Engine Summer

I had an American friend of Irish and Lebanese ancestry and in the seventies she did the hippy overland to India thing, and ended up spending a long time in Afghanistan. She said she connected to this whole women's culture there, where they had women's bathhouses and women met in them and talked about everything and especially modern 1970s women's poetry in Arabic, of which there was a whole thriving culture. And they were wearing burqas in the street and naked in the baths, and they had this whole alternative underground culture that my friend found very appealing. She spoke Arabic, and she was a nurse, and she worked there for a year or so. She'd left before the Soviet invasion. But she talked about it, in Greece in the early eighties, as this complex feminine culture that wasn't exactly feminist but wasn't exactly not either, and which contrasted a lot with the way women live in Greece, and for that matter in the US and Britain too. She said there were drawings and poems pinned up in the bath-houses, where men never went, and passionate discussion. And she had read all kinds of things because they'd been recommended to her and lent to her.

I've often thought about that culture, because it's so invisible that I've never otherwise heard anything about it,

I know Iran isn't Afghanistan and Farsi isn't Arabic, but this seemed relevant even so.