The texture of our hair, the length of it, how we choose to wear it — these are decisions that have consequences. In Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s novel Americanah , the Nigerian protagonist’s struggles to tame her crinkly African locks tells us that hair is political. Hair is also seen as the ticket to freedom in Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad’s memoir The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran . Alinejad’s story, co-written with her husband Kambiz Foroohar, is unapologetic, brave and doffs a hat to women who cannot not ask questions and have to face the music when they do.
This is the story of a woman triumphing the greatest of odds, or a series of “firsts”, as Alinejad puts it. She is the first woman in her village to go to prison, the first to be pregnant before marriage, to be a divorcee and so on. The book is a detailed account of her battles with the establishment — family, school, the government and the clerics.
The book opens with the 11-year-old Alinejad, who unlike her elder brother is not afraid of the dark. Even as a child, Alinejad speaks out against her brother, a boastful and otherwise fearless teenager who would not allow his little sister to ride a bicycle or run around the fields. At school, she is reprimanded by teachers for questioning the Quran, and rebuked by her father when she decides to abandon the chador on her 16th birthday. These rebellions serve as precursors to greater ones that would follow as she grows older.
Before Alinejad finishes high school, she is arrested, along with her brother, friends and fiancé, for being part of a political group that wrote seditious material. She gives chilling details of her incarceration; she has no idea where she is taken, is harassed into a forced confession and discovers she is pregnant while in prison. Yet Alinejad resolutely refuses to show that she is scared.
The book admirably tackles the difficult question of compulsory hijab. Alinejad’s first trip to Lebanon, where there are no hijab laws, is a moment of bewilderment, hesitation and exhilaration. It gives the readers a taste of what freedom could possibly mean to someone who has had no option but to obey when it came to wearing a hijab. But curiously enough, Alinejad never talks about what it means to be a hijab-clad Muslim immigrant in North America, where she now lives after run-ins with the Iranian government. Her 2014 Facebook and Instagram campaign, My Stealthy Freedom, raises some important questions about the female body and agency, but she has been criticised for subsuming every political issue under the fold of compulsory hijab. She takes time to respond to these criticisms in the Trump era, knowing the slippery ground between respecting the laws of the Islamic land and exercising choice.
It is refreshing to see Alinejad candidly describe the drudgeries of domesticity and how much of an imperfect mother she is. She admits that she blossomed after her divorce and was no longer attached to the home. The awkward, yet blooming relationship with her teenaged son after losing custody of him as a toddler proves to be an engrossing read, where she acknowledges she does not know her son well and is trying to figure him out.
Alinejad’s memoir also points to the power and influence of social media. While people can dismiss social media politics as too aestheticised, one cannot underestimate the reach it has had. Her campaigns such as White Wednesdays and My Stealthy Freedom brought attention to the voices of Iranian women and allowed Alinejad to continue her activism against compulsory hijab despite being in exile. The global popularity of the campaigns prompted Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, to urge her to write this book.
However, The Wind in My Hair is too neat a memoir. Alinejad is always-already a free spirit. We never get to know how her views on the hijab changed or what made her question her religion.
The book starts on a note where she is the braver, freer child but we never see how her thoughts moved beyond her immediate social context.
Autobiographies, when messy, help us see the protagonist evolve. We see Alinejad grow physically but the arc of her thoughts is constant. This makes the reader wonder — how do you attempt to write about yourself? Since autobiographies are also an act of remembering and forgetting, do we read the past through our present politics or allow the past to shape and mould our current self? Alinejad’s book will resonate with South Asian readers who have to battle questions about their honour and sexuality every time they stand up to authority. It tells us in no uncertain terms that there will be a price to pay for asking questions, but that never means we stop asking them.
Suchismita Chattopadhyay is pursuing her PhD in anthropology