincere. Nadia was very
neutral at that time, but I needed a real friend, and Guido called up and said
why don’t we get married and create a family? However, even though I needed
him, I said no. This was because I couldn’t forgive him for running off to the
Philippines with Amor, the girl he’d got to know on the train. I couldn’t trust
him anymore. He had been lying through his teeth and wasting my precious years,
and I was following him loyally, only because he was kinder to me than my own
family. He did save me from a lot of things and I was grateful, but since he
never listened to me, I thought it was useless. I suppose I was after a dream.
Someone like my father, who listened to my mother and respected her ideas and
opinions.
This was my existence in those years, and the images I was
working on said these damned men are only a waste of time; why should I be
running after them, when all they can do is to humiliate me and make me feel
like shit? I felt like the Iranian women who worked on the carpets. That carpet
creativity allowed the women to get away from the male dominations in their
lives for at least a few hours. Ideally if there was respect and love and only
respect and love, then perhaps we could have created a family. I wouldn’t have
been an amoeba anymore. I wouldn’t be trying to catch hold of the moments and
seconds so much. I suppose trying to catch hold of one’s time and hours means
that one wants to get control, have control over one’s life and all the
possible things that may happen. Had I been more easygoing and ‘normal’, I
would have married Guido, even though, he didn’t have a job and had children,
and made myself a life with him in Italy. I owed him that because he had been
good to me emotionally; he had the patience like a true friend to cure me when
I was hurt, and nobody else had ever been that good to me saving me from
madness. I suppose going to university and finishing that formal education saved
me. But I think to myself that reading the Holy Koran would have had the same
healing effect, and it would probably have brought me more barakat.
My existence got very complicated. A lot of the time we
don’t realise that other people are amoebas just as much as ourselves, trying
to survive the world and our own life.
If I had been a cleverer woman, I would see that men too
take a woman for the good things that she can add to his life. It was only
years later that Serenella and Enzo came into my life, both Florentine people
who had rationalised this process. As Serenella put it one day – she was good
wife herself – she said that, “Enzo wants a woman who doesn’t spend too much
and who is companionable”. The good things she can add to their life.
Italy Via delle Cinque Giornate Oil Paintings, 1984-1998
The Contact of Aliens with Humans
1. The Contact
This painting, ‘The Contact’, was sold in
Dubai in the winter of 2008-09, by Roberto in a Dubai gallery called Mondo
Arte. R is a thirty year old artist himself, and he had had a feeling for this
picture when he first saw it. Later on he stretched the canvas and put it up on
show, together with the rest of the paintings I’d shipped from Italy.
‘The Contact’ was done spontaneously. I mean, I hadn’t a
clue about what I was doing or where I was going. It just happened. However, I
must say that I had seen this film – it was ‘Independence Day’. Such a Star
Wars type movie, always excited my imagination.
It made me express my belief that there was intelligence in
the universe, but what I was really talking about was pretty earthly itself. I
mean, it’s a contact of relationships – i.e. it is about when you find someone
who you can really relate to, someone who opens up the world to you from a
totally different angle, and that becomes a phenomenon in itself, because
through a real contact you can also see surreal things.
*This was written before the black Fukushima episode in
March 2011.
Vision of a Planet Watercolour, 1990
I took this painting to Pakistan, thinking
that the words from the Koran would make it interesting to someone from an
Islamic culture. However, I had to take it back to Dubai because no one wanted
it, even Auntie Jahan, who had wanted a big painting on her wall, and I had
brought it especially for her. R said that an American client at the gallery
had it now.
The Koranic writing says, “Do not the rejectors of
the faith know that the galaxies and the earth were all one single mass and we
blasted them apart? Then we caused rain to fall and give life to earth…We made
every living thing out of water, will they not believe in Allah?” God the
mastermind is taking credit for his creation.
Vision of a molecule Watercolour, 1990
I was overjoyed that it was sold. I don’t
think that my other big paintings will ever be sold now because, as is the
situation in 2009, there is a general economic crisis and nobody seems to be
spending money on such items.
So I got lucky that time. R left the gallery and the
gallery closed down after some months. Actually, the story is that I got to
know R through A, who worked in the gallery full time. She was very stressed by
her new job, but she liked my work and accepted them in the gallery. Then I met
R who I thought could be related to her – I was wrong. Later on, I realised
that he must be very young – perhaps not even thirty.
Cosmopolitan Time painting in the blue apartment, 1995
When he took over responsibilities from A
because she had an argument with the owner, he was just as stressed, but he was
friendly and we talked about various things. He told me that he had gotten to
know Raffaella, who was the directress in the gallery, whilst he was running a
flower shop somewhere in the periphery of Milan. Raffaella had brought him to
Dubai, and so he had been living in Dubai a few years.
Raffaella was a woman one never met at all. Behind the
scenes somewhere being totally irresponsible. I say this because one of the
‘slimies’ had damaged one of my paintings in the gallery whilst A had been
there. I saw this poor painting being mistreated, and Anna didn’t do anything
to fix or repair it, even if she said she would do it.
When R took over, he too didn’t do anything about repairing
it, even though he said he would. So finally, I repaired it myself, taking some
instructions from this other painter called Paolo Maria. Paolo was friendly and
interesting to talk to.
When I had finished repairing the painting with more gold
leaf, and it had become a beauty, a couple from Denmark walked in and wanted to
buy it. They took it without paying for it, and I was left with the choice of
accepting the fact that I had very little power to protect myself and my
interests if the gallery didn’t do it, or to fight with everyone and leave,
protesting the only way I could. I chose to let the painting go and say nothing
– i.e. not make an issue of it. They were probably part of an elite group, I
mean, the Danish couple, and I had had to be a victim of their privileged
status.
The young client said that he had participated in the
Bosnian war, so I suppose he enjoyed getting something for free.
Cosmopolitan Time Oil on canvas
The young man who had worked for the UN in
the Bosnia area was talking about the Sarajevo pictures and I thought it was my
duty to participate in the sale of the painting. Our conversation was civil to
begin with, but later on he said some unpleasant things and so did his young
wife, and that was when I realised that they were out to get me. It was a power
trip on their part. Later on R, who was totally taking their side, hence
meaning to say, “go away from the gallery if you don’t like what we are dishing
out to you” in a silent slimy (means invisible mischief maker) fashion.
Sarajevo Oil on canvas, 1995
I had been in a similar situation before
and I had lost out and suffered. I chose to accept the situation, even though I
had counted on the money because I needed it. R said afterwards, “We are living
in a war situation” (2007). It was sincere, his speaking frankly. I thought,
“thank you, R – you are a kind person after all”, and even though this is rough
on me, I’ll bear with it. Time will sort this out. Being a Muslim and a woman
on her own is not going to protect me. I’ll have to do like the prophet Jesus
Christ and try to rise up upon this and many other occasions.
‘Time Warp’
This painting was sold by Mondo Arte
gallery in Dubai.
I was listening to a program on the radio in Florence when
there was a programme called ‘Time Warp’. I like this painting a lot. In a
black and white world, there is not much space for the greys.
‘Time Warp’ is about our psychological time; not the time
that flows in the ticking clock, but the one which derives from our
consciousness and experiences. That’s why, for some people, time stops at a
certain event or age, for others, time is a cycle which is always returning,
whereas for others it goes in a straight line ahead. I’m thinking about how
time is a flow of our personal feelings; a map with roads and lanes and
landmarks.
Pulsar Watercolour, 1989
The reason why I did cosmic paintings was
because I’ve always been a starry eyed teenager, and I am really impressed with
astronomers who search out the Milky Way and that sort of thing. I mean, I wish
that had been me. I am sure that I would have been a different, better person
if I were involved in astrophysics. However, I can only afford to dream and
this painting just leaped out of my imagination.
The first one of such cosmic types was the one that I
started to do in Pakistan whilst I was staying with my aunt in her house in
Karachi. Her name is Jahan, which is such a big name, meaning ‘the world’ when
translated from Persian. Could it be a coincidence that such big ideas were in
my mind then? That watercolours were a rather 1960s type and sort of
psychedelic, whereas ‘The Contact’ was an oil painting with a bit of gold leaf.
It may be a metaphor for myself as an individual, so far away from people
whilst in the midst of the crowd. That is how I have always felt. And now I
think this ‘Contact’ business is really not about aliens, but about people who
are alienated and finally find a relationship, which makes life worthwhile the
living. I suppose some call it love with the big L.
Cosmic Stations Watercolour, 1999
I remember watching some movies with Robin
and Sarina in 1993. I was so proud of being friends with Robin who was socially
in a higher league than me, being an English Language teacher at the
university. We could talk about politics and ideas, rather than the day-to day
things. I don’t know if I saw this movie with her or not. But, she was a planet
and we had made contact. For a while there had been communication and that was
good.
The Koranic
verse here translates into a rational view of the creation of the Universe, but
in a personal sense the universal creation is also a sort of communication… by
God to the individual. ‘The Contact’ is from Surat al Anbia v.30 and it
says, “Do not the rejecters of faith know that the galaxies and the earth were
all one single mass and we blasted them apart?” It gives me such deep emotion
that here the creator is saying, “I did this”. He takes possession of his role
and says, “If you didn’t realise this before, then I’m telling you NOW, I
created the galaxies and I’m the mastermind of all that you know and don’t
know”.
It continues: “Then we caused rain to fall and give life to
earth…we made every living thing out of water; will they not believe in
Allah?”
I interpret this line as a dialogue between God and man
i.e., the individual {someone like the Prophet Abrham asks God the Mastermind:
‘How did you create the universe?’
And God in his benevolence responds: ‘I
created the
Universe and I did it like this’
It continues by explaining the process of
creation:
God the supreme Architect and Engineer says: ‘I created the
universe… and I caused the rain to fall on earth so that living creatures could
thrive’.
In a way we are being told that everything has a reason for
which is exists in the process of creation and existence.
Back to the Centre Watercolour, 1980
My deep belief and faith in the creator is
expressed here in the painting. Perhaps in a moment of real inspiration and
contact with the divine, I want to say, “I’ve been blessed and I have seen the
light – in a mystical experience”.
I have finally seen God the creator
through his work.
3. Sarajevo
The Bosnian War was especially important to
me because, as a Muslim who had lived in Europe for thirty years, I felt that
the bridge that I believed in, was being rubbed out of history. The Arabs and
the Islamic culture were totally made unacceptable.
‘The Painting Called Sarajevo’
Robin was a teacher of English and the University. She was
an assistant who had been working as a teacher for many years. She’d married an
Italian, a Florentine electricity technician. Having renovated a house
together, they were now at a stage where they were getting a divorce. I met her
at this stage. She was a friend who came to Steve’s house.
In fact, I remember walking down the street in Via del
Cerretani one evening and I heard my name being called by someone who was
running behind me, rather desperately, to catch up with me. I was surprised and
a bit flattered that anyone should do that for insignificant me. That’s how I
remember me and Robin becoming friends. She had come to my graduation party at
Via delle Cinque Giornate, together with Sarina, Steve and Jeff. They also came
to the exhibition I had at the women’s library. It was Guido’s last days with
me and it was so unfair because he had been the one to help me through
university and now I had this bunch of new friends.
Robin was intellectually stimulating and we were both
interested in politics and what was happening in Bosnia. Especially those
concentration camps where Muslim women were taken and impregnated by Serbian
men in order to hurt the Muslim pride in general.
It was a Karadich tactic of psychological warfare put to
use in this war. The things we use to read in the papers were probably a
fraction of what the real situation was.
What can one do about the superficial world of glossy
magazines, writing about women’s clothes and sexuality but not about such real
things that were about women being treated as less than human?
Sarajevo was really a big issue for me, so I painted
pictures about it. But later on I regretted doing that because it was pretty
useless me doing that. I suppose it was a way of saying, “I was here and I saw
this happen”. As if a handful of Jews protesting against the Holocaust as it
was happening, would make any difference.
Robin joined me in writing this letter to the editors of
these magazines, reminding them about what was happening to these women and
asking them about their intentions with regards to giving their public some
information about what was happening.
I suppose what is the real issue is that every one of us
would like to live a life as far from problems as possible.
Hadn’t I and my family always avoided
political subjects during the Shah’s time? We only wanted to get on with our
little lives. We, none of us took part in the revolution – we weren’t leftist
and we weren’t religious. A lot of people just want to get on with their lives
and solve their problems as best as they can, because after all, life is so
short.
‘A Letter from Sarajevo’
This Serbian man who I knew because he was into the
cultural scene and liked to watch arty films like the rest of us – he was a
sensitive soul who suffered for the political situation in the Balkans, and he
was getting into a depressed state of mind which eventually made him
psychologically ill. You saw him around town, drinking himself into oblivion.
He was one of the ones who didn’t survive in the game of the survival of the
fittest… whoever survives, because that’s reality.
From the
Holy Koran
The Chapter
Al Noor (meaning Light) v.35 , 36
“God is the light of the heavens and
the earth, his light is like this: there is a niche, and in it a lamp, the lamp
inside a glass, a glass like a glittering star, fuelled from a blessed
olive tree from neither east or west,
whose oil almost gives
light even when no fire touches it –
light upon light- God guides whoever he will to his light; God draws such
comparisons for people; god has full
knowledge of
everything”
Italy:
Marina, Sylvia and Lucia 2004/5
Viareggio
Marina and Sylvia
In the fall of 1998 I moved to via
fiesolana studio and my dream of working as an artisan had come true. One of my
prayers was that I would be able to earn enough money by being self-employed as
an artisan, so that I could keep my prayers and work at the same time. I met
Susan through the exhibition I had had in August and she had told me about
Silvia. I imagined that the connection between Susan and Sylvia was in the days
when they were in their 20’s. They had shared the zeitgeist of the 60’s. Sylvia
had rebelled against her wealthy conservative family rules and had married a
Columbian architect who wasn’t well off. She had married for love and had
worked as a teacher in order to contribute to the household expenses. When I
first met Sylvia it was in the late 80’s. She was living in via dei bardi in an
apartment on the ground floor.
Buildings by the
seaside – Oil Painting 2007
The rooms faced a garden full of tall trees. In the summer
of 1998 Susan had told me about the place but I hadn’t made the connection in
my mind. I had met the same person Susan was talking about.
She was talking about the woman with the big house in
viareggio and the apartment in Florence. I had been looking for a room to take
on rent in an apartment years ago, because the responsibilities of having to
run an apartment and study had been too much. I had seen her adverts (Sylvia)
at the British institute library and had gone to see her place after calling
her on the phone. I myself had been renting the rooms in my apartment for many
years now. I wanted to change my life.
Sylvia had two grey cats who had a whole
garden to live in, and I was wondering if I could take my cat to live with me.
My pets Mooshie and her daughter were sharing my life and I could understand
that Sylvia would not approve of cats in her place. The problem with having
pets is that other people usually don’t want them around.
Watercolour 2003
There was a romantic wooden shed in the middle of the
garden at Sylvia’s house in the middle of the trees. It was being rented out
and it looked like a little house in a fairy book. For one minute I thought
that I could even bring my pets with me, but it didn’t seem very practical. I
had been looking for a really normal home.
It had been pleasant chatting to Sylvia in her dream home
and I left her thinking that she was a special person. I didn’t see her again
for many years to come.
Susan’s description of Sylvia and her children didn’t give
me any clue as to who she was talking about. My house hunting had made me visit
many homes. Susan to have had the same sort of problem.
People who don’t have money to buy their own homes often know
about other peoples’ houses just because they need to have a roof over their
head. Susan had found a place in the mountain community and I had stayed in my
apartment for many years. It was always nice to live in the centre of town and
marina happened to be my neighbour living in the next street. We had been
neighbours since 1984 when we started university. She had a little car, a fiat
and she was employed as a full time secretary. I had seen her drive that car
for many years, in fact she had had it right at the start of our meeting, now
she had become a very competent driver and it was fun to be in her car and
driving to the unknown situation ahead of us.(In 2005 we went to visit Syliva
in Viareggio)
The Underwater
Seascape
Oil on canvas 2008
I had been told by Susan that I should call Sylvia and ask
her about her about work as an assistant in her viareggio house come bed and
breakfast. Now I was going to Sylvia’s place together with marina, I was taking
her along with me to meet Sylvia; it was like a little adventure.
I remembered the first time I had invited marina to my
apartment, she had come along with her friend Angela and I had wondered why she
had had to bring someone along with her. Now I saw that going somewhere with a
friend is always comforting, because one has morale support. Some of my friends
that drove had told me that they didn’t like driving on the motorway, but
marina was chatting about everything under the sun as she drove and that made
me believe in girl power. I was proud of being with her because she was always
so together and cool headed and balanced about everything.
Seaside House – Mixed
Media 1997
We enjoyed each other’s company and we had so much to talk
about. Later on when we had met Sylvia and Lucia I was also grateful that she
had come with me. After via fiesolana I had moved into a first floor in the
countryside around the city of Pietra Santa. It was a long walk away from the
train station, and one could hear the trains going on the hour. I had rented it
because of the garden and because my pets could wonder about. I had taken
marina to see this country house because since she’d known me, I had been
living in Florence and now I was out of the city and living by the seaside.
1
Lucia and myself
2
In the garden
3
The cook and Sylvia’s mother
It had been predictable that I would leave Florence because
I wasn’t really upwardly mobile. I hadn’t found a steady job, Guido had left me
and gone off with a Philippine girl called Amor and all I had left was my
pretensions to art.
Marina had picked up studying for her university degree at
25, just like myself. She had come back to Italy from Germany where she had
worked as a secretary in a well-paid job. She had decided to come back to Italy
after having grown up into the German school system and she had a clear-sighted
view and a plan about the things she wanted. She never talked about these out
loud, but her passion and perseverance at keeping a job and studying for a
University degree at the same time, were really admirable. She never complained
about how hard it was to get through the day and always had time for
everybody.
Cruising In The
Countryside – Watercolour 2001
Her brother Antonio was in the police force and she would
talk about his different girlfriends because he was an eligible bachelor. They
had bought a house in the suburbs of Florence, he was staying at the ground
floor and she was staying on the first floor.
Marina was practical and down to earth and I don’t know how
she managed not to harden up into a tough career girl, with all the things she
managed to do. She never got out of being a nice family girl and a loving
sister and daughter.
1 Teresa preparing the table
2 View of the back garden
3 Sylvia , her mother and the cook
That Sunday in autumn the sun was shining down on us,
it was 11.o.clock in the morning and a pretty chilly day. The place id rented
in the countryside wasn’t very promising at all. There had been strange
going-ons at night and the cats were behaving very much out of character. I
suppose the owners who lived on the first floor thought I wasn’t very normal
myself. From their point of view I was a foreigner who had bought in cats with
her and a middle aged woman on her own.
Marina instead had her brother and fiancée around
her, she seemed to be well protected and well adjusted. She was amused by my
eccentricity I suppose that was why she still kept in touch. We looked into my
place in the country and later headed out to Sylvia’s place by the
seaside.
Swimming With The Dolphins – Oil painting 1988
The villa was just a little walking distance from the
beach, you only needed to cross the road to get there. I found out later that
the views from the window were magnificent and exciting, because the waves were
rolling right in front of you. We got to
Sylvia’s place about noon when the sun had warmed up the front hall by pouring
in through the large French windows. Sylvia and Lucia were there to receive us.
Marina was a great conversationalist and I found out that there was so much
that I’d never known about her. The interaction between these 3 Italian women was
interesting because they had all such a rich amount of memories, experiences
and tenacity, which was much different from what I had found in other
people.
View of the piazza signoria
from the window Watercolour 2003
Marina was Pugliese and from manfredonia the area where
Padre Pio had spent most his life. All catholics have great faith and respect
for this saintly man. His life and works especially his stigmata’s were
extraordinary and his life was impressive. Marina and Sylvia, who were both
believing Catholics, were talking about Padre Pio.
Sylvia was speaking a lot about different things, which
showed she was well read and interested in the world. I was meeting Lucia for
the first time in my life and the thing that was extraordinary about her was
her simplicity and intelligence in speech, she was in her twenties and was
about to drop out of university because she had to work for a living. She was waitressing. She hadn’t been able to
finish university because it was impossible to study and work at the same time.
It requires a lot of concentration to focus on books and exams. I could relate
to what she was going through. Lucia had gone through various exams but now
seemed confused about what she wanted out of life.
One losses strength, when there isn’t enough support from
family and friends, I knew all about that sort of thing and I felt sympathetic.
She seemed not to have anyone who encouraged her to get a degree.
It seemed such a miracle that I managed to pull through
University after all those years, what with the Iran Iraq war and little funds
from home, I felt I knew very well how hard it was for her to study and work at
the same time. Especially with a humanities degree, much of the courses at the
university were for people who had time and money to continue studying.
Journalism or teaching, were only possible after you had spent some years at
private schools. I had seen my wealthier colleagues do that. They were the ones
that then went on to professions.
In The Library – Oil Painting 2007
Momenti Brillanti
Oil on canvas 1990
I got lucky because even though I was very confused about
how a thesis was written I had been introduced to Patrizia by an Australian
professor at uni, and she helped me by lending me her computer and by giving me
good advice. Incredibly enough just as I handed in my thesis the university
fees for the next bunch of graduates went from a few 100,000 old lire to a
million old lire. It would have been impossible for me to pay another session
at uni never mind this incredible high amount.
As Lucia was talking about her own experience, I knew
perfectly well that for a woman her age the costs were an obstacle. I had known
other people who had been passionate about getting through their studies.
Such people had no time for niceties and pretences and
Lucia was one of those people. She was a typical Italian girl jet-black hair
and dark features were set upon very white skin and she had a striking beauty
spot on her chin under her lips. She was what they called a truly archaic woman
because she wasn’t really pretty but she grew on you.
We had talked about so many things the 4 of us it was
astonishing to find that the hours had flown by and we had hardly said all that
we wanted to say. I realised that after many years of solitude I was back in a
world where there were people who were interesting. I loved Sylvia’s house,
which reminded me of a similar place in Karachi.
The Sitting Room –
Watercolour 2006
Seven bricks it was called and was owned by mother’s second
cousins a big old house where some generations had lived, memories filling up
each and every corner. I felt that there was the spirit of the house by the
sea, which would be positive. We had been sitting in a huge hall with very high
ceilings over 4 metres with very tall windows with lots of light pouring in,
the autumn skies were darkening as we left the place.
This front hall was probably the place where lots of people
had had their romantic meetings, in fact I found out later that the buildings
had been a hotel in the 20s and 30s and that Sylvia mother had lived there all
her married life.
Casa a Pietra Santa
Watercolour 2003
Later on, this ninety year old lady told us stories about
her life in viareggio whilst we were sitting around the dinner table,
especially episodes that had happened during the second world war. One of the
stories was about how she had to pass through a checkpoint where the German
solders checked everyone who was entering Florence. She had her very blonde
blue-eyed baby son who they thought was a German boy because he looked
especially different and that is why she got through the checkpoint. They had
asked her if his father was German and she had playfully said yes just to get
through.
The moral of this story she said, was that one had to go
with the situation.
I sat with the old lady when Lucia couldn’t sit with her
and looked after her at times but my stay at the villa began on a Sunday. I had
gone out to look for a place to rent closer to Viareggio.
I was staying at Pietra Santa but it was cold and
inhospitable. I felt that there were people there who were watching me
closely.
Buildings by the
seaside (triptic)
Oil on canvas 2008
In a sense Eric, Sarina’s boyfriend was right about Pietra
Santa. It was a place for rich artists and if you didn’t do sculptures, people
couldn’t really accept you. Maybe I was just too old and I couldn’t pretend to
be an aspiring artist anymore. I still sold my cards in a shop on the main
piazza in the city but I found it difficult to get into the life.
Once I saw some very handsome Senegalese people, men and
women in their national costumes coming in and out of a house just next to the
main piazza. They seemed to be very happy and I was surprised that they didn’t
have any problems being black in an area that was very conservative.
Houses in the country
Oil on canvas 2008
Eric had such a lot of good things to say about Pietra
Santa because he was a rich American type. He probably didn’t get followed or
watched at all. I was used to having this phenomenon in my life ever since I
had moved to via fiesolana. Something was going on. Sylvana the gallerist in
Borgo Pinti said that a lot of different groups of people were observing me
even though I wasn’t political at all.
I had come out of Pietra Santa thinking that I would speak
to Sylvia and see what she would say about me joining her staff for the winter.
I knew that she preferred to keep s South American people because she knew them
well and they were flexible and good tempered. I had been followed by a group
of people all that day. I had been walking down the beach road trying to phone
up housing agencies and asking them about cheap rent for the winter.
The Kitchen
Oil on canvas 2008
Sylvia, wasn’t to be seen anywhere and as I waited
there behind the big front window I watched Jacopo Sylvia’s son. He was wearing
a black jumper and pants sitting on the sofa with an afro American girl deep in
conversation. I hadn’t seen Jacopo but I had heard his name mentioned a lot.
You could tell that he had South American genes because he looked the type. He
had a lot of dark thick black hair falling across his forehead and his features
were peaceful. Their conversation made me think that he was a smooth and
sophisticated type of person.
Dialogue No. 1
Watercolour 1992
However my first impression of Jacopo would prove to be
very wrong because, he had had many things which had darkened his life and he
was far from being at peace with himself and the world. I would come to know
these peoples stories later on and the reality would unfold itself but in this
magic moment he would seem a “normal” man sitting with a “normal” girl; i.e.
people who had no problems where as I was the one outside the door knocking and
asking if I could be taken in for the night.
It was very hard to ask for Sylvia’s help but as I knocked
and introduced myself, they called her to come to the door. She had been in the
kitchen and came to greet me much surprised because we had only met once and
now, I was introducing myself as her friend. I asked her straight if I could
stay the night or did I even ask? That I can’t remember because she led me away
to a room upstairs and put me up for the night without a question or a
word.
Later on, she sent her young Chilean assistant Jose Miguel
with some food up to my room. I couldn’t believe it. This was a moment of need
and I was very grateful to have found refuge in a safe place.
The Refuge
Mixed media 1987
I wished that I could have done the same for other people
but I don’t think that I would ever have the strength or the faith to do so. It
was a relief to have solved my bed situation for the night and I went out again
after dinner to buy a toothbrush hoping that I would find a pharmacy open in
the area. Of course it was useless to think that anything else but bars and
nightclubs would be open on a Sunday evening.
Next morning I woke up to the lively cries of the ducks and
geese on the riverbanks next to the house, I had always noticed them on my
walks but on this particular morning I woke up to hear them sing; it was as if
they sang the praise to the creator.
It was a bright fresh morning to me because I had received
this kindness from a friendly soul and the beauty of the place made life worth
the living. There were rooms, which Sylvia showed me later, which had windows
that opened right over the sea. Breath taking views to wake up with, it made
all the difference.
Boat out on the sea on
a windy night
Watercolour collage
2008
Even though the building itself needed to be repaired it
was still a grand old place. Its majestic marble staircase leading up to the
first floor was really spectacular but the front halls that received the sun
made it a happy joyful and a unique place.
However you realise it isn’t the place that is the most
important thing, it is the spirit of the people and how good they are that
matters most. I had left Via Fiesolana city bustle and I was grateful for that.
I had moved on with much difficulty and now again I was looking for my future
in viareggio. My mother and brother had given me hopes that they would have
liked to buy property in and around Florence but they never got around to
actually doing it. They held the purse strings and they weren’t really bothered
by my problems abroad.
The Old City
Watercolour 2002
They were thinking that they wouldn’t mind me going back to
live in Tehran with them. They had dropped the idea of buying a place and
didn’t want me to stay on. My father however thought that I should settle down
in the adopted country after having lived there for so many years.
I have reached the conclusion that if that one doesn’t
innovate then life itself makes the necessary changes for you. One has to make
an effort to make positive changes, beneficial ones and all this requires
courage to begin with, strength to continue the task and purpose to bring it
all together. That is the ideal, however I didn’t do too well in bringing it
all together at all. I am sure that the only reason they were not making any
more moves towards buying a place was because of fear. The fear of the unknown
The Metropolis
Watercolour Collage
2008
Sylvia’s way of life made me question my own decisions. I
think, it was the Christian morality of giving hospitality that played a part
in her accepting to take me on in her household. It was now winter and I needed
a place because I couldn’t pay more rent where I was staying. I called Lucia
and had invited her to come to my place in Pietra Santa. I was thinking that
perhaps I could do some waitressing like she did or some other work in order to
earn money. But my heart was in the white villa on the beach and I asked Lucia
to ask Sylvia if I could stay with them at her house. There was no heating in
the rooms upstairs in the winter months. So eventually, I went to stay where
everyone else was staying and my pets stayed downstairs in the garden. Lucia,
Pascal and Teresa had rooms as well and I was given a room next to them. My
stay at the villa began in the autumn of 2004.
The bedroom view
Watercolour 2008
Sylvia ran the place as if it was her own family or
community of people and certain rituals like dinner had been set. That was when
people gathered around the big dining table next to the kitchen. Mrs Pardini
Sylvia’s mother who was 94 years old stood in the kitchen and helped the cook
make dinner for people. Actually one of the girls had the set task of preparing
the meal for everybody but grandma did help out on the kitchen in whatever way
she could. She worked as an assistant cook, Sylvia thought that by keeping her
mother occupied, the old lady would get some exercise and lead a healthier life
and she enjoyed being around other people,
I had been given the task of watering plants but after
having done that I didn’t know what to do
so I did nothing and went for walks on the beach. No one in the house seemed to
enjoy the beach. I found that these walks were a treasure which I had missed
out on for many years. Living in Florence, wasn’t like living away from nature
because the countryside was only minutes away. But one got tangled up in the
everyday chores and didn’t make the effort of going out and seeking nature. Now
I had the possibility to be with the sea breezes and the fresh air and the
sound of the waves. I felt guilty about the times I had spent watching TV and I
pitied my parents and people like them who had the TV on all the time. I am
sure that they spent half their life in front of the telly like that.
The Sitting Room
Oil on canvas 2008
That is the way a lot of people live today in the world. It
has probably something to do with enjoying a passive state of mind, you just
let go and accept whatever is given to you without any effort.
Nobody in the white villa watched TV that much, but people
stayed indoors a lot. Even on the very best days they couldn’t be persuaded to
go out for a walk on the spur of the moment. I think that everyone worried a
lot, thinking their lives and problems wouldn’t work out.
The Studio – 1998
However worrying and anxiety never makes things better. I
had stayed cooped up in the room of my apartment for years because I had to get
through exams and university, and once that was done it was the same happening
again in via Fiesolana because I had to make a living. I had spent so much of
my life in doors that I almost felt a guilty pleasure when I did go out for
walks (as if it was a privilege that I enjoyed without permission from the
adults!).
It’s funny how one feels that one doesn’t deserve to be
happy and it follows that you want to give yourself a hard time just to fit in
and please everybody else.
The Studio Entrance
In fact in the moment of happiness there is a thought that
ups itself and says, what about all the unhappiness of humanity (just looking
at the daily newspaper is enough to participate in all the known problems and
ignore the ones that we don’t know about).
We are always trying to control life but one way or the
other sooner or later we find out that one can only make an effort in the right
direction and hope for the best.
The Rough Seas –
Acrylic on Canvas 1985
Like a small boat on the ocean we try to find the shore and
if we are lucky, and God willing, we may find the island of happiness.
Happiness was what a lot of people were after, and one of
these was Sylvia’s son Jacobo. He said often that he didn’t want to suffer, he
wanted to be normal like everybody else but he hadn’t found himself yet.
Metropolis
Watercolour collage
2008
When I met Jacobo he was 35 years old; he reminded me of a
darker shade of a young Roman Polanski, but he wasn’t an ambitious boy at all.
He had lost his way on his way to school when he was 16 and had been trying to
come back home ever since.
I was working as his nurse/companion during that Christmas
of 2004/05 because his girlfriend had gone home to
Mexico. He was lost without someone to take
care of him and I knew that I couldn’t replace her warmth and affection. They
sat next to each other like two kittens, the body language said we just want to
be hanging out together.
The Computer Room – Oil Painting 2007
She wasn’t a pretty woman, but she seemed caring and
he was a vulnerable young man who needed to lean on a companion. Rosa Elena was
her name and she had a laptop and was managing to swim with the tide while
Jacobo was struggling to keep afloat. He had stepped into the parlour of the
“dealer” when he was a teenager in order to feel grown up.
He had talked about himself over lunch one day saying
that when the dealers approached him he had felt powerful, as if he had found
his place in society; becoming a man amongst men. Later on though when he was
into the game, he had been frightened; but then it had been too late to turn
back. I was wondering why I had never been attracted to drugs myself. I had
been curious about them, and I had even read Aldous Huxleys book about tripping
experiences but I didn’t really feel that I wanted to have them in my life.
The Confused Couple –
Oil on canvas 2008
When after years of struggle I came back home to my
parents, my mother asked me “why didn’t you become a drug addict like everyone
else?” as if it was the only thing one could bring back home form the big wide
world. I was astounded by the low opinion she had of me. All my life I had
tried to get an education and aspired towards creativity and self-expression.
Those highbrow things that can frustrate a young person and make you think that
you will never make anything out of your life. I think what seriously saved me
from falling into depression well and truly were my pets Mooshie and Mooshina
who were nature’s examples of how fun life can be once you have a roof over
your head and enough to eat. They taught me how to be contented with little and
to find a lot of love and joy in their playful company.
Mooshi and Mooshina
1984 to 2001
As far as work was concerned, Sylvia had told me to water
the plants but it didn’t make sense to water them through the winter I did
clean the rooms downstairs and chores like cutting the wood, or bringing in the
washing.
At dinner we used to sit around the big dinner table beside
the kitchen. Sylvia liked everybody in the house to be sitting around the big
table at dinner. D the cook was the one who looked after Sylvia’s mother in
those months and she took her out for walks to the coffee shop during the day.
It’s funny how I had seen a man walking outside the villa the first night I
stayed there and he seemed to be a living copy of this girl in his features
only that he was taller. This stranger had looked at me in an inexplicable way
as if to say, “you got in after all our efforts to make you desist”!
The kitchen table
Water colour 2009
The good food which old Mrs Pardini and the cook made, went
to waste because of the hot tempers of the recipients. Almost immediately the
dinner table talks proved to be stressful and aggressive. Tension came from
unexpected parts! I never imagined such problems at the dining table. I felt it
was so unnecessary to be unpleasant in a gorgeous house like that which came
with a hospitable Sylvia as the owner. However people are so full of anxiety as
a rule that if there is no control through rational thought they can easily
become unbearable and mean in the most beautiful and comfortable
situations.
D the cook kept her mouth shut and worked hard most of the
time. She was a nice girl, into sports and I thought of her to be so distant
from me in every way. She was on good terms with all the other young people and
wouldn’t get involved in the politics of the house.
The Mermaids
Watercolour 2007
Pascal was Sylvia’s best friend and much cherished by her
during those days, because even though he had been involved in drugs he was
coming out of it through his own efforts.
Sylvia paid him a lot of attention, somehow
it felt as if she was trying to help Pascal in order to make amends for what
had happened to her own son.
Jacobo was not at all well. He was so unlike the man I saw
that night sitting with Louise. I came to know that Louise was his American
friend. She had been through the same problem but had somehow come through. But
Jacobo was pretty fargone, deteriorated. I felt for him because he was very
silent as if he had gone through a lot of hardship and no one else could help
him anymore. He told me that his right arm was not working at all because of
some accident which had happened some years ago.
But, Sylvia used to hope that her boy would take up a job
as a driver someday, driving with only one hand. She expressed those ideas once
and I thought how extraordinary, she thinks that men are good for driving cars
and that is what most of them do for a living now a days! Why hadn’t I thought
of that?
My own brother had driven a van around LA when he had lived
there for some years. Somehow what was wrong with Jacobo was something of a
heart issue (I thought).
Once when Sylvia and some of us were sitting in the garden,
Jacobo who was doing some manual work in the garden came along and showed his
mother how dusty his jumper was and how it had been made dirty by the work. I
thought that was a clue to what the problem was. Jacobo was still a child in a
way, he hadn’t really matured at all. One spoke to Pascal and one could see
that there was a whole person there and very clear headed too.
Pascal gave the impression that he was attentive and
intelligent. He had a liver problem because of all the drinking and unhealthy
drug taking issues. He had survived all of it and spiritually he was a better
person for having gone through those experiments. He spoke of it light
heartedly as if it wasn't his own experience. He had read about the various
drugs and tried them out on himself. He did whatever he did with open eyes and
a mature responsible mind.
I had heard that drugs were given to young people nowadays
to stop them from making too many demands on the controlling forces in society.
He was really a small child in comparison to Pascal, even though they were both
35. Jacobo sometimes came to dinner all dopey and it broke everyone’s heart to
see him that way. He would sit next to Pascal and his head would hover down on
the food, he looked as if he was going to put his head down on the table for a
long snooze. It was at one of these dinners that Lucia came to say some bold
things about relationships at the table. She said that Sylvia seemed to prefer
Pascal to her own son and treated him in a privileged manner. Sylvia was
sitting there with Jacobo and Pascal sitting next to her, it was such a strong
statement to make. Silence took over the dinner table it was almost a criticism
that shook everyone out of their relaxed state of mind. Off came all their
bourgeois niceties and high flying dinner talk, Lucia was saying let’s get
real!
Dreamtime
Mixed media 1989
I was wondering what Lucia expected from an overworked and
disappointed mother. I mean how much could she ever support Jacobo without ever
getting any signs of improvement from him? Jacobo of course didn’t say
anything. I really didn’t realise the depth of this statement until someone
shouted at Lucia that she should shut up and get back to the kitchen where she
belonged and that she had no right to say such things.
Pascal didn’t say anything to defend himself, but Sylvia
was upset and so was everyone else and everyone started to shout and get angry
at each other but mainly at Lucia. Some defended her saying that she was only
saying the truth and others disliked her for being disrespectful to Sylvia at
her own table. Some tried to calm people down. When everyone started to get
back to normal, Lucia was still trying to explain her point of view but saying
that she was sorry how she put things and she was sorry about hurting anyone’s
feelings.
Dialogue No. 2
Watercolour 1986
I had seen with my friend Marina, that female’s loyalties
of people in the south of Italy always supported the men of the family at all
costs. Marina would defend (her then boyfriend) Carlo totally and irrationally.
I suppose that Lucia had expected total loyalty from Sylvia. However people in
Tuscany aren’t so family orientated as people in the south, I think their
loyalties are for what they call “to reason” i.e. ragionare. It is very clear
that Sylvia was a social individual who didn’t want to have to answer for her
son who hadn’t turned out as she had expected, and at times all her
frustrations were poured out on him. There was no one strong enough to give her
a helping hand in those moments of weakness.
People in the city
Pen and Ink
Later on after Christmas she found Maria Angelica a young
Chilean woman who she had met at church. Maria Angelica was a beautiful girl
with long auburn hair and a good figure, she was also a very good-hearted
Christian friend. Maria Angelica started to give Sylvia all the friendship she
needed to keep Jacobo and Pascal out of trouble. The question is why hadn’t God
sent her this angel before.
The Musicians
Oil on canvas 2008
After this dinner of contention Jacobo wasn’t feeling too
good about Pascal because, Lucia had voiced the thought which was a seed, an
idea which hadn’t occurred to him before. Jacobo knew that Pascal was more
sophisticated, but he was confident of his mother’s love especially since she
declared that she loved him in front of everybody. Jacobo being a heart person
was deeply aware in a quiet way, he wasn’t stupid, he was only unable to
express himself properly. Or was it because of all the pressure that he felt
and all the demands made on him that he couldn’t cope?
It was in the month before Christmas when Sylvia asked me
to stay with Jacobo in her apartment in piazza ciompi as his assistant
nurse.
I was to keep an eye on him through Christmas and the New
Year. It was then that I got to know him a bit more and he told me what had
happened to him as a young teenager. He said that he had been approached by
some people when he was 16/17 and he felt that he could be powerful by hanging
out with them. These people sold drugs. He tried to do everything in order to
get out of it ever since, but that he suffered a lot and that at 35 he didn’t
want to suffer anymore.
It was strange that I had seen this person in a different
light the first time I set eyes on him sitting on the sofa talking to Louise.
He revealed himself to have a bundle of problems like everyone else. But,
nevertheless he was a good person. I felt that he had been misunderstood many
times and hadn’t had the medicine that he had really needed. Sometimes God can
send you down exactly what you need and that is what can be achieved if he has
accepted your prayers. But Jacobo hadn’t believed in God that much.
It was getting close to Christmas. The day I arrived in
Piazza dei Ciompi, I saw that Jacobo could only use one hand. Nevertheless, he
had wanted to do the cooking for the both of us.
After the meal he disappeared and when Sylvia asked me
where he was I said he hadn’t come back. She told me to go upstairs and check
if he was there (it was as if she knew what would happen). In fact he had gone
upstairs with a bottle of wine and had drunk himself to sleep, poor thing, he
must have felt very much alone. The next days as I got to know him better I
found out that he didn’t intend to spend Christmas with his family and wanted
to spend it on his own in Florence. His feelings were well intact and it was
surprising to find that he was very oriental in a way that only Asians can
understand.
Piazzale Michelangelo
Watercolour 1999
Jacobo didn’t like Viareggio at all. It was because they
had given him a hard time and he was very law abiding (very adherent and aware
of the law). Compared to him I was an anarchist who feared nothing more than
having no money in my pocket.
I had always like Viareggio. As a student Patrizia had
bought me to a pizza place right by the seaside and we had stuffed ourselves
with pizza together with a bunch of rowdy teenagers. They were on the way home
from school. It seemed like the authentic Italian Viareggio life, I mean people
lived this life every day, having pizza before going back home.
Without a title
Watercolour 1986
San Miniato
Watercolour 2002
We celebrated the Christmas of 2005 at Viareggio in the
white villa. When Christmas day came the table was prepared at the big dining
halls where I had seen the dinner laid that first night. It was a lovely do
even similar to the lunches and dinners that my family have always prepared for
relatives and friends in Pakistan and Iran. Prepared with a lot of love and
affection.
Everyone got on well and Jacobo and Pascal were well
behaved and good. Jacobo’s Uncle Frederico proved to be very jovial and
sociable, he was sort of Irish looking with red hair and beard and wanted
everybody to feel at ease.
City View
Watercolour Collage
2002
His wife was a blond laptop owning lady who was looking at
the business side of running their hotel and she was always busy with the
emails.
One of their daughters had married a paraplegic, who was
very intelligent and very up to date, but he couldn’t move at all, his wife was
a beautiful girl. One wondered about these young marriages, the other daughter
was expecting with her husband they were both well settled in their life.
One thing that Frederico had said stuck in my mind even
today, he said, “my mother in law irons my shirts for me and I am very grateful
to her for this bit of affection”. It seemed that she had won him over by doing
that chore for him. As a young man Frederico had been to Iran and hadn’t met
any girls there and thought that it was very strange. I thought it was strange
too, because he must have been there during the Shah’s time when women were
more westernised.
Dialogue No.3 –
Watercolour
He was disappointed about this, but I wanted to tell him
that Iranians as a people, are very reserved, especially the women and not very
adventurous in their friendships even though they like foreigners and they
usually want to practise their English – especially young people. However, men
approaching women in Iran is not the done thing.
Even though in the new post-revolutionary age, it is
surprising to see that women are more outgoing and would approach foreigners
just to chat to them.
Visiting The Cathedral
– Print Watercolour
I felt very ill at ease that Christmas, because I wasn’t
really supposed to be there.
But due to the fact that I had no money, I had ended up in
this situation. Had I had my independence I would have probably spent Xmas and
new year on my own as I had done in the past. But Sylvia had a way of making an
occasion of this Christmas. She put her old 60s vinyl’s on an old gramophone
and that’s when she announced that she loved her son very much. She said that while
we were sitting around the table and everyone was much surprised. It was like a
gift for Jacobo, after months of tension.
It was good that she did tell him that she loved him
dearly, I mean it’s always good for people to reveal their good feelings for
each other as much as possible (instead of saying hurtful things). One never
knows what happens the next day in life.
In fact, Jacobo didn’t survive the coming year, he passed away in his
own bed in the beginning of March, he fell off the bed and went into a coma
while everybody was sitting around him and passed away a month after that.
Sometimes people recover from a coma but he didn’t.
View From The Kitchen
– Watercolour 2002
I don’t know why Sylvia’s house and life reminded me so
much of my mother’s second cousins in Karachi. They had this house called seven
bricks and they lived as an extended family back in 81.
I had seen that family live together in this big house and
it seemed similar to how Italians live when they live together. They have their
fights and there misunderstandings but they go on living together nevertheless.
That is why people in the Middle East believe that some Italians have Eastern
characteristics (because they are sociable and like to eat together). In Italy,
eating in company is really important to people and sometimes, eating alone is
looked upon as unpleasant.
Indian and Pakistani weddings and that sense of the family
coming together, has a similar attitude of bringing everybody together for a
joyful event. Even though things are changing now even in parts of Asia, some
people don’t have that much time for each other.
After the new year lunch and dinner Pascal started to study
for his exams in order to get a degree and Sylvia used to help him with his
studies. I saw less of Lucia because she worked in a restaurant in Pietra Santa
and as a companion of an elderly lady.
Casa a Ventimiglia
Water colour
Once we were all down at the apartment in Florence in
Piazza di Chompi and Louise Jacobo’s American friend was there too. That was
when she was accused by one of the girls of having taken a shirt from the
luggage. It was such an absurd accusation and I was sure that it was done in
order to create unnecessary tension. I just couldn’t believe this girl to be so
mean. It was as if every once in a while some unpleasant thing had to be
created on purpose in order to sweep away all the good feelings of friendship.
I saw that happening often in other situations and other countries as well. At
this point I defended Louise, because I respected her and thought of her
highly. She was an amazingly informed and educated African American woman.
Dialogue No.4 (The
Enigma) Watercolour 1990
She knew about things, which weren’t about America and were
about the rest of the world probably because she had gone to university in
Russia. And she wasn’t even Jewish! She reminded me of Condolisa Rice the woman
who was Mr Bush Junior right hand woman in government at the time.
Ms Rice’s speaking fluent Russian made me think that there
were people who had followed in her footsteps and Louise was probably one of
them. I will always remember the story of how Ms Rice had stood in the doorway
to a merry Mr Yelstin who had had a glass too many (as far as I remember the
anecdote I had read in the newspaper) she had spoken to him in Russian! I
thought that was very impressive.
The Uffizzi
Watercolour 2002
Sometimes Lucia was very busy and she couldn’t sit with old
Mrs Pandini Sylvia’s mother, she would ask me to sit with her and I would do
that on Sundays.
Sylvia’s mother was very fond of Sylvia and always said that
she would defend her daughter whole-heartedly and wouldn’t allow anyone to
speak badly of her.
She had been a young girl in the late 1800’s when women use
to wear big hats with flowers on them, and long romantic skirts with frilly
starched tops. The type of thing that you see in films but she had pictures of
herself with other girls dressed that way and she said that they were people
that worked at their lace and embroidery producing factory.
Her parents who were Florentines had been pretty wealthy
because of the factory; I loved to listen to the stories of how it used to be
and how she had met her husband and how she had married. But more than anything
I’ll remember her for what she said after each meal, “Anche oggi si e
mangiato”! which intends to say, “even today we have eaten a meal”. Having
lived through the war, I think she appreciated the fact that not everyone can
procure the satisfying and tasty meals of the day and that is why one should be
grateful for having the good wholesome meals served to us every day.
Without a title Water
colour 1987
The
Painting Ekstasis:
This picture came to represent my seeing
the world in its smaller components; how everything is always organically and
precisely mixing and mingling and changing from one thing to another in nature
according to a plan.
This is a water picture, one about the two seas not mixing
together.
It was Nadia who told me about the Koranic verse that and
says that the sea waters are salty and fresh, but that they never mix with the
currents of the freshwater that run in to the seas as if they were rivers
running on land. Thanks to the mastermind who has had these systems run the
world since time immemorial.
AL RAHMAN, Chap 55, v.19, 20.
“He sent the two waters that meet each other and between
them there is a barrier which is not contaminated by fresh nor salt water,
pearls and coral are extracted from both waters.”
Al Rahman is the name of a chapter of the sacred Koran and
means ‘The Benevolent Creator’. It is a chapter which speaks about all of God’s
creations and the extraordinary things and the phenomena we find in nature; it
asks the reader ‘which one of these things can you negate?’
Had heard about the rivers flowing in the seas in some of
the Jacques Cousteau films about the earth’s waters. The concept of having
rivers flowing in the oceans waters is still mind boggling. In this chapter in
the sacred book in talks about the salty and the sweet waters which can never
mix even when they are existing side by side in the seas and the oceans.
J’allais me donner picture
I like this painting very much, because of
the balance I find it in. It is just right.
I was friends with Francesca and I think that’s where I got
the poem from – J’allais me donner. One day, I was at her house and she started
reading T.S. Eliot’s poem for me, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, which
starts with:
Let us go then you and I
When the evening is spread out against the
sky…
It has this tired air of dragging one’s drunken feet on the
pavement, and then every once and a while it says:
In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
Eliot’s poem is so much of our experience, I mean me and
Francesca’s. We had a feeling for the literature we were studying, especially
Francesca who was truly a creative person. I found this poem in some book
belonging to Francesca; she was giving me her deep feelings for Eliot’s poems
by reading out the love song poem to me.
It was such a gift of togetherness, but like all love and
all good things, one knows that the apex is reached and then, one has to get
back to reality. That’s what ‘J’allais me donner’ means for me, especially
concerning love. Worldly love and attachments are destined to fly away, as
William Blake’s poem says:
‘He who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in eternity’s sunrise’
‘J’allais me donner’ is the poem that was fitting to write
on this image. It was even the expression of my feelings for Philippe, meaning
that I had to let it go. He was never going to be mine and I was never allowed
to be by his side, even as a friend.
However, God did allow me to have a cat named Mooshie and
to whom I use to give all my love, because she was always there and tolerated
my ups and downs, a true friend who was always there for me. The only thing she
couldn’t do was to provide me with groceries – and, I suppose, children. But
even this little beloved creature was not mine, and one day we would have to
part.
The poem ‘J’allais me donner’ was a prophecy about the
future. Now in 2009, the fascists are in our lives, controlling our human
relationships, and we have to pay ransom for everything, except for the breath
we take, and this is what the poem was about;
‘I was going to tell you that I loved you
but I realised that I didn’t belong to
myself’
Which is exactly what has happened ever
since the year 2000 or thereabouts. Possibly, it was with breaking down of the
Berlin wall that this Stasi type of control has overtaken the world. This
system of hate goes directly against the JudeoChristian idea of love and
fraternity, and it considers money as the only God that we have to answer to.
Therefore it creates deep ditches around the individuals who don’t obey its
orders. My brother, before his death, told me that he felt as if he had been
thrown into a deep well and couldn’t get out of it, his voice weak, as if he
were really at the bottom of the well.
Psychological pressures on him and other
people.
‘Il
Flusso Organico’, 1990
‘The Organic Flow’
I was thinking of ‘Ophelia’, the picture
painted by a PreRaphaelite painter.
I really love the romanticism of the character of Ophelia.
However, Ophelia was a person who didn’t fight in order to win. She wasn’t
thought to fight for things. She was a receiver, as most women are taught to
be. Sometimes, I think that is a middle class attitude. You complacently wait
for things to be given to you. But really speaking, Ophelia wasn’t intelligent
enough or experienced in the ways of life – she didn’t even have a good friend
to help her out. On top of it, she had a father who was a prohibiting moralist
and was a negative influence in her life. As a woman, Ophelia wasn’t a
fortunate woman. Sometimes in the difficult project of ‘husband chasing’, girls
get lucky and have the assistance they need from their mother, an elder sister
or a friendly soul. One can’t help thinking that had Ophelia known how to
humour Hamlet, she might have saved him as well as her father and brother. She
could have saved everybody had she been a ‘bad’ girl. As a more experienced and
cunning and materialistic woman would have grabbed Hamlet the prince as a prize
and she wouldn’t have allowed him to get lost in his fantasises of revenge. How
useless and negative Hamlet is as a personality. He takes the life of many
innocent people and cultivates hate. So it is hate upon hate that we see on the
stage. He tries to put things right and says that things shouldn’t have
happened the way they did. But really speaking, his interfering only brings
darkness. I suppose what Shakespeare was really saying was that one bad deed
brings with it a trail of other bad deeds. Opposite to this, we can see that
one intelligent capable person who can save the peace at all costs may bring
better times for himself and others around him. The organic flow is life itself
– trickling and flowing water always finds a way. It is invincible and has no
need for principles… It is a law unto its own. The laws which are inherent in
nature, even if nature isn’t kind, it automatically does what is supposed to
do, showed a pretty girl who had drowned herself having suffered a broken
heart. My painting is the before and the after scene. Ophelia disappears – only
the flowing of the river remains and the plants that grow.
It is important that individuals are able to overcome the
difficult moments of life and continue living the best life they can. It is the
message that we get from Shakespeare; having the strength to continue even if
life is getting us down, is the best policy and while we are trying to live our
best life, helping others to live their lives as well as they can.
Having a correct attitude – the attitude of water which is
life giving in its mere existence.
Virus Invading Bacteria, Wednesday 28th October 2009
The viruses and the bacteria is a painting
which was inspired by my studies of biology in London in 1980.
I was very impressed with the way the virus could inject
their DNA into the body of a bacteria. In order to reproduce itself, a virus
would use the body of the bacteria as a resource and in a short while, its DNA
would turn into many. Then lots of little viruses would burst out of the empty
shell of the bacteria. What would remain of the bacteria would be only the
shell. Today I realise that the Maoist policy probably derives from scientific
research. It seems that ‘The Entity’ will manage to take over the world by
simply following what the virus does to the bacteria.
Is there anyone to study these political events in the
light of this theory?
I feel it upon my life, and even though the invasion is
being carried out very subtly and seemingly effortlessly in the Middle East,
the fact that The Entity would never allow a Manfazar Alzeid
– the Iraqi, who threw his shoes at President Bush – type to survive his
freedom of speech and become a hero. That is what makes me fear this silent
takeover by ‘The Stasi Entity’. Some call it the Mongols conquering the rest of
the world a second time around. But on the other hand, the wars of the white
imperialists in the region are bitter and relentless. A war for resources has
brought the West & its allies into lands whose people and mentality is well
known to the Chinese who are Asians and are rather liked and respected by other
populations of Asia. How can they ever be kept out of the race for resources by
the ex-colonial powers who have also played the part of white racists who
looked down at the people they conquered?
Uncle and Aunt
Dialogue Watercolour, 1988
My Uncle Ismile had been living in the UK
in London ever since he was eighteen, until he died in 1999 or thereabouts when
he was sixty-three. He was born in Bangalore like my mother, but he considered
himself a Pakistani rather than Persian.
He was important in my life because I stayed with him and
his wife Ylva for three years when I went to study in England in 1979. I was
just out of high school, having taken my last exam for my diploma. Having
finished high school at eighteen, I looked forward to going to England and
staying with them in London.
My mother was his elder sister of about 10 years, and as
her family had accepted to keep me at school in London with them even when I
had been a child. Now she asked him to help her get me into university in Britain.
I was always a very dull, uniformed young thing with no one to guide me. I was
more than happy to escape the university entrance exams in Tehran as they
seemed a barrier which seemed impossible for me to overcome.
The Persian carpet Oil on canvas, 2008
I had been an absolutely useless student,
mediocre by all definitions at high school. The only subject that I was good at
was English because as a child, I had been sent to stay with my Auntie Jahan
and her three children. My Uncle Ismile and his wife Ylva lived together with
my Auntie Jahan in the southeast of London, in a semi-detached house. Later
they moved to a house which they renovated themselves. They were very different
from us Iranians as they did a lot of DIY and enjoyed it.
The highlight of my high school in Iran, was when I once
did a synopsis of the book 1984,
introducing George Orwell to my seventeen year old class mates. I suppose I am
still happy about that, because a lot of other students were proud of their
maths and science exams, and I usually never excelled in anything. However,
having gone to primary school in the UK as a kid, my English was pretty good
and then it is true, that my Mother, God bless her soul, tried to get me
interested in the subject of books and novels by telling me the stories of
these, and that is how I was introduced to the stories of Shakespeare and other
authors.
She was an English Literature MA from Bangalore University
and she loved books herself. Her efforts – whatever little effort she put in
teaching me – were fruitful and even later on in life, I followed her on that
path, being too afraid of risking a useless degree in art. That is what my
Mother thought because we were ignorant of the fact that art was an important
subject. Here I want to tell everybody that a degree in art can be as useful as
any other. My Uncle Ismile had heard his fair share of stories too, because he
was my mother’s youngest brother and she tried to get him to study with the
same methods.
The sitting room looking on to the
river Arno Watercolour, 2007
I had always been a plain girl, whereas my
Pakistani cousins Ameneh and Atefeh, with whom I stayed with in London, were
much more interesting and brilliant girls. Everyone was always talking about
them. What they did and said, was of the utmost importance. They were special
perhaps because their father had died and also because Auntie Jahan and her
Brother and his wife genuinely liked to communicate with children and judged
them to be above average.
My aunt and uncle and Ylva, my uncle’s Swedish wife,
thought the world of Ameneh, the eldest child. She was truly the star on top of
the Christmas tree. People would have thought that she was some sort of a
genius in the making. My uncle, they say, was pretty much obsessed with her
when she had been a teenager, and he hadn’t allowed my aunt to bring up her
children in the Islamic Pakistani tradition. The girls had pretty much a
British type of education and upbringing.
In 1979, when I arrived at their home with my mother when I
was eighteen, my cousins weren’t living there. Ameneh was at Brighton
University studying science, and Nadar was at Swansea. Sadly, Atefeh had passed
away in Pak/Karachi at the age of sixteen from an unidentified illness. She had
fallen into a coma and died. Atefeh had gone to Karachi to live with her mother
and go to school there.
Atefeh had been my childhood friend. We were very
different; she was seemingly shy and retiring and looked very feminine, and
liked all the girly things. She loved to dress up and to look pretty, she liked
to write and had lots of friends. When in Karachi we would all go to the bazaar
in the old part of town to buy glass bangles and nice materials to give to the
tailor. It was very exciting to be with my cousins because they knew so many
people and were always involved. We visited jewellery stores with our mothers.
We weren’t really that interested in the gold ourselves, but the older
generation bought it with the idea that gold would always come in handy one
day.
Once I was invited with her to a school friend’s house and we
went to this party where all the girls and boys were sixteen like us, and we
had to stay the night because it got very late. I woke up early with the call
for prayer and even though I didn’t pray regularly, I felt I had to pray. I
couldn’t think of something to cover up with so I used a bed sheet, putting it
over my head and as I was praying, naturally. Someone in the house woke up to
go to the loo and in the dark they saw this sheet moving on its own. There was
a low frightened scream because they thought I was a ghost.
That happened some months before Atefeh went into a coma.
It was probably some kind of sign. We had had such good times together when
some months earlier she and her family had come to Tehran. They had driven from
London, travelling across Eastern Europe and Turkey all the way in an old green
Peugeot. My aunt had bought it second hand in London.
It was the summer of 1976, and when they arrived at our old
house, everything seemed just perfect…
Just some months before she passed away, we had spent some
memorable evenings on the rooftop of my old house in Tehran. In those years,
people still slept in the open air, on the rooftops in the summer. The beds
would be laid out in the cool evenings and by nighttime they were deliciously
cool and fresh to sleep in. We were both sixteen and slept close to each other.
We watched the stars and talked and giggled until we fell asleep. Even then we
had noticed the red planet and we didn’t know it was the planet Mars, which
would soon descend upon the country.
The night of the Angels Oil on canvas, 1988
Uncle Ismile and Auntie Ylva were a nice
middle aged couple, who were dreaming of their pension years when I went to
stay with them. It was because of Ylva’s Swedish influence that they lived a
very methodic and organised kind of life. Ylva was generous enough to see her
husband go back to university at forty.
Al
Noor Oil on canvas, 1987
He got his degree in economics and was then
able to teach at high school. They were both teachers, going to work every day.
They would come home, cook the evening meal and we would eat together at the
table, where my uncle talked politics and me and my aunt kept quiet, only
because we didn’t really care one way or the other.
I had been enrolled in a crash course, studying three
Alevels in order to pass them in one year. No one told me that it was an
impossible task for someone who wasn’t a real studying maniac.
However, I plodded along to Great Russell Street every day
to the University Tutorial College and would spend the lunch hour at the
British Museum. Of course I didn’t get through the exams as I should have.
My Time Mixed media, 1989
Whereas the Iranian students and the other
Indian and Pakistani students who had taken languages or Maths for their
subjects passed and were accepted into university by the end of two years
study, I only managed to get a pass for English and Biology in my A levels, and
I had spent a lot of time painting.
I am grateful to my uncle for allowing me to try going to
art school. It was my own choice, and that’s what I really wanted to do in the
first place but hadn’t had the courage in that direction. So I came home to my
uncle one day and said I had enrolled at Saint Martin’s on a foundation course
and I was going to try to get a degree in art.
I suppose people knew that I liked drawing and painting, as
I had always done those things when I should have been studying for my exams.
That year at Saint Martin’s was a good year. I had finally found my place and
was happy to go on studying art.
Going to Italy was the result of my wanting to study and to
get a degree. I hadn’t managed to do it in England. Mrs Thatcher and the
Conservative Government in 1981 brought about the rise in costs to attend
university, and the revolution in
Iran meant that I didn’t have the money.
The last time I met my uncle and aunt in Florence, they
were both older, in their sixties and enjoying their pensions. Now they had all
the time in the world to travel in Europe as they had always wanted to do. The
first thing that we did when they got off the train that came from Milan
airport, La Malpensa, was naturally to go to a coffee shop and get a
cappuccino.
My Uncle still had a lot of his thick white hair, with the
exception of a bald patch that he was getting at the back of his head. Auntie
Ylva was looking very old and tired.
Joseph’s Dream Oil on canvas,
1988
Not working hadn’t made their life more
pleasant for them. I had always been very grateful to them both for their
support and friendship, and so I was sad to see them unhappy even as
pensioners.
My aunt wore a hard expression because of the problems
that she had had to face in her life. Now
my uncle wasn’t well, and she had to look after him and nurse him. He also had
a girlfriend that he had introduced to the family; it was none of my business
in the first place, but his choice rocked my conservative view of life. It
hadn’t happened in our family that anyone should take a 2nd wife,
but I know it happens all the time… I mean divorces and other relationships
happen all the time and are in the normal way of life for everyone. There was
something wrong or right with families who remained the same all through. My
parents pulled through fifty years of marriage and were an exception to the
rule.
This ‘other woman’ happened to be an eighteen year old, one
of his students and from East Germany. This story reminded me of a film called Icelandic Wedding, where a young girl
marries the teacher and accepts the fact that each one has a life of their own.
She does not expect too much of the institution called marriage. Whereas the 1st
wife chooses to die because she finds that he is never there for her and that
she has lost him somewhere along the years.
My grandmother as a child (Saheb
Soltan) and her sister
These two people were now sitting in front
of me in the coffee shop in the Piazza della Stazione. I could feel that they
were really lonely and lost, and as if they were both in need of an adult
person to look after them.
My uncle had always been a sort of leftist-secular liberal
who didn’t believe in religion and he never talked about God.
In fact, God didn’t come into his
vocabulary at all.
Whereas his father, Mr Namazie, who was a Shirazi, was a
very religious minded Shia, and he was brought up in the Holy city of Kazemain.
He used to spend most of his time praying and reading the Holy Koran, and not
much time at his business making money in Bangalore where he lived with his
wife Mrs Saheb-Soltan Shustari, daughter of a Mullah. Their three sons had all
taken a dislike to religion and wanted to be modern and practical, and they
were secular.
My uncle, being the youngest of the five children, was
very down to earth and wanted to get things done. Getting organised and living
in the world’s reality meant everything to him. All he talked about were
political subjects. One of his favorite topics at the dinner table was what the
German Nazis did during the war in Europe. He would repeat that the Holocaust
of the Jewish people included, aside from the six million Jews, slaves, gypsies
and homosexuals as well. He would drone on and on, saying that we all must be
responsible people, doing our bit for society, contributing to society and so
forth.
I learnt a lot of Communist jargon from his dinner time
monologues. He wasn’t Islamic at all; only once did he mention God, and that
was when one summer I was going out a lot without telling him where I was going.
I only went to museums in London, but once I ventured out to France, to Paris,
to see a high school friend who was staying there. That time he said that God
had created the planets according to a plan so that they went round their
orbits with regular precision, and that’s why the worlds that God had created
were all interconnected and worked according to these precise and reliable
movements, which were eternal and relied upon each other, moving in orbits
destined by him. As in Sureh Al Rahman no 5, The Slavic race.
His wife Ylva humoured his political
sermons. Nobody, excepting Aunt Jahan and myself and her daughter Ameneh,
remembers what he said in his repetitions of the same concepts. My aunt
remembered them because she was mischievously making fun of him when he wasn’t
around. It was such a relief to see that someone didn’t take him seriously!
Auntie Ylva and myself, who were intimidated by him, used
to listen patiently at lunch and dinner. His voice of male authority didn’t
encourage anyone else to get a word in. Sometimes my aunt use to try and get a
bourgeois table discussion off the ground. She would say, “wasn’t it true that
this happened in history?” Just something to liven up the monologue. When she
did speak, she highlighted his words by her wavering and indecisive manner. He
was the one in charge, and his words were somehow unique and nothing could be
said to match their importance.
I used to wonder at him, since my father and brother never
tried to prove anything to anyone. In fact, nobody I knew was so self-absorbed
as he was. Especially his standing up for the Jewish people in our Palestinian
suffering region.
The Germans had always been morally beaten down after the
Second World War. They were portrayed as terrible humans; people who
heartlessly helped the Fuhrer to be the dictator that he was. Hollywood and all
English productions on the subject of the war have always been full of
propaganda which we all know well. However, in Iran and the Arab countries,
Germans had always been looked up to because they were known to be so
efficient, unlike ourselves, they were disciplined, capable and neutral.
For other reasons we liked the Germans and thought that
they were more tolerant towards us in the Middle East than most of the white men
and their civilisations. They were involved in other issues with other nations,
and that was reassuring for a lot of people. Being reliable, clear minded and
straightforward and sincere and not very friendly, is the Protestantism was
more understandable, and it made these people seem more acceptable.
The Israeli war on the Palestinians, the plight of the
Arabs and their homelessness, was what he should have been talking about and
what he did say about the subject was unrealistic. He said that if all the Arabs
got united, there wouldn’t be room for “the state of apartheid” in the Middle
East. But we all knew that this was not a solution and that it would never
happen. The future would probably allow the state of Israel to survive and
flourish – the injustice to the Palestinians was obvious and inevitable and
nobody could do anything about it. Only a miracle could save the Palestinians
and the Middle East from this, and a miracle was nowhere in sight.
The Blue Apartment in 1997
Having said that, accepting this reality
also made people in the Middle East looks at Israel as a creation of Europeans
who had always been intolerant and had kept the hatred against the Jewish
nation fueled for centuries. The Muslims had to pay the price for European
crimes and history. Whilst the Western countries had created their oasis in the
dessert, Israel was now their ‘darling’ and everything that nation did was
right and good.
I traveled to Iran in the early 1990s, when I was thirty
two. My best friends in Florence were Robin
who was American, and Sarina who was
Australian. Robin was Jewish from her mother’s side, but she denied being
Jewish because she said that her father was a Christian white American. She was
blondish and blue eyed, and no one could actually tell from her appearance that
she was a New York Jewess and possibly a Zionist.
I liked her, even though my heart told me that she was
probably not on my side. I was grateful for her leftist political conversations
because she was informed. Ordinary people in Europe were really not that
interested in world politics, unless they were students or intellectual of some
kind. Those were the 1980s and 1990s, when 9/11 hadn’t been ‘created’ to
brainwash the world.
That summer, I had been painting my
apartment blue.
During the spring of 1992, I had had
a court case against the shop where I use to work for some years, during the
summer months. My lawyer, Mr F, was a young, handsome Florentine.
The picture below was a homage to those
white people in the corridors of power, who have controlled the world events
after
World War Two with the upmost nonchalance.
‘Entente
Cordial’ is the name.
‘Entente cordial, (or Goodbye to
Palestine)’ Watercolour, 1988
Robin would say things which I had heard my
uncle say, the same leftist arguments. It was so reassuring! I was happy to be
friends with her because she was intellectually alive and sensitive, where
other people really couldn’t be bothered. For example, she was interested in
the Bosnian War, and she was moved by the events happening in central Eastern
Europe as much as I was.
It was now 1994 and my uncle hadn’t liked me staying on in
Florence after getting my degree in 1992. I suppose he thought that I should
have left Italy, and that my staying on in Europe after my BA was really
unnecessary. After they arrived at the train station, I had taken them back to
my apartment.
When they came to the house, I was showing Auntie Ylva my
paintings; she had bought some paintings from me in the past. I had done this
huge one of the sea-barrier reef. It was two or three metres big and it was a
lovely peaceful picture. I called it ‘Underwater Scene Subacquea’. Of course I
showed it to her with an interest in selling it, as I was penniless and I don’t
deny that slimy money intention underneath the exposure of my work.
Panorama Subacques 1
She did admire the picture, and I was happy
to show it to someone who appreciated it. Little did I know that my uncle was
seething! I suppose it was as if he had been a child who had lost his mother’s
attention for one minute, and he didn’t like me having done something which
wasn’t under his control. I can imagine the reason and the psychology that lay
behind his anger. He started to say some very unpleasant things then, and I
just stood there and took those words silently, thinking, oh my God! Why do I deserve
this being shouted at and called names? Later on, when he’d cooled down, he
confessed that he had always wanted to be an artist himself but couldn’t afford
to approach art.
He had to earn his living and had had to concentrate on the
practicalities and other paths.
However, he didn’t say he was sorry. I had learnt in
another similar experience to take what was dished out from the elders with
some philosophy, so we made an appointment for the next day, as if nothing had
happened. Just as if no offensive words had been spoken. I suppose I only
tolerated that scene because I was helpless and poor. Plus, I didn’t want to
fight with him in front of his wife. Later on, my brother said, “beggars can’t
be choosers” and that was me being a beggar. He was right in saying that I had
received too much from my uncle. It is true that my uncle had been a real
friend and had always helped me during the years at university. He had been a
rock.
They stayed for a few days in a hotel in Via Nazionale
because my uncle refused to stay in the blue apartment. I took them to
Viareggio for the day. We went to a place right by the seaside and had lunch.
Ylva and I were quiet, very subdued and a heavy air of dark unresolved feelings
was around us and in my heart. I was glad to see them go back to the UK.
My uncle did give me some money as an atonement for his
misbehavior and kind words before we parted, and I was grateful for that. He
had always helped me out.
Some years later, I was left some money by my Aunt Ylva in
her spoken will. She had suffered a stomach ailment and had come through the
critical period, only to get a hospital infection. On her deathbed, she
remembered me and asked her husband to give me £8,000. My Uncle was good enough
to send me £3,000 of this sum, and I managed to go to Paris after years of
hardship. The astonishing thing was that he had asked me to buy a small
apartment for myself with this money! Then, when I told him that I had been to
Paris, he didn’t like that at all and was angry again.
He said that he would send me the rest of the inheritance
left by my aunt, his wife, if I obeyed his one wish – i.e. he wanted me to
promise that I would give up my ambition of becoming a painter.
I couldn’t give up painting and art like he’d asked me to,
since I was in the studio in Via Fiesolana since 1998 and had worked so much
towards that goal. I told him that I wouldn’t promise anything of the sort. It
was ridiculous of him to ask me such a thing and he was going against all his
leftist ideas.
He decided to keep the money, since he said
that he had spent about £5,000 on me when I stayed with him in England. It was
very out of character. He wasn’t the man he used to be some years ago and by
saying such things, I was very confused about what I should do. His coming
between me and my life’s ambition seemed a bit too much, but I felt that it
wasn’t really him who was doing this. It was probably grief, as other out of
character things did happen after Auntie Ylva passed away. The servants at home
in India had mistreated him as a child.
My uncle, who had never talked about any dark event in his
childhood, started to say that the servants at home in India – he was a child
of Bangalore – had paid him undue attention as a child. It was totally
unbelievable, especially since he hadn’t given the minimum sign of such events
all through the years in which we knew him. It was very embarrassing for us to
hear him speak of such things now. However, now I understand that it was the
psychological breakdown that was upon us and through this suffering, other
venues – the forces – had come to create mischief in our family relationships.
Relationships which had been very peaceful until then.
His last year was spent in isolation, with his girlfriend
who got married to him; who became his partner and looked after him. He was
separated mentally from his loved ones, and none of us could do anything to
make it better for him. He was lucky in that he could rely on his beloved
second wife – ironically, she was German.
As usual, I was penniless all the while and couldn’t even
go to the UK to make up with him. Even when my Irish friend Michaela offered to
go to his house and talk to him for my sake, as an ambassador of peace, I
didn’t accept it. I really didn’t know how to interpret his behaviour; perhaps
I should have accepted her offer, but then I didn’t think that he would die in
such a short time.
I am grateful to him, because he didn’t hinder me to go to
the art school that year in 1981.
Life is funny because we think that we have so much time
ahead of us – but then we really don’t. Every decision we make could be the
most important one. 1981 was the year of the Iranian revolution, and from being
well off, we were about to become very poor and discriminated against. Like
many others of my countrymen, I had had a proposal from the Foreign Office visa
section; if I didn’t leave the country for three years, I would be given a
British passport.
Even though this was a huge opportunity, I couldn’t accept
it because I felt that I was too confused in England and that I needed my
family. So I left London to go to Karachi that summer and then regretted that
decision very much. However, it was the best decision, the healthiest one and I
feel good to have taken that step, even though it was hard for me later.
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