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The idea of a honeymoon in Iran sounds like a concept cooked up for a sitcom or an easy joke on late-night TV: it's where you go to wear a veil
after the ceremony (not to mention for the rest of your life). But Alison Wearing's five-month journey through Iran was not born of dark humour or a "try to top this" approach to adventure. Rather, she chose Iran "because it frightens me; because it frightens the world... and because I don't believe in giving [fear] such power. I refused to believe that such a place of unalloyed evil truly existed, that that was the end of the story."
Wearing's journey becomes a story of expectations met head-on, altered and exceeded. Travelling into territory unknown to or stereotyped by most Westerners, she presents a collection of portraits of a complex, multi-faceted, and humane people who live and struggle daily with the legacy of revolution. Wearing's entertaining, compassionate, and insightful journal reveals a country of great faith and great contradictions, where religious fundamentalism means freedom to some and enduring oppression to others. The author's experience of this chafing of beliefs and values is perhaps best embodied by her struggle with the chaador--the heavy, body- and face-obscuring manteaus and veils required for females over the age of nine. Unlike her travelling companion, who is free to dress appropriately for the scorching desert weather, she struggles and suffers under layers of stifling black clothing that require constant attention to keep in place. The chaador--uncomfortable, restricting, yet at times oddly liberating--comes to symbolize a great deal about contemporary Iran.
Though Wearing's travels are peppered with frustrations, she is treated with exceptional generosity and kindness wherever she goes, finding herself welcomed into the homes of strangers, fed, entertained, and put in the path of adventure. Honeymoon in Purdah becomes an eloquent and humorous statement about the spirit of a people--irrepressible and full of heart. --Svenja Soldovieri
From Publishers Weekly
To blend in on their recent visit to Iran, journalist Wearing and her gay roommate pose as a married couple, complete with wedding rings and a forged marriage certificate. Wearing also purchases a chaador (literally "tent"), made of heavy black polyester, which she wears throughout her journeyD110-degree heat notwithstanding. From that point forward, the friends can't go anywhere without receiving copious offers of gifts, dinners, invitations into people's homes, free taxi rides and fruit from Iranians who are delighted by the Westerners' attempt to understand and appreciate their customs. The characters Wearing meets are extraordinary in their ordinariness, and the author deftly shows that our opinion of the Middle East is really our opinion of Middle Eastern government. She seeks out the most intriguing of the people around her, then steps back and lets them take center stage. Tip, for instance, spent 12 years in California. Now in his early 20s, he's been stuck in Iran doing odd jobs for three dollars a day, so to save money he started a side business selling opium. Another Iranian they meet, deeply religious, explains to them why Iran is superior to the West, while other Iranians apologize profusely for the conditions of their country since the fall of the Shah 20 years ago. Wearing lets readers glimpse the anti-Americanism, oppression and miserably inefficient bureaucracy portrayed in the American news, but again and again she demonstrates the generosity of the Iranians. With this engrossing account, Wearing casts a sympathetic eye on the real people of Iran, so often invisible to the West. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
