Where are you from?

This is one of the questions I’ve been asked the most in America. I know many people answer differently, and some even feel offended. What are you asking me? What are you trying to find out? I guess most of the time, I’ve looked very much like a woman that comes from an oppressed country.

I’m Iranian.

Now that we showed the world how hard we can fight back against our difficult, harsh, and impossible regime, it feels empowering to say where I’m from. To me.

Oh no. Women are so unsafe there. You have no rights. Don’t you fear your home country?

That’s partly our reality and mostly what all non-Iranians know about us. It doesn’t matter how fearless you are as a woman and who you’re fighting, or what you’re fighting for. If there’s a grand oppressive force on the other side, the only focus is that you’re being reduced. Fuck the fact that so many Iranian women and girls died in the name of freedom. We mourned and cut our hair mountains and oceans away. We love our home and we do have rights. We just can’t practice them anymore. Women have certain rights that slowly get criminalized one by one. Anywhere outside Iran? Yes, now that too. But fuck all the resilience we have shown as Iranian women because in the end, this story is told in a space I did not create: It is a fragile bubble created for you to slam the Middle East, but you still cannot tell the truth.

So, what was it like moving there, (as a helpless child who was forced to go live in her motherland)?

It was amazing. It was scary sometimes. It was exciting and full of flavor. I can still smell the leaded-gasoline air of Tehran on my clothes and my hair. I moved to Iran when I was eleven. I slowly eased into reading and writing Farsi, and my American accent slipped away while speaking my mother tongue. Then literate enough to recite the majestic poetry of Hafez and Saadi. All while dancing to Britney Spears on my headphones in my bedroom that overheard the beautiful sound of Azaan from a mosque a couple blocks away. There was balance between the meditative religion of people I knew, and the freedoms I had in my own family, and I know I am privileged to know that balance. But there were challenges too. The Islamic Republic and their followers can quickly catch you doing non-Islamic things, like selling CDs of illegally downloaded Lady Gaga discography in school or plucking your eyebrows when you’re not supposed to. Or not wearing your headscarf and being the morality police’s prey.

Do you have to wear a headscarf in Iran?

Short answer, yes. Long answer––my cousin and I were alone in her house, and we wanted to watch a movie. We only had pastries that we were going to share with our parents later with afternoon tea, so we couldn’t touch those without seeming greedy. We wanted chips and ice cream. The perfect duo: the salty, crispy Maz Maz chips and a delicately sweet vanilla cone. Or maybe an ice cream doll. It was this delicious vanilla and chocolate bar in the shape of a doll’s face wearing a hat, but the chocolate eyes and mouth was put on so bad that the face always looked all messed up.

“Let’s just go get our snacks from the shop a block away. You don’t need to change” my cousin said. She grabbed a long headscarf and I followed her with approval. I was wearing a t-shirt and leggings, and she was wearing a long sleeve top with her headscarf. We walked together past the creepy abandoned house on her block. She showed me the broken glass from the basement. Apparently, druggies were living there. The house next door was having a party. We could hear the Sasy Mankan playing and we were mockingly singing along. The thing with Sasy Mankan was that the lyrics were so bad and cheesy, but the beat was so catchy. It made you Gher (moving your waist) subconsciously. We were about to turn right on the shop’s block until we heard a police pager. My cousin stopped me and we hid behind the wall. I was curious so I looked over.

“There’s a van, it’s white and green” I said. Then I saw a woman in a black veil and an officer talking into his pager.

“Rahil, run but be quiet!”

Norberto Perez, Run but be Quiet, Oil on board, 2024

I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears and my eyes twitching with every step. I realized that was the morality police. We were running so fast, and that one block felt like twenty. While my cousin was unlocking the street door, I could hear a car engine coming closer into our block. Before I could see if it was the van, my cousin pulled me inside and slammed the heavy door shut. We looked through the gaps in the wrought iron fence and luckily the car sped away from us. We still don’t know if it was the van, and I’m glad we don’t. That afternoon we just sat in her room. We didn’t watch the movie, and we didn’t have ice cream. But our parents came back, and we promised we wouldn’t tell them.

What was school like in Iran as a girl?

I went to an all-girls school that was in a very liberal district of Tehran, the capital. Most families who lived in that area weren’t religious and our school was less religious than the rest. But there were some surprising things that got me into trouble. My school was very focused on our grades and our skills. We’d often get reprimanded for not getting A’s or for having a Facebook account. I remember being asked by my academic advisor to log the hours I’d spend on social media. I always lied because I was addicted to chatting with my friends on Facebook and Yahoo Messenger right after we had spent eight hours together.

Our school still reenforced a lot of the laws of the country. For example, girls wore uniforms covering their body and a head covering. Inside the school, sometimes girls were allowed to take their head coverings off or to let it rest on their shoulders. This was only if there were no males present in school or if we were indoors. However, some of us didn’t wear it during gym class in the yard. I remember our superintendent telling us to keep our head coverings on because some construction workers in the building next door could see us.

“These men are watching you, right there” the superintendent said and pointed to the sky. “And God too.”

Me and my friends would wait until she gave up and turned around to laugh super hard at her efforts. But I remember getting braver the longer I was at that school. We slowly let our hair show during recess when we went into the yard, too. The key was being in groups and not alone because it was harder for them to punish us all. One day, me and my friends were sitting in the yard with our head coverings on our shoulders. Mrs. Baghayi, our superintendent who was friendly but tough came up to us. We already knew the drill; she’d ask us to put our head coverings back on, we’d smile and ignore, she’d insist, and we’d joke about how it was good for the construction workers’ mood to see our beautiful, luscious hair, and she’d ask us to go inside.

“Ladies, please. I’m tired of telling you this. Just put it on and take your break.”

“But Madam, why? The construction workers aren’t even here today. Is there a male pigeon flying around?”

Norberto Perez, Ladies Please!, Oil on linen, 2024

“Then at least go sit inside the slides on the playground. I don’t want the principal to see you from her office.”

And that was it. Recess was over and we successfully had our hair out while she begged us. It was almost a power trip for both sides of this battle to get what you want .

Did you get into trouble in Iran?

I was able to run away from the morality police at thirteen. But I didn’t know that the morality police was everywhere. We thought our school was super chill for not punishing us for not wearing our head coverings. And they didn’t, they were quite gentle compared to other schools. So, we grew confident and even a bit stupid. I was born with the unibrow gene. The one depicted in Persian drawings of women that are wearing the beautiful traditional dresses. But that unibrow looks way off when you’re wearing a navy-blue school uniform that is two sizes big. I hated my unibrow. So, one day I plucked it off. And then shaped my eyebrows too. I was going on vacation so it felt good to look like someone else.

Every school week, the superintendent inspects the girls’ nails and faces. All nail polish is prohibited, and so are long nails. Any makeup must be wiped off, and then there is the secret rule of not touching your natural eyebrows. By the time I was a student in Iran, waxing and threading your upper lip (mustache) was fine. But my cousins both got kicked out for a week for doing that in their time. The superintendent would normally just look at our faces, but if we had done something suspicious, she’d whip out this small eyebrow brush from her pocket. Then she’d start brushing up our eyebrows to see the damage done.

Surprisingly, when I got back from my trip, that didn’t happen…at first! I came so close. I almost passed. But our school had hired a second superintendent while I was gone because obviously the first one wasn’t as effective. She was also the school’s accountant, so she had seen us all and even made friendships with some of us.

One day, she saw me going to class and called me by my surname as most teachers and staff do.

“Ahmadi!”

I turned around and felt uneasy. I had a feeling something was wrong. Ms. Babayi, the second superintendent walked up to me and stared at my thin eyebrows. And that’s how I got caught. I tell the story in detail how I had to tell my mom to call her and eventually got suspended for a week. I thought it was the most idiotic thing ever. Although, it resulted in me bonding with my mom over a similar experience she had.

You would really go back to Iran to visit? Why?

Yes, because. Because when you have a home, you believe in the power that holds that home together. The people that I came to know in Iran are still with me, everywhere I go. The strength of Iranian women is something that has never failed me. The entire reason I made this magazine was because I wanted to empower them and thank them for giving me strength and perseverance.

I hold on to Iranian love. And I feel that love by so many women I have met here in America, too. I taste it in the food we make for each other, the gifts we give, the languages I’ve been taught. And I’ll forever give back the strength and kindness of my mom, my grandmother, my cousins and lovely teachers who showed me we are more powerful together than when we leave each other behind. Just like our small groups in school when we didn’t wear our headscarves. Or when we show up for our rights at a greater scale.

Norberto Perez, Thin Eyebrows, Oil on board, 2025

Norberto Perez is an illustrator and painter based in New York City. His work primarily focuses on the human figure to tell a story. He also uses traditional mediums to create emphasis on form and mark making.

Of course I want to go back once, to embrace my loved ones and look at myself in that bedroom mirror where I danced to Britney Spears. I want to see how far I’ve come. I want to look at my thin eyebrows now in that mirror. I want to let my hair fall on my shoulders in Tehran. I want to crank up I’ll Do It by Heidi Montag, wear the most y2k outfit and go out without even carrying a headscarf in my bag, knowing this time I’m not alone. Maybe the thought and picture of my home is more beautiful than its tectonic state. But I love her forever.