Peripheral Visions

imams gives religious merit and earns their intercession on the Day of Judgment, so on the anniversaries of their deaths men’s and women’s meetings ( rowzeh ) are held in mosques and homes as the stories are retold, interspersed with prayers and singing, offering the chance to have “a good cry” and feel refreshed. All who are present sob or moan and beat their breasts, and tears flow freely. Men, for whom these mourning activities provide a community network throughout the year, march in procession or organize dramatic reenactments of the battle scenes leading up to tragedy, the women gasping and pulling their children back as horses gallop by.
    When I went with women friends to such mourning gatherings, it was clear that they were expecting to weep and half-expecting me to weep as well, for they seemed to feel that the deaths of the imams, especially the martyrdoms of Ashura, were so tragic that weeping would be a natural response, even for a nonbeliever. But there were plenty of signs that repeated weeping is learned and managed, with a skillful leader acting rather as a cheerleader. In wealthy houses, ornate Kleenex holders spaced around the room are part of the furnishings—silver set with turquoise, I saw in one house, where afterwards a maid came around with an ewer of rosewater. Between sessions, cheerful gossip prevails, in no way subdued, but when each session begins, weeping takes only seconds to get going. Once I saw a toddler worriedly trying to lift his mother’s veil as she hunched over on the floor, sobbing, her veil pulled entirely over her, but in general children watch solemnly without weeping and go home to playful imitation, with their mothers’ good-humored approval.
    It is unfair to call this ritual weeping insincere, for it absorbs and transmutes the genuine griefs of life. At a mosque the day before Ashura, I heard a woman break into convulsive sobbing, so stark that the leader stopped her narrative and the other women looked up and fell silent. My companion whispered to me that the woman’s son had been killed in a political protest a few years back. After a few minutes of dithering and consultation, the women drifted out. The ceremony was resumed some time later, but for the moment it was shattered, whether because the bereaved mother’s emotions were ungovernable or because they were politically risky, I could not tell.
    In a sense, all mourning is mourning for the imams. The preaching at burials and memorial services is full of references to the martyrs of Shiite Islam, echoed in the ebb and flow of audible weeping and the expectation that one will be moved to tears even at the funeral of a relative stranger. Poor elderly widows take their griefs to funerals often: not exactly professional mourners, they may be given gifts of cash. The bereaved are supposed to be overwhelmed by grief—they throw dirt and ashes on their heads and wail. Men as well as women who suppress their grief are respected the less for it.
    Between the death and the burial, however, those who are close to the deceased or to the family go, dressed completely in black, to the house. Their behavior could not be more different from the gregariousness of a Filipino wake. Entering through an unlocked door, friends sit in silence, separate and self-contained, eyes cast down, with only the barest acknowledgment of greeting. Tea and cigarettes are offered, but the theme is isolation, a turning away from social form and ceremony, an ascetic of grief. Here familiar rituals serve in a different way, for against the background of flowery Iranian greetings and elaborate hospitality, this austere reversal of ordinary social behavior is extraordinarily moving. You have to have forms to dramatize their inadequacy.
    Weeping in public outside ritual contexts, like over-whelming rage, is both feared and admired in Iran. It is scandalous to be so overcome by emotion that one is unable to maintain appearances but almost admirable to have emotions strong enough to escape the dividedness of self-consciousness and calculation. In popular films, heroes may be so carried away by rage that they ignore all risks in the effort to achieve revenge, or so overcome by love that they will even marry a woman who is not a virgin(!).
    Tears flow and flow again in courses etched by culture. Ritual weeping in Iran is apparently “Method” weeping—it depends on a learned skill in drawing on real emotion, not on the ability to simulate tears.