Growing up in a tiny village in northern Iran, I learned to chant “death to America” at the age of 7, along with all the other schoolchildren. In the ideology of the Islamic Republic, America is the monster, the Great Satan, the Other. Every morning we screamed those words until our voices cracked—not out of conviction, but because not joining in was dangerous.
At home, on our black-and-white television, I watched hours of programming in which bearded clerics warned women that if a single strand of their hair revealed itself under their hijabs, they would be condemned to hell for eternity. But there was no need to wait for the afterlife to taste punishment. As a teenager, I was beaten by the regime’s morality police for freeing a few strands of hair and for daring to wear my headscarf a little too loosely. I was jailed for the “crimes” of writing political slogans and handing out pamphlets that questioned the Islamic regime. In a prison cell, I learned how dangerous truth could be in the Islamic Republic.
At the height of Iran’s reform movement in 2005, I became a journalist covering parliament. But before anyone had even read my writing, my appearance caused controversy: A lawmaker threatened to punch me senseless because a few strands of my unruly curls had escaped from under my headscarf. He would have carried out his threat had he not been stopped by other officials and journalists.
