Wedding

I showed up at my friend/calligraphy tutor/English student’s (I’ll call her Amineh) house in my best suit with no tie yesterday (late afternoon but still ungodly hot). When a couple businessmen passed us wearing ties on the sidewalk on Enghelab Street last week the first friend I made here, who I’ll call Amir, told me that neckties were illegal in Iran (as a symbol of West-struck-ness, I guess), but this law was enforced about as well as the ban on jaywalking. This was news to me, and I yesterday decided against wearing a tie to the wedding just to be safe. When I got to Amineh’s apartment, Amir and his girlfriend Artemis were there, the former napping in Amineh’s roommate’s bedroom and the later doing her hair with Artemis. When he woke up, Amir, wearing black slacks with no belt, a purple checkered shirt, and blue rayon-looking tie that was almost comically short, told me that I needed a tie for the wedding, and lent me an extra brown one of his, which I donned in muttered protest.

While the girls took forever caking on makeup and Amir moved for chair to chair readjusting his tie uncomfortably, I watched a VCD of footage Amineh had taken of a Naqshibandi/Qadiriyeh Sufi religious festival in Iranian Kurdistan, with all-male participants, many of the older ones with very long hair, head-banging to a drum rhythm literally for hours until they got so dizzy they were in another world, and then an Austrian documentary on the same community.

We took a darbast taxi to the wedding, which was held in the basement of a very surprising venue, apparently the workplace of the groom. Most of the women had taken off their headscarves and were in regular dresses, and after a couple seconds of whispered debate Amineh and Artemis followed suit. We had arrived there too early and sat at one of the tables peeling and eating fruit to occupy ourselves for a while before it started getting crowded.
I infinitely preferred it to Kurdish weddings just because at the latter the bride and groom aren’t allowed to dance or smile, and just sit at a separate table not speaking and watching everyone else have fun. The bride was wearing a regular Hollywood-style (I’ve never been to an real American wedding so I my insight into American wedding ritual is probably no greater than that of these Iranians) white puffy dress and the groom and suit with a pink shirt and normal tie. Almost all the men, as well as the waiting staff, wore bad ties. I cursed myself so not bringing my own—I would have been the best-dressed of the bunch.

The music, played by a DJ and entertainer on the same cheesy little stage with multicolored strobe lights on one side I remember from Bar Mitzvahs, was all mediocre Iranian pop—with rappers collaborating on some songs—with no foreign music at all. There were maybe 50 people total and a dance floor too small to fit us all. The women all knew how to dance and the men were split between very good and very bad dancers; there was a good amount but not by any means absolute gender segregation on the dance floor, with men often holding hands to dance and wiggling their hips at one another in such a way as to awaken my American homophobic sensibilities. I didn’t see any of the headscarved women dancing. When we sat down, I asked Artemis if it would be rude if I asked a girl I didn’t know if she wanted to dance. She thought for a minute and say It wouldn’t be rude, but it would be strange. I chickened out.

At about 23:30 the bride and groom (who’d also had the first dance) went up alone for a last dance (again, to mediocre Iranian pop) as people threw 2000 Toman bills at them. Then the bride was given the keys to a new SUV (by either her or the groom’s parents) and the couple was given tickets for a vacation in Kish. Then a late dinner. Joining our table to replace 2 headscarved women were a couple young guys, one of whom amusedly spoke only Kurdish with me, refusing to acknowledge my Persian, after Artemis told him that I knew a little (I’d mentioned it a week before and then surprised myself by stringing together a few sentences relatively well for a group of visiting Kurdish women, earning a round of applause), and the other of whom asked me in broken English whether I would need to be sent to reeducation camp after the upcoming Iranian Communist revolution. I said I thought Communists had done some good work on public health care in Latin America, which satisfied him. Then home a bit after midnight.

My taxi driver for a stretch on the way back to my own nearby apartment was listening to some oral storytelling on the radio and turned down the volume to complain about how much richer Iranian culture was than American culture. I nodded and muttered agreement and didn’t mention where I was from.