Rugs, rituals and resilience: How artists are expanding the story of Iran beyond conflict

Episode 38: Iranian Artists Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: Growing up in Iran, Maryam Bayat was surrounded by rugs.

Maryam Bayat: My parents, my family, they were all in rug business. My childhood was running through these stalks of rugs and the light coming through and the smell, you know, I think you're feeling this, you're sensing the smell right now here.

Evans: And today, she's surrounded by rugs again — in a gallery full of her sculptures. Each is constructed from an old Persian rug. They're undeniably cute, like stuffed animals. It's part children's playroom, part fantastical forest. And each sculpture tells a story about the place where she grew up.

Bayat: And it's a place beside the sea full of trees and breezes and wild animals. So in the summer times we normally went there and so about the buildings, the narrow roads in the streets and the smell of the blossoms and everything.

Evans: The Iran she knows is the family rug shops in Shiraz, the bustling cultural hub of Tehran and the bucolic forests in the north. But the images of Iran we see in the news right now almost never show the wild beauty, the woodland creatures and birds. And for Maryam, it's not just the landscapes, but it's the relatable rhythm of everyday life. Her exhibition even has what looks like a living room among her sculptures.

Bayat: You know, it's about a woman gathering with her friends beside that table over there, and they're having a tea party, drinking tea, coffee, and they're talking about their memories.

Evans: For most Americans — especially Gen Z, millennials and Gen X — all they've ever known is an Iran marred by conflict and at odds with the United States. In 1979, after the revolution established the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime held 66 Americans hostage, most of them for more than a year.

Archival news clip: The demonstrators burned the American flag, blindfolded and handcuffed at least some of their American hostages and paraded them in front of the embassy building.

Evans: After 9/11, President George W. Bush declared that Iraq, North Korea and Iran made up an axis of evil.

Archival clip of George W. Bush: Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror. These regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

Evans: And as of February of this year, the two nations are at war. Thousands have died already, and the threat of further destruction looms large.

Archival news clip: We did get another post on Truth Social by President Trump: So a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will.

Evans: California is home to around half of the nearly 400,000 Iranian Americans living in the U.S. today. And like Maryam, many of them know a different Iran. It's the continuation of the culture of ancient Persia, where a profoundly vibrant heart has been woven into civilization for generations. And it persists.

Bayat: There is so much life now, and I know that there are lots of artists there that are creating very creative stuff.

Evans: Maryam's rug sculptures are a twist on a centuries-old tradition, really one of the greatest artistic traditions in the world, but one that these days is all too easily overshadowed by darkness. And Maryam and two other local artists of the diaspora are creating art right now that shows the resilient brightness of Iranian culture.

Bayat: Because for me, it's full of colors. It has lots of natures. You could go to ice skating, you could go skiing, you could go to the desert at the same time. And I would love for people to see it and to sense it.

So I hope with this exhibition I could show that feeling or make you connect to it. I really would love that to happen.

Evans: From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: Maryam and I talked as she installed her new exhibition, “Unrolling Paradise,” at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido. She begins her creative process with an old Persian rug. She lightens the original colors, redyes the wool and paints her own patterns, layering them over the faded remnants of the rug's original design. Some of her painted rugs hang on the walls like tapestries, but others are built into the animal- and tree-like sculptures that make up her rug forest: polka dotted birds, a smiling horse and a fox, cypress trees with bold pink blossoms.

Bayat: We have this tree in all different parts of Iran and it's about strength and it's a symbol that is used in all stories and in all rugs and in all different poems of Persian poems, everything. You could see these trees everywhere.

Evans: And each is something of a monument, an homage.

Bayat: I think of a story and just try to create something from it. Yes.

Evans: So each one of these has your own story?

Bayat: Yes, exactly. I'm connected to it. Yes, I think of it. I think of the memories. I think about the feelings.

Evans: Persian rug making is a 2,500 year old tradition. It uses layers of motifs and symbolism. And, over the ages, has stretched across all levels of society, from royal palaces to nomadic tribes — wherever there's a floor. But they're more than decoration or a source of warmth. Woven into each one is a piece of the person who made it.

Bayat: The main thing was that all of their rugs had a story behind it. So, they would just sit and sometimes if they are sad, their hands affects how they weave the rug. And so when you have a rug inside your house for most Iranians or Persians, it's like, as if it's real. It's living. And it's just, it's not just a piece of object in the house. So it has a, it has nature and life to it. I wanted to bring that life and bring that energy back to it, so I try to making them as objects that can talk.

Evans: Maryam's art has a way of disrupting the status quo. A rug is not just a tool of interior design, but also these living things.

Bayat: For us Persians, when we look at a rug or a motif, a Persian motif, something inside us just, you know, flourishes. The exhibition here for me is to see if it also happens to you or anyone who comes here and has a different kind of perspective towards this. I wanna kind of find something mutual.

Evans: She's trying to find common ground to close a gap between cultures. It's an instinct shared by other immigrants too.

Roxanne Varzi: And so I felt like I was always having to explain and be the person who was explaining. It was definitely, you know, like, hey, maybe you guys need to know where Iran is on a map. Maybe you need to understand who Iranians are.

Evans: Roxanne Varzi has been going back and forth from the U.S. to Iran her whole life. Today, she's an artist and professor of anthropology at UC Irvine. She grew up in Tehran with an American mother and Iranian father. After the Iranian revolution, when she was 9, she moved to a small town in Michigan where she was the only Iranian kid.

Varzi: And I was in second grade or third grade. And like the first day of class, my teacher was like, stand up and tell everyone where you're from. And the hostages had been taken. At that point it was like midway through the hostage crisis. And there were yellow ribbons on all the oak trees. And one of the most popular things was bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb. I won't mispronounce it. I hate it when people mispronounce Iran, but they pronounce it the other way and, you know, to “Eye-ran,” that was like a constant refrain. And so it was tough.

Evans: In Michigan, Roxanne was bullied for being Iranian. All anyone there ever heard about Iran was war, death and darkness. Like Maryam, Roxanne remembered a different Iran: big family dinners at her grandparents' house on Fridays, music and poetry everywhere. A cousin was the poet laureate of Iran. She was even in the Girl Scouts there. She tried explaining that Iran is different than what everyone sees on TV, but as the years passed, Roxanne herself was also seeing all the same news, distancing her from the Iran she remembered it was art, a film that grounded her again.

Varzi: I saw Kiro Kiarostami's, Koker Trilogy, and it was so antithetical to the news we were getting, which is, you know, dark. It was Iran-Iraq war. It was people screaming in the street, and then you see these like little kids running around the villages and you just wanna walk into the scene 'cause it's so beautiful. And so after I graduated from college, I wanted to go back and see what I was missing out on.

Evans: She returned to Iran on a Fulbright Scholarship, and what she found was a vibrant arts and culture scene.

Varzi: There's a lot. There's theater, there's film, there's painting, there's sculpture and it continued, you know, it continued even after the revolution. My second book, “Last Seen Underground,” is about the underground theater movements from around 2000.

Evans: All of this was a continuation of one of the world's oldest and most celebrated cultures, especially in theater. Iranians have been doing set design for centuries.

Varzi: They would put up these drawings from the Shahnameh, which is the "Book of Kings," it's sort of like the Iranian “Odyssey.” And they would draw pictures or like a scene from that, and then they would go town to town and then they would narrate from it. So they had already this like very cinematic way of, of telling stories and presenting art.

Evans: This was the Iran that people in the U.S. seemed to know nothing about. And things haven't changed all that much since then.

Varzi: We underestimate Iran and Iranians quite a bit. If you go and look at anything from math to astronomy to philosophy, you know, to theater, to painting, yeah, Iran is like incredibly original, and the inception of so many things. Even now, I mean, I was telling my students yesterday, Sharif University — which is the MIT of Iran, where I did a lot of my field work on students in 2000 — was just bombed. And Sharif produced after the revolution, the only female Fields prize winner in mathematics.

Evans: On April 6th, strikes by Israel and the U.S. reduced large sections of the university to rubble.

Varzi: I think it's always important for people to know, you know, where they're bombing. Absolutely, I do. I think it's important to know that it's just not a little red dot on a, on a map.

Evans: Like Maryam, one way that Roxanne has tried to help people understand Iran is through art. A big part of her work is making a distinction between a country's government and its people. She does something called multimodal anthropology, which means she doesn't just write academic papers. She makes documentaries and writes fiction that bring her research to life, bring Iranians and Iranian culture to life.

Varzi: I think art is incredibly important. I think also the best form of advocacy is to create absolutely, but then you have to try to get it out there, and that's, that's really important. But unfortunately, it's really hard to get stuff out to the market and often the people who do, especially with Iranian art, it's been women were being treated badly or people were overdosing on drugs and you know, the darker like, you know, angst ridden and the, the horrible stories, the tragedy, those are the things that got published. Not the happy stuff, not the joyous moments. And unfortunately that also, that helps people kind of wanna go in more and bomb, bomb away, you know, or whatever. So unfortunately we haven't had a really good track record of showing the good parts, whether it's in film festivals or in literature and books. You know, we don't wanna see the happy stuff, but, you know, Iranians see the American happy stuff. And the Iranians have always, always loved American culture. For instance, the first time I went back in ‘93, my cousins would say, oh my god, well, so what did the Americans think of us? You know, like, 'cause they have all these opinions about Americans and they're like, well, either the Americans don't think about you, or they think of you as terrorists. I'm like, what?

Evans: Art like Maryam's shows the happy stuff and she hopes everyone who sees her rug forest exhibition will come away with a fuller and richer picture of Iran than they had when they walked in. But there's nothing superficial about connecting the stories of people weaving rugs in Iran years ago to modern life here or anywhere. It's a powerful message.

Varzi: Like how do you get it out further? That's, I think the, I think that's where the rubber meets the road, and I think that's also why I'm in education. I think it's the best form of advocacy is to teach.

Evans: Up next, we'll hear from two local Iranian American creatives that are getting that message out to kids right now. Stay with us.

[Music]

Evans: Writer Zoe Ghahremani is communicating the cultural history of Iran but, also like Roxanne, she's intent on separating the government from the people.

Zoe Ghahremani: I just came from a school talk in Los Angeles where a second-grader asked, a boy asked, aren't we in war with Persia? And I was surprised that he even knew. And I said, we are not in war with anybody.

Are you in war with me? And he said, no. I said, who is fighting who is the unfortunate thing that happens because some grownups decide to do that, but we are always friends.

Evans: Zoe and her daughter Susie Ghahremani have published two children's books together about Iranian culture and the diaspora in the U.S. Zoe writes the stories and Susie brings them to life with her whimsical illustrations. Their most recent book, “Celebrate Nowruz,” is about the Persian New Year celebration.

Susie Ghahremani: Cause it is the kind of thing that anybody can celebrate. Anybody can join in.

Evans: Nowruz happens every year at the spring equinox in late March. Its Persian roots go back thousands of years.

Susie Ghahremani: It really feels like the darkness is fading away of winter, and it really is an opportunity for things to sort of turn around, you know, and wherever you are to sort of welcome positivity into your life and your hopes for what, what may come ahead. It feels like a much more natural new year to me than western New Year’s

Evans: In their book, the main character is a little girl in an Iranian American family. She learns how to build the Nowruz haft-seen, a spread of seven symbolic foods, among them, garlic, apples and wheat pudding. Zoe left Iran in the 1970s amid the revolution and raised her family in the U.S. At each Nowruz, she recognized in her kids a version of that isolation and otherness that Roxanne felt. So she wrote the book her own kids didn't have.

Zoe Ghahremani: A little girl being the only one in her class who celebrates it, and wondering why doesn't everybody celebrate and so on. These are questions that my children had when they were little, and now my grandchildren have it and they need to be addressed.

Susie Ghahremani: I think seeing it through the eyes of a little girl, seeing the holiday through the eyes of a little girl makes it really easy to understand.

Evans: But the lesson about Nowruz in the book is not just for American kids and Iranian families.

Zoe Ghahremani: I felt sorry for the little boy who was worried about war because his next phrase was, what if World War III starts? When a second-grader talks about World War III, you know that he or she's just echoing the conversations that went on at home. By showing differences and telling them, that's not your new year. That's none of yours. We are at war. You are actually spreading all the negative emotions that don't need to be there. Say this is another day to celebrate. Go celebrate with your friend. Be happy for them, and it’s such an easy message to give children. Why bring them into the mess that is caused by politicians?

Evans: The book honors the rituals and brightness of Iranian culture. It feels like Maryam's rug forests and tea parties distilled into the page. And Zoe says sharing that has been a hit.

Zoe Ghahremani: We did not expect this much popularity. We expected them to like the book, but they're not just liking the book, they're really using the book like a banner of joy. They're just embracing our work with love and that much I didn't expect, and I am just thrilled.

Evans: The message of Nowruz is about hope, spring coming, a fresh start. This year, it arrived at a time that didn't feel particularly hopeful. People in the diaspora handled it differently. Some didn't observe it, but Maryam, Susie and Zoe did.

Bayat: This year, it's very different. Yes, it's hopeful, it's sad. It's full of mixed feelings, and we are hoping for a change. So, yeah, I don't know how it's going to go, but it's a Nowruz. So it's a new in everything, you know, it's a start. It's a new start.

Evans: Here, these artists are passing along these inherited stories. Stories of the people whose creativity, innovations and traditions came before them, whose shoulders they stand on. From larger than life flowers made from vintage rugs to a children's book about a centuries-old festival, it's a form of hope. And hope is something Zoey stubbornly believes in.

Zoe Ghahremani: We can't imagine what we don't know, but something good has to come out of this. We just don't know what. And also, Nowruz has survived so many wars. I mean, what is going on right now couldn't be worse than what Alexander the, I call it Alexander the Not So Great, did to Persia. Persepolis is in ruins now because of what he did. But that didn't stop Nowruz. This is something that has survived for 3,000 years and hopefully it'll survive forever. And I always quote Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet, who said, you can cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop spring from coming.

Evans: Special thanks to Maryam Bayat, Roxanne Varzi, Zoe and Susie Ghahremani and the California Center for the Arts, Escondido for their help with this episode. And thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a rating or comment. It makes a real difference and helps stories like these reach more people. The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. This episode was written and researched by me and Anthony. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.