Sing It Loud and Proud
After two decades of silence,
Iran's Googoosh makes a triumphant return to the world stage
By
AZADEH MOAVENI Dubai
The diva
is cloaked in a white flannel bathrobe, bare feet up on a
chair, her face looking its age in the harsh fluorescent light.
She pouts between sips of hot tea as a makeup artist chases
her lips with a brush dipped in waxy violet gloss. The dressing
room scene is not a pretty picture. But it doesn't matter
because this is Googoosh, the most famous Iranian singer of
the 20th century, a living icon who touches the heartstrings
of her fans as if she were Barbra Streisand, Maria Callas
and Edith Piaf rolled into one. In a few moments, a blue Maserati
will race her to a concert hall where she'll sing for a hometown
crowd for the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Gushes Googoosh: "This is like a rebirth!"
Because
of political difficulties in Googoosh's country, her homecoming
concert is taking place not in Iran but across the Persian
Gulf in Dubai, one of the Arab Emirates. More than 10,000
Iranians have arrived on the 105-minute flight from Tehran
for the concert, which was timed for Norouz, the Persian New
Year. When she finally appears in the hall, they surge forward
chanting "Goo-goosh, Goo-goosh!" and waving placards emblazoned,
"We Love You!" In a golden robe, her eyes watery with emotion,
she kneels and says, "Happy Norouz to all my dear Iranians!"
As women
pass tissues to one another to wipe away their tears, Googoosh
starts into an old favorite, Four Seasons, which suddenly
has the crowd on its feet clapping in rhythm. "This was the
background music to our life," says Farzaneh, 33, a physician.
Adds Shireen, 35, who brought along her 8-year-old daughter:
"We never thought we'd see this day."
The recent
Dubai concert was the finale of a 19-city tour, made possible
when Googoosh was granted a passport amid the cultural thaw
under moderate President Mohammed Khatami. Her shows attracted
U.S. politicians, Iranian soccer players and admirers like
Celine Dion, who reportedly caught her gig in Toronto. But
conservative clerics in Iran denounced Googoosh's tour, making
her entourage nervous about a return
home. Googoosh will spend the next few months shooting a movie
in Cuba, where she will have time to measure the risk involved
in going back to Iran.
Born in
1950 as Faegheh Atashin, Googoosh began performing at age
three with her father's folklore dance ensemble and was a
national singing star at 15. During the Shah's era she reigned
over the Tehran nightclub scene. After his overthrow, she
returned from a trip abroad and offered to sing My Beloved
Sir and a revolutionary anthem
for the Ayatulluh Khomeini. But the new regime banned female
vocalists as temptresses, and Khomeini's cultural police
put her under virtual house arrest. Some Iranian entertainers
fled to Los Angeles-or, as Iranians call it, Tehrangeles-to
make a living within the new Iranian diaspora. But for the
next two decades Googoosh shunned opportunities to slip out
of Iran, living alone, buying her own groceries and only occasionally
gathering around a piano with friends. She always won the
hearts of Iranians with classic ballads
of lost love and hardship. But some of her new songs deal
with death, suffering, repression and exile, the more recent
Iranian
experience of Islamic revolution and the long war with Iraq.
"If I stayed, it was for the children of the war, for the
mothers imprisoned by their tears," she sings on her new CD
Zoroaster.
Such sentiments
are reaching eager ears in Iran, where a new generation has
grown up listening to their parents' Googoosh albums or pirated
audiocassettes of old tunes. "She's suffered our pain with
us all these years," says Amir, 25, an engineer from Tehran
who waited for two hours out side
Dubai's World Trade Center to catch a glimpse of her. "In
this choking regime of the mullahs, she knows of what she
sings."
For Googoosh,
the difficulties of the last two decades are eased by the
bonds she shares with her followers. Typical among them is
Omid Daneshvar, 39, a computer engineer standing in the fourth
row with other listeners chanting "Googoosh, we love you!"
She bellows back, "I'd die for you!" and moves into a ballad,
singing "I shall lend my voice to history/ Oh, give me the
chance, so I can sing your tears!" All the while, Daneshvar
is holding up a cell phone, connecting the sounds to his family
seated in a living room back in Tehran. If Googoosh's songs
have freed her nation's memory, they seem to have reunited
a
people as well.
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April 16, 2001 | No.
15
COVER
STORIES
The
City Of God
No other city is as venerated as Jerusalem, a source of conflict but the
hope of pilgrims from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Archaeologists
are reconstructing the way the city appeared to Jesus when he entered
it on his way to martyrdom
SOUTH
PACIFIC
HIGH
SEAS : City Afloat...
The length of three football fields, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation
is a floating fortress, with more than 5,000 men and 72 planes. Time tours
America's flagship
THE
ARTS
ART: In Paris, Picasso's erotica doesn't
quite excite...
SHOW BUSINESS: The action heroines
MUSIC: A silenced Iranian sings again
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY
PEOPLE
TO WATCH: Novelist Elizabeth Knox...
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