Fashion designer Tala Raassi literally suffered for her art.
In the May issue of Marie Claire magazine, a young designer named Tala Raassi relates her nightmarish tale of being arrested in Iran for wearing "indecent" clothing (a miniskirt) to a private party celebrating her sweet 16th birthday. The teenager was held in handcuffs for 5 days, repeatedly threatened, and ultimately received her sentence - 40 lashes from a wet whip ("to make the lashes sting").
There's a memory that has defined my life: I'm standing in line in a long, dark hallway, handcuffed to a friend, while listening to the horrifying sound of two other friends screaming out in pain. I'm in jail in Iran's capital, Tehran, and I'm about to be served my punishment: 40 lashes. My friends emerge from a room down the hall, tears streaming down their faces and blood staining the backs of their shirts. I can barely breathe as I wait for the guards to call my name. Finally, it's my turn. My friend and I, still cuffed, enter the torture room together...
What's truly amazing about this story, aside from what the Western mind can see as nothing but senseless brutality, is what Raassi did after she was released. Born into a well-to-do family, Raassi had planned to attend law school one day. But the torture she endured changed the course of her life. She began to consider a career which would allow her to take a stand against the brutality and oppression of women she experienced so personally. She moved to the U.S. (where she was born and is therefore a dual citizen) and entered the world of women's fashion. Today Raassi is the owner of the internationally acclaimed Dar Be Dar fashion line - a line of super-sexy swimwear. As she so eloquently puts it, "A woman who cares about herself is not afraid to celebrate the beauty of her own body."
At the risk of comparing myself to the incomparable, I confess that a part of me can empathize with Raassi's experience of the impossible situation. Even here in the United States, women are daily faced with such paradoxes of will - be socially acceptable and maintain your peaceful existence, or else be true to your own genuine will and learn that, at the very least, you will not often be loved for it. On a much smaller scale, my own entry into the world of design resulted from a similar realization. Having spent the lion's share of my of my adult life as a career social worker, I once believed in the ideals that trap so many with their overly-simplified promises of the ultimately "Just World Theory" - the belief that, essentially, everything ultimately happens with just cause, and it all evens out in the end. After all, if Raassi had just worn pants, she wouldn't have been lashed, right?
As such, I dedicated not just my time but my very soul to the social service system, believing that it was this system that ultimately provided justice (usually in the form of meeting basic essential needs) to those poor souls who had somehow slipped between the cracks of a just world. A family of four is homeless? Send them to a shelter. A child is doing drugs? Send him to drug diversion classes. A woman is ill and uninsured? Send her to social security disability. I had an answer for everything. But the longer I worked in the system, the larger the cracks seemed to be. 3 million Americans are homeless. 1 out of every 10 teenagers in the U.S. uses illicit drugs. Over 46 million Americans lack health insurance. Eventually I became so overwhelmed by the unmet needs of so many people that I ceased to be able to separate myself from my work.
Ultimately, my body rebelled from the combination of overwork and exposure to so much disease (remember, those who are uninsured are much more likely to catch and spread contagious illnesses, and I worked with uninsured clients every day). Every system in my body began to break down. I couldn't fight off even minor infections, I was always exhausted, and my days became a blur of physical pain and mental frustration. I lost my job when I requested a reduction in hours, and so of course I lost my insurance soon after. Suddenly, I was the poor soul without insurance being referred to social security disability. I knew from working with clients that this was not an ideal system, but I was soon to learn just how broken it really was. Over the next five years - while fighting for my life - I was denied over and over, racked up enormous medical debt, and worst of all for me, was treated like a pariah by the larger society. While celebrating one July 4th - a good day for me - I was able to get out of bed and sit on my front lawn with my neighbors to watch the fireworks. But the evening was overcast, and all we could see was a vague blush of oranges and blues in the fog while fireworks exploded unseen over the water. As we were commenting on the cost of the largely invisible display, one neighbor tuned to me and said with all sincerity, "Well, at least they didn't waste it on welfare moms."
That moment was my true education, the moment I realized that I had been towing the party line for a society that considered helping young, impoverished mothers (and their children) afford food and shelter to be less valuable than fireworks that nobody could see. I discovered the hard way that we - you and I - are "those poor souls;" that it is but for the grace of God or sheer dumb luck any of us manages to avoid the same sad fate.
I imagine that Tala Raassi might have had a similar realization, if entirely more immediate and terrifying, while waiting for her turn to be tortured in that hallway; that rather than embrace the beauty and joy of their own youngsters joining together to celebrate life, her society would prefer to whip them into brutalized submission just because they could. She must have felt she had an impossible choice to make - maintain her society's standards and therefore reinforce its brutal oppression, or leave her home to create an entirely new life for herself without any assurance of support or success. When it comes down to it, Raassi's decision took her unforgivable tragedy and transformed it into beauty - not just in her designs, but the beauty of a strong, empowered woman who shaped her own better world from pieces of a painful past. Her story is an inspiration for women (and the men who love them) of every society.
0 comments:
Post a Comment