An alternate headline for this piece could be “How Dates Explain the World.” Ancient, diverse, and delicious, dates are staples on Middle Eastern plates. But as Matti Friedman explains, they are also windows into the past and the future:
At ten feet up the trunk of a date palm and rising, you’re still thinking about the ground receding beneath your feet, but at 20 feet your gaze shifts upward toward the approaching explosion of green above your head. At 40 feet the hydraulic platform shakes to a halt, and Yuval Shabo and the other workers at this Israeli date orchard grasp the trunks and leap into the fronds. It’s spring, when date palms reproduce, and the workers use curved knives to harvest pollen from male flowers, place the pollen in squeeze bottles and then apply it to the white petal clusters atop the female trees. It’s a different world at this height—birds gliding at eye level, the Jordan Valley stretching north toward Syria and south toward Egypt, the green frond sea waving in all directions. The workers stop on occasion to sip water or roll a cigarette. Ground-bound humans and their concerns seem irrelevant. Up here all that matters is the little brown fruit.
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The same overriding sense of the date’s importance struck me several times during the past few months, sitting in air-conditioned libraries, hunched over books, looking at the ancient art and literature of this part of the world. When I began my research, the date palm seemed to appear merely as a background detail in art, from pharaonic tombs and Assyrian palaces to a 2,500-year-old seal impression showing the Persian Emperor Darius shooting arrows at a lion. But after a while my perception changed. The date palms stopped looking like decorations and came to the fore. After all, the pharaohs are long gone and Darius no longer matters, but the date palm does, feeding multitudes, linking people with their ancestors, rising everywhere like millions of green fireworks frozen mid-blast. Maybe these trees are the stars in the story of this region, and we’re the extras?
Mohammed, who made it to Spain in part to find adventure and escape compulsory military service in Algiers, has had his autonomy stripped away by a performative political system designed to deter migrants from leaving home in the first place. In the process, he may have sacrificed “the best years of his life” for nothing.
What I found was an entirely different story: a generation of young men for whom the greatest barrier to starting a new life was not physical but bureaucratic. They were effectively held prisoner by a byzantine application process so interminable that people had begun scaling the fences — to escape and return to their home countries.
He seemed to sense he stood little chance of being granted the right to stay, but he felt unable to concede that he had spent so much time here for nothing.
In 2018, Tahlequah, a female orca from the Southern Resident community of the Pacific Northwest, gave birth, but her baby died shortly after. Tahlequah swam with the dead calf for 17 days before letting it go. During this “tour of grief,” the other female orcas in her pod took turns carrying the calf in an incredibly moving display of maternal support. I’d forgotten about this heartbreaking story, which Grace Loh Prasad mentions in the opening of her recent essay at The Offing.
In this reflective and braided piece, Prasad explores the bonds of family, building a life as a mother, and the need for community, among other musings. What’s it like to live thousands of miles away from your loved ones, and what happens when that family is gone? What’s the alternative, and what sort of network can take its place? I’m grateful that my parents are healthy and still live in my childhood home, less than an hour away, and that I’m able to see them often. For Prasad and her parents and brother, an ocean came between them. She writes about planting roots in the U.S., but no matter where she built a life, that family unit would remain intact, even if they weren’t all physically together.
Although my brother and my parents weren’t present in my daily life, they provided an invisible scaffolding that I didn’t realize I depended on until they were gone. All the things that proved I had a home in California—house, job, passport, driver’s license, ability to vote—were the result of choices I had made, rather than natural ties to a culture and community. It was a one-sided equation: I could claim it, but it did not claim me. The only true unit of belonging I had that was intrinsic and undeniable and could not be undone, that understood my complicated identity without needing an explanation, was my family.
I constantly think about the sacrifices my husband, who is British, had made when we got married at San Francisco City Hall a decade ago. Like Prasad, he adopted California as his home, choosing a future and day-to-day life without his family and friends in the U.K. But I also know that he will never fully feel like he belongs here.
In Grace Loh Prasad’s Longreads essay, “Uncertain Ground,” she realizes that mourning is complicated when home and homeland aren’t the same place.
My daughter was born in 2018. She’s an only child, and her cousins, who are much older and live four hours away, are hardly playmates. When she was a baby, we lived in a small town in California’s wine country; it lacked ethnic diversity, but we liked the slower pace and rural lifestyle. But we hadn’t made any real friends: people to text spontaneously for playdates, or to hang out and get a beer with. In fact, since we got married, we haven’t really made any new good friends as a couple. That has felt even more isolating as new parents.
We’ve spoken over the years about why that is: Are we too introverted? Are we not able to find people who share our interests? The answer to both is no. But it’s hard to make new friends as adults, and as individuals we miss our existing friends — across the U.S., the U.K., and other parts of the world — and would love to strengthen those relationships, especially friends who now also have kids. Geography, of course, makes this challenging, and these last several years, it’s been impossible.
Even before coming upon Prasad’s essay, I’d been thinking about the word “community.” We’ve moved seven times in 10 years, and have lived in four different homes with our 4-year-old daughter. We’ve now settled in Berkeley, have gotten acquainted with parents of her preschool friends, and live in a lively and diverse neighborhood that’s walkable and accessible to so much — community gardens, parks and playgrounds, free family-friendly events. Yet we still feel as socially adrift as before. But why? What are we really looking for?
Prasad reflects on raising a child without a family network, but also writes about a type of tight-knit community, beyond blood ties, that I’ve longed for.
I envy my friends who have healthy parents that live nearby, who have the ability to slip out for a spontaneous date night or to take off on a weeklong, kid-free vacation. How I wish we had occasional help that we didn’t have to pay for—something my friends take for granted—although it was never about the money. How I wish I had a sibling or cousin with children in the same city so that we could send our kids to the same school, share dinners and holidays, coordinate vacation plans, and so on. How I wish my son could grow up with a clan, a group of mothers and children traveling together through life like a pod of orcas, always looking out for each other, secure in their belonging to something bigger than a family of three.
Prasad also writes about the maternal qualities of spiders, recounting the first time she saw “Maman,” a giant spider steel sculpture by artist Louise Bourgeois, in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills. I saw this sculpture when I visited Japan; I remember it to be massive and menacing, not at all the strong and nurturing motherly figure that Prasad describes. I’d simply never considered a spider in this way.
Although monstrously large, as if made for a vintage Japanese disaster movie, getting close to Maman brings an unexpected feeling of intimacy. You can stand underneath her. You can be enclosed and sheltered by her, the same way your mother once enveloped and surrounded you. The spider mother appears delicate with her fragile skinny legs, but she is literally made of steel.
Maman is stronger than she looks. She is your first and forever home, and she weaves the world into existence.
Prasad describes her own mother as “a weaver of community, responsible for maintaining the social fabric that cushioned our lives,” and questions whether she has been able to do and build the same for her son. This hits me in the gut: I know that as parents, we’ve only just begun to build our family’s life, but I wonder whether we’ve found the right corner of the world to weave that web.
The older he gets, the more I worry that I have not done enough to knit a tapestry that will enfold and protect him, that will open doors and give him room to stretch while keeping him out of harm’s way, that will imprint a pattern so deep and recognizable that he can always find his way home. This is what I am most afraid of: that I will be exposed as the mother who cannot weave, who cannot on her own produce the work of many hands, the unseen web that no one notices but everyone needs. Try as I might, there is no material stronger than kinship.
This is a beautifully told story with an almost ethereal quality to it — which is apt for the mystical figures it discusses. When two friends stole figurines from the Second Mesa, they didn’t realize they were stealing the heart of the Hopi religion. After being tormented for years, they came to understand what they had done.
Inside the cave were four gnarled figurines carved from cottonwood root, each about three feet long. Three lay on a mat of feathers with their heads pillowed by a log, surrounded by braided prayer bracelets and prayer sticks made of cotton twine. The fourth, twisted like a figure eight, leaned against the sandstone wall as if protective of the others.
This story from the New York Times and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism looks into years of torment and abuse at Ware Youth Center, one of Louisiana’s largest juvenile detention centers. Megan Shutzer and Rachel Lauren Mueller conducted more than 100 interviews with people previously held at the facility, as well as current and former staff members; they also examined security footage and thousands of pages of records and court documents. What they found: repeated abuse from staff members (30 have been accused of sexual abuse, including a manager), children held in prolonged isolation, guards bribing children to beat up other children, and an increase in suicidal attempts. For years, Ware’s leaders have not reported complaints of abuse, while local law enforcement has continued to brush off allegations. As Shutzer and Mueller’s reporting shows, this horrific place, meant to help and support children, has descended into “chaos and cruelty.”
In fact, while some of the children at Ware are held for violent crimes, a vast majority are girls and boys like Solan Peterson, sent there for nonviolent offenses or infractions as minor as skipping school. “We knew there would be consequences,” his mother said, “but my kid didn’t deserve to die because he set fire to a roll of toilet paper in a school.”
Thomas Hale’s account of his experience in a COVID-19 quarantine facility, inside China’s zero-Covid regime, offers a glimpse into an eerie, dystopian parallel world.
The daily rhythm went as follows. Early in the morning, we awoke to a lawnmower-like noise, which was in fact an industrial-grade disinfectant machine spraying our windows and front steps. Meals were provided at 8am, noon and 5pm. Around 9am, two nurses in blue hazmat suits came by to administer PCR tests. Once, I asked if I would be taken somewhere else if I tested positive. “Of course you’ll be taken away!” one of the nurses said. “A new life!” she added in English.
The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs.
The teenage girl stands at her mother’s grave, a middle-aged woman who was killed by the Iranian police during recent unrest in the nation. A white veil hangs around her neck. Her eyes shine with the same rage I’ve seen in the eyes of people who have lost a loved one during the Islamic regime’s brutal crackdowns. Her hair is shorn and she holds her long tresses in her hand. The other hand is obscured by gladiolas on the grave, but I can imagine the scissors she has used to cut her hair. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She knows — like all Iranian women — that to mourn is to cut her hair.
Iranian women took to the streets on September 16, 2022, to protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. The Kurdish girl died in police custody after the “Morality Police” detained her for a loose hijab. Every day, I wake up anxious. I read the news, scrolling through horrifying scenes of police brutality against women who burn their scarves in the streets alongside the men who support them in cities all over the country. I go to the neonatal intensive care unit where I work as a doctor, and attend deliveries of premature and at-risk babies, but my heart flutters for yet another day of harrowing news emerging from Iran. Another day of police beating people with batons and shotguns, another day of high school girls shouting Woman Life Freedom in schools, another day of young women sauntering scarfless in front of Basiji militias in a country that has required women to cover their hair for more than 43 years. I am worried, like Iranians who live in Iran. I never thought that after 20 years of living in America, a day would come that I’d be troubled for the country I lived in during my adolescence and young adulthood. The news brings back doleful memories and a desolation that in all the years I’ve been outside Iran, I have tried to forget. But the shocking scenes are so powerful — they erupt remote, fading memories.
My mother didn’t wear hijab; neither did my grandmother or my aunts, like other modern families in Iran. But after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic regime forced women to wear hijab outside the house in public. Even though I saw Maman grabbing a scarf and throwing it on her head before she went out, wearing hijab never materialized in my mind until the first day I attended school. I woke up early in the morning, calling Maman, ready to go to school. She smiled at my blue jumpsuit and said, “I’m afraid you’ve forgotten one thing.” She pointed to my hair and said, “They will need you to cover your hair at school.” All the way to school, I struggled to keep the scarf on my head. It was a small, square scarf Maman had given to me. The knot kept loosening under my chin and as the day went by, one side became shorter and shorter until it freed itself from the knot.
She knows — like all Iranian women — that to mourn is to cut her hair.
Hijab law strengthened over the years and the dress code for girls in school changed to a black scarf that covered shoulders and breasts, and an extra-long dark cloak. I remember a hot day in June, in the late ’80s. I was sitting on the low steps of our middle school yard in Tehran, wrapped head to toe in heavy hijab, trying to solve an algebra problem just before my final exam. I was writing the solution when I noticed our school principal’s shadow hovering over my head. I jumped up immediately and pulled my scarf forward. By that time, we were conditioned to shove our hair under our scarves as soon as we saw a school official, the revolutionary guard, or Basiji militia in the streets. The principal fixed her gaze on my veil and, without hesitation, snatched the scarf under my chin. “This is too loose. You need to sew a couple more stitches under your chin.” I forgot the solution I had sketched on the paper and took the test with trembling hands and an anxiety that never left me during the exam.
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After Reza Shah Pahlavi ordered mandatory unveiling of women in public in 1936, Iranian women who chose to step out of their homes and pursue higher education abandoned hijab, attended universities, and achieved an active role in society. In conservative families, women had no choice but to stay at home for their reluctance to show their hair in public. Even though the obligation to unveil was relaxed after Reza Shah abdicated in 1941, wearing hijab was dictated by the family’s core beliefs. Men in conservative families set the rules for women’s appearance in public. In those families, women continued to use chador (a long garment that covers a woman’s body from head to toe, but is open in front).
After the Islamic Revolution, the regime forced women to wear hijab and once again the government policed women’s attire. During the first decade after the Islamic government was established, Iranian society was extremely radicalized and girls were scrutinized everywhere outside the house. Even a single strand of hair could put them in trouble at school or in danger of having acid squirted in their faces in the streets. The Islamic regime defined hijab as a core value in a Muslim woman’s beliefs. Women could hardly say a word against obligatory hijab. The regime’s Morality Police enforced this core value, enshrined as a sacred family law. We are told we are sinners if we show our hair from under our scarves. Islamic regime teachers said that on Resurrection Day, women who disobeyed the hijab law would be hung from their hair over heaps of fire. They would feel their skin sizzle in hell, just to grow a new skin that would burn for eternity. We were brought up by a doctrine that humiliated and vilified female beauty and alienated us from our own hair and body.
Hijab and women’s hair was always on my mind and we discussed the subject among friends in high school. It was about that time that I read Savushun by Simin Daneshvar, a novel about the life of a landowning family in Shiraz during the British occupation of Southern Iran in World War II. The protagonist Zari, who is a quiet obedient housewife, transforms into an outspoken supporter of her husband’s cause after his death by the British occupier’s agents. In the novel, women mourn for a lost beloved by cutting their hair and attending a ritual deeply rooted in Persian culture. Zari mentions Gisoo tree — gisoo meaning long tresses of a woman in Farsi — and says, “The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs. The braids belonged to women who had lost a beloved young man, a husband, a brother, or a son.” The tradition of Savushun fascinated me for years. I read more and paid close attention to the symbolic actions Iranian women took during various mourning ceremonies.
In Shahnameh, the epic of Persian kings by 10th-century Persian poet Ferdowsi, Farangis cuts her black, musk-scented hair once she finds out the enemies of Iran have murdered her beloved husband, prince Siavash. She wraps the cut hair around her waist like a belt and starts the tradition of Savushun — women mourning the death of a Persian hero whose innocent blood is spilled in the valleys of the land. In the tragic story of Siavash, Farangis plays a seminal part by hiding and safekeeping her son, the next Shah of Iran, signaling her intention to remain abstinent of any sexual encounter with another hero or prince by fastening her long black hair around her waist. Her haircutting symbolizes her refusal to pursue a normal life after Siavash’s death. It is a protest against the sovereignty of Iran’s enemies.
It is not only in Shahnameh that we read about this tradition. In other literary works such as Darab-Nameh by Abu-Tahir Tarsusi, Burandokht cuts her long hair after the death of her husband, Alexander of Macedonia, and mourns him for 40 days. The tradition is so embedded in Persian literature that numerous poets after Ferdowsi — namely Hafiz, Khaghani, Salman Savoji — use cutting hair as a metaphor for mourning in their poems.
In many parts of Iran, the ritual is performed in different ways. In central Iran, when a young man dies, the close women of his family cut their tresses and hang them on an erect stone at his grave. The gray of the mother, the black of the wife, and the thin and frail hair of the daughter tangle in each other and dance with the wind. They remind the beholder of the silent mourning that continues for the young man. In Lorestan province, from ancient times, women have covered the croup of the dead man’s horse with a black veil and adorn the animal with a necklace of their tresses. In a ritual called Kotal, women sing in a procession following the horse through the streets. In Bakhtiari tribes of Iran, in a ritual called Pal Boran, women cut their hair, and either stamp on it and mourn, or put it in a clean garment belonging to the beloved and bury it with him, or gather around the hair and sing sad melodies.
In the kaleidoscope of rituals that vary based on geographical region, there seems to be a fundamental connection between hair and life. “Life” is woven among the strands of a young woman’s hair and cutting that hair implies her unwillingness that life can go on as before the loss of the beloved. Her liveliness is gone with the departure of the beloved, and so is the hair that once signified the beauty of life. She sends a clear message as she mourns: that she will appear and act differently after the tragic event.
Now for over four decades, in a culture where female hair is revered and linked to life, the Islamic regime is forcing women to wear a veil and cover their hair, degrading women’s most cherished beauty into an evil that seduces men and encourages them to commit great sins. Since the Islamic Republic was established, Iranian women have defied obligatory hijab and the patriarchal ideology that wants to oppress the female body. Women activists have challenged this government-imposed law many times, namely in the One Million Signatures campaign for gender equality in 2005. Almost always, the Islamic regime detains women activists to dampen such resistance movements. Women have turned to civil disobedience tactics like showing more of their body and minimizing their scarves to communicate their unhappiness and disapproval for the law.
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As another day of unrest unfolds in Iran, I think of the symbolic measures Iranian women are taking every day in this fight. Famous women writers, thinkers, and artists in the world have cut their hair in solidarity with them. Elif Shafak, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, and many more are among the writers and artists who have cut their hair in protest.
In the kaleidoscope of rituals that vary based on geographical region, there seems to be a fundamental connection between hair and life.
I walk up the stairs to the third floor, to the NICU in our hospital, to care for premature babies. On my way to the unit, I think about those Iranian girls and their protest. This time seems to be different from the past. This time, high school and even elementary school girls are demanding what Iranian women have been asking for, for decades. The short clips that trickle from Iran’s heavily filtered, government-slowed internet picture young girls facing whiteboards, their backs to the camera, hair dancing in the air, shouting Woman Life Freedom in class. I am tongue-tied by their bravery in committing such protests in school without hijab. I was a teenage girl in that country — just like them — and I know the courage needed to take off the veil, when showing their hair could cause them to get beaten or detained. It could even cost them their life, and they know this. They shout in schoolyards that they can be the next Mahsa Amini. Their courageous act of letting their long hair flow loose shows they are fully aware of the power hidden in those tresses, and it is not accidental that they shout Woman Life Freedom with their backs to the camera. They know — like their mothers and grandmothers — that their strength lies within their hair.
Once again, I look at the girl standing at her mother’s grave. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She is young, the same age as the schoolgirls who face the whiteboard. She is aware of the tradition of cutting hair. She cuts her hair to mourn, but above that, she acts at her beloved’s grave. She acts in defiance against the oppressor who has killed her mother and silenced her voice. She and all the schoolgirls who protest with their hair may not have read the story behind the Gisoo tree. The old women of Fars believe when they hang their braided hairs to the tree, and water it with tears, the loved departed comes back. They may not know the legend of the tree, but the collective wisdom shared by Iranian women for a thousand years runs in their veins. It whispers in their ears, and tells them that “Life” is stranded there, and to fight for freedom they must first free their hair.
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Mojgan Ghazirad is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has published three collections of short stories in Farsi in Iran and Europe. Her memoir, The House on Sun Street, depicts her memories of growing in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the years of war between Iran and Iraq.
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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
