Making an Exit: From the Magnificent to the Macabre - How We Dignify the Dead - Hardcover

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The Lament
A TEAR JAR IN IRAN
 
 
As I step out of the car, I’m struggling to adjust the head scarf I’ll be wearing for the next two weeks. Gravel crunches beneath my feet and my breath turns to white vapor in the sharp air of a bright January morning. It’s my first day in Iran and Maryam, my guide, is taking me around some of Tehran’s museums and palaces. Sprawling out from the foot of the Alborz Mountains, the city feels a little like Eastern Europe before the fall of the Soviet Empire. The colors are muted, the cars are beaten up, and faceless concrete blocks have appropriated sites once occupied by elegant mansions. But in a nineteenth-century Qajar dynasty villa, the Glass and Ceramic Museum offers a flavor of the old Tehran. Its delicate brickwork façade blends traces of European rococo with the courtly geometric details of a Persian palace.
Inside are artifacts from distant civilizations—the Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sassanians. Maryam, who has a degree in art history and a passion for Persian culture, knows the collection well. Born in Tehran, she speaks immaculate English with an accent picked up from television and from the many American tourists she’s accompanied on trips around her country. Like many younger Iranian women, she interprets the Islamic dress code loosely where she knows she can, covering herself modestly in the required knee-length manteau, pants, and head scarf. But rather than swathing herself in the dull black or brown worn by most Iranians, she usually dresses in her favorite color—turquoise—and wears a large pair of wraparound sunglasses.
When it comes to Persian art, it’s the unexpected details Maryam loves. As I gaze at a set of decorated plates, she explains that the almond-shaped eyes of the figures depicted on them are the legacy of a wave of Mongol invaders who barged in from the east on horseback in the thirteenth century, razing towns and villages to the ground, killing even the dogs in the slaughter. It was one of Iran’s most violent periods of history, yet Persian artists continued depicting the eyes of their invaders long after they’d left, creating a new tradition from the detritus of violence and upheaval.
Amid the cabinets of exquisite glasses, bowls, and plates, something catches my eye. It’s a glass vase with a bulbous base and a narrow sinuous neck that twists upward toward the rim, where an oval flowerlike opening resembles a small ear trumpet. Maryam sees me admiring this strange and beautiful object. “Can you guess what it is?” she asks. I shake my head. “It’s a tear jar,” she says. “It was used by women while their sweethearts were away at war. They’d collect teardrops of sadness as a gift for them on their return.” Ah, yes, that makes sense—looking again at the little flowerlike opening, I can see it’s shaped to fit over an eye.
Capturing and storing tears is an idea that seems quite remote from the culture in which I grew up, where expressions of sorrow tend to be muted or even suppressed. Yet in many countries, self-control is absent from the process of grieving. We’ve all seen television coverage of parts of the world in which the bereaved mourn their dead in an unrestrained display of emotion, whether it’s crowds of ululating Turkish women in the aftermath of an earthquake or Iraqi mothers shrouded in black, rocking back and forth in vociferous grief after losing a family member to a suicide bomb. And it’s hard to forget the extraordinary scenes of emotional public grief that followed the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Loud, unself-conscious, and highly public, these kinds of laments give visual and vocal shape to mourning.
To get a glimpse of powerful ritual laments, I’ve come to Iran during Muharram. This holy month commemorates the martyrdom in AD 680 of Imam Husayn, grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Culminating in the sacred day of Ashura—the day on which, centuries earlier, Husayn was killed in battle—this is Iran’s most important religious holiday. It’s not a joyous occasion, but a time of intense sadness, when Iranians get together for a period of collective mourning.
Of course, unlike the anguish captured on TV newscasts, the mourning here will be for an individual who died many centuries ago. Moreover, the weeping and acts of penance performed for Husayn and his family are inextricably bound up with deeper bonds uniting Shi’a Muslims across the globe. But while the lamenting ceremonies won’t be the same as the grief you might see at a funeral, I want to get a sense of a culture where mourning is embraced, not hidden away.
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The man Iranians weep for every year at Ashura died in the Battle of Karbala (now a city in Iraq) after leading his small band of family and followers in a march across the desert to seize Kufa, a city ruled by Yazid, who was said to be flouting the teachings of Islam. Before reaching the city, a group of soldiers surrounded Imam Husayn and his men, cutting off their water supplies, subjecting their families to terrible thirst. After several days of bitter fighting, Husayn, his family, his followers, and their relatives lay dead on the battlefield. Husayn’s death, considered to be a martyrdom, was a critical moment for the Shi’a movement, heralding the separation of the Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam.
Iranians know the story of the battle by heart. It’s been told to them since they were children. Yet, every year, they mourn Husayn’s martyrdom and remember his death with great outpourings of grief—as if he’d died only yesterday.
Ceremonies and activities, even civic decorations, are designed to promote weeping. In theaters around Iran, ta’zieh, or history plays, re-create the battlefield scenes with elaborate costumes, male-only casts, live animals, and audiences who are encouraged to cry at the most poignant moments in the performance. On streets and in religious halls, people watch lamentation ceremonies in which groups of men stand together, slapping their arms hard against their chests in powerful rhythms as they shout out Husayn’s name. In public places, posters depict his riderless horse weeping for its lost lord and water gourds spurting with blood. Fountains are filled with dye so that they, too, appear to be running with blood.
Until recently in Iran, men marked this occasion by whipping themselves with barbed chains or blades—popular images in the Western media because of the high drama and bloody nature of the ceremonies. This practice was banned in Iran several years ago (although it continues in other countries and secretly in parts of Iran). In a new penance tradition, mourners give blood during Muharram, and instead of blades, men beat their backs with clusters of chains attached to wooden handles. In mournful street processions moving to the slow rhythm of drums, chain clusters rise up in unison before falling back heavily onto the shoulders of their owners. Even young boys join in using child-sized bunches.
I get a taste of what’s to come on my second day in Tehran, as Maryam and I stroll through the Grand Bazaar, the ancient market in the city center. This is a place that’s usually alive with activity—in open-fronted stores beneath nineteenth-century brick arches, women in chadors haggle with traders over the price of a pound of mutton and small boys run around with trays of hot tea, dodging boxes of dried fruit and stacks of china plates.
Today, though, the storefronts are shut. The cobbled streets are quiet. Draped across the majestic arches of the bazaar are green and black velvet banners with prayers and eulogies dancing across...