She grew up punk in conservative Tehran, but don't tell Dela Moradpour she was 'oppressed'
With her labret, tongue and eyebrow piercings and jet-black, turquoise-streaked hair, Delaram Moradpour, known as “Dela,” might have blended seamlessly into Portland’s 1980s punk scene or Seattle’s ensuing grunge era.
But she wasn’t an American teenager. Moradpour was stomping around the capital of religiously conservative Iran in her U.S. Army boots and modesty-law-breaking ensembles. Sometimes a black Analog trucker hat would take the place of her hijab, the headscarf Iranian law dictates women wear when in public.
Moradpour’s brazenly bold and quirky personality is hardly contained in her petite physique. With enormous artichoke-green eyes and animated, sarcastic manner, she makes a notable impression.
As she came of age during the mid-2000s in Tehran, Moradpour and her posse of street friends were paving the way for a new, nonconforming breed of Iranian teenager.
Her clique is credited in various publications as being the first wave of a cultural shift among Iranian youths, setting trends that became more prevalent as high-speed Internet infiltrated urban areas in the years that followed.
Some came from affluent families, some were poor, and others, such as Moradpour, came from comfortable middle-class homes. What they had in common was boredom with the status quo and a shared affinity for art, music from the West and a style that affronted traditional Iranian culture.
They often hung out in a green space in northwest Tehran known as Frog Park because of its thriving amphibian population. The graffiti-covered park was one of the only places in the city of more than 8 million that had skateboarding terrain. Moradpour would watch the boys skate; they talked about rock music and illicit drugs as they smoked cigarettes and shared joints.
Years later, one of Moradpour’s longtime acquaintances, Obash Karampour, described Frog Park as “the Haight-Ashbury of Tehran” in an interview with Vanity Fair.
Four of the Frog Park kids made headlines in 2013 when they were killed in a murder-suicide in Brooklyn. Three were members of a punk-rock band called Yellow Dogs. They moved to the U.S. in their pursuit of creative freedom, according to reports in The Guardian. Their killer, who turned the gun on himself after shooting the band mates, was a former member of another Iranian rock group, Free Keys.
Moradpour fondly remembers listening to the Yellow Dogs’ band practices in a makeshift rooftop attic.
“We all wanted to go somewhere as teenagers,” remembered Moradpour, now 25 and living near Hillsdale in Southwest Portland. “The frog kids aren’t there anymore; they’re in the U.S. and Canada, in Uruguay and Europe.”
In Iran, they were often targeted and arrested by the authorities for minor and sometimes imagined infractions.
Of her group of about 40 friends, she said, five committed suicide and two others died of drug overdose — speedballs and tramadol. She attributes the high death rate to the hopelessness, general fatigue and state of depression that permeated the clique.
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In 1990, Moradpour was born in Sharak-e Gharb, an upscale neighborhood in northwest Tehran. Her parents were conservative — her mother a deeply religious Muslim and her father a traditionalist who believed in “the dignity of the family and female modesty,” she said.
She often attended “chic parties” with female relatives — one of her favorite memories. Forty or more women would gather, first to listen to a religious lecture and read the Quran for about an hour, and then to eat, dance and socialize the night away.
It was where Iranian women cut loose, wearing scandalously revealing outfits and talking about sex. Describing the parties, Moradpour said she was reminded of the smell of cucumbers, cookies and Esfand, a perennial plant burned to create a cleansing smoke.
Her parents were financially stable and were able to send her to some of the best private academies in Tehran. In Iran, schools are segregated by gender, and Moradpour didn’t fit in with the other girls.
“I got bullied,” she said. “I kept changing schools.”
Most of her classmates came from wealthier families, but they stole from her — school supplies, even her swimsuit.
Her taste in music also contributed to her status as an outsider. When she was 5 years old, her older cousins introduced her to heavy metal, and she was hooked.
She was listening to Sepultura, Ghost Brigade and Persian metal bands while her classmates were either listening to Persian pop or P. Diddy, Eminem and Britney Spears, she said.
“Anytime I listen to Britney Spears, when I hear her voice, I just imagine myself with a chainsaw. It makes me so angry,” Moradpour said in a serious tone. “I find Britney Spears to be more vulgar and scary than this Tool and Metallica.”
It wasn’t until a boyfriend introduced her to the kids in Frog Park when she was 14 that she felt at home with a group of friends. The boyfriend didn’t last, but she remained a member of the Frog Park clique through high school and into college.
In 2008, Moradpour began to study monumental sculpture at the Art University of Tehran, although she remained in her parents’ home, as Iranian men and women typically do until marriage.
Two semesters into her first year of college, she ventured off to Isfahan to sightsee with four friends. One frigid evening during this vacation, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or Revolutionary Guard, approached the students as they stood looking out over the city from an iconic bridge in a strictly conservative neighborhood.
The Revolutionary Guard is separate from Iran’s police forces but can also make arrests. According to a New York Times report, it has grown from its origin “as an ideologically driven militia” to “assume an increasingly assertive role in virtually every aspect of Iranian society.”
The guardsmen asked the students for identification.
“Of course I was the only one that was refusing,” Moradpour said. “We were so young and naïve. We didn’t know how to handle police.”
One guardsman was particularly offended by their street-punk style and attitude.
“I’m pretty sure he has like Oedipus complex or something.” Moradpour said. “I’m telling you, a true sociopath.”
Before arresting them and transporting them to a nearby police station, he told the teenagers they would be “executed in the morning.”
At the station, a police officer told the guardsman his captives were a problem for the Revolutionary Guard, not the police. He then assured Moradpour the guard’s station was closed and they’d be released. This was true, but the guardsman insisted the teenagers first sign an affidavit admitting they were Satan worshipers. All but Moradpour signed the document.
“Aren’t they a bunch of idiots?” Moradpour said as she recalled the story. “Why would you sign a paper saying you committed a crime if you didn’t?”
Although she was released without charge, Moradpour feared the stigma attached to the arrest would anger and embarrass her family.
“I felt so poorly about myself that I didn’t want to face my parents after that,” she said. “I was both terrified and ashamed.”
She didn’t return home for an entire year after the arrest. Instead, she moved in with her sketching instructor, a man 20 years her senior who was also her boyfriend. This move would further stigmatize her.
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Moradpour’s affair with her teacher ended, and she returned home. Despite their traditional values, her parents continued to love and support their daughter.
Over the next four years, Moradpour estimates, she was arrested about 14 times for hijab-related offenses and for sporting a manto, like a parka, that was too short.
“I got desensitized to it after a while. I was like, OK, here we go again,” she said. “It was becoming a hobby for me.”
The police would take her down to the station, where they would typically bully her for a few hours and then make her call someone who could bring her more modest clothing to change into.
“My whole life has been a complication of bad stigmas, so I’m not afraid of it anymore,” she said. “I openly had boyfriends, I openly smoked, and I was openly drinking. I was openly doing pretty much everything.”
Despite the arrests, she said, “I had a very fun life. It was trouble every single day; I had to run away. Once I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and I passed out because I ran so much, and I was a heavy smoker, so you can imagine what kind of a burden it was to run away from police.
“In many cases, I smoked with police officers. I got friendly with them. It’s just a different way of life; it’s a different way of living.”
As she continued her studies, unrest was growing in Iran. In 2009, the controversial re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked what would become known as the Green Movement. Protests began peacefully, with much of the organization and communication happening on social media.
Moradpour’s father warned her to steer clear of areas of Tehran where there were protests, which were escalating from peaceful to violent. Moradpour began to hear stories of arrests at protests from students whose voices were strained from shouting.
She was intrigued and started going to protests in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Even today, she said, her heart is with the Green Movement, although it was suppressed as quickly as it began.
“No European or American country could ever experience what we experienced in (the) Green Movement, because nobody cares that much,” she said. “People are comfortable. They don’t have the problem of freedom of speech. They don’t have the problem of human rights, and you know, if they want something for other people, just have fundraising and everything. But we had the problem of freedom of speech and human rights, so Green Movement was necessary.”
On Feb. 14, 2011, a student at her university, Sane Jaleh, was shot and killed at a Green Movement protest. His friends and classmates say the Revolutionary Guard was responsible for his death, although government-issued statements claimed otherwise.
Moradpour, along with most other university students, attended his funeral. Afterward, the Revolutionary Guard careened hundreds of mourners into an auditorium at the school. When Moradpour was handed an opportunity to slip out, she and her friend took it and ran to a nearby coffee shop.
“We just started crying and crying,” she said, “because we felt so bad about ourselves that we ran away.”
Her father called her as she sat in the coffee shop, wanting to know if she was OK.
Shortly after she hung up the phone, she heard a voice. “Miss, could you come with us for a second?”
One of the officers kicked her U.S. Army boot and accused her of speaking on the phone with the “Cia.” What he meant was CIA.
She told them it was her father on the other end of the line, but they persisted. “I know you’re a U.S. spy. What is this you’re wearing? You’re a U.S. soldier.”
She recounted her response with a smirk. “I said, ‘Yes, that’s who I am.’ I was being sarcastic the whole time, and that was a bad, bad mistake.”
“You talk a lot, you’re coming with us,” they said.
This arrest was different from the others. She was intensely interrogated and held for eight days in solitary confinement.
“I want to meet my interrogators, I respect them, actually. They did a very good job,” she said matter-of-factly. “The second day, they knew that I wasn’t a spy. But yet they had to follow protocol. They had to keep me for a few days. They had to make sure. They had to file the paperwork, and they let me go. If I was their boss, I’d say, ‘Bravo, you did it!’”
She never got any paperwork after her release so she doesn’t know if it was the police or the Revolutionary Guard that arrested her. Even though she was found innocent, Moradpour was put on probation at the university for being arrested, and she eventually dropped out.
Later that year, she met Amin at a party, and the two began to date. (She asked we not use his last name.) Like her sketching instructor, he was decades older than her. “I think I have a problem with these men,” she said with a laugh.
One month into their relationship, Amin told her he was moving back to the U.S., which came as a surprise to Moradpour; she didn’t know he was only in Iran temporarily. Shortly before he left, he asked her if she would marry him.
“I said, well yeah, let’s think about it for a month,” she said. Six months later, he returned to Iran, and they had a small ceremony before he brought her to Portland in 2012.
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Moradpour enrolled at Portland Community College before attending Pacific Northwest College of Art. In her free time, she volunteered with Red Cross, giving cookies to blood donors, and at the Portland Art Museum.
She liked working the iPod booth at the museum, where she would “show old people how to use an iPod — I felt like, genius!” she said.
Street Roots sat down with Moradpour in her tidy, book-filled apartment in late August. For the past year, she and her husband were living in the in-law suite above their friend Kenya Zappa’s garage. Zappa, a third-generation Italian-American, said the couple dropped everything to move in so they could help her and her children get through a difficult time.
But the couple had their own problems. The day before Street Roots met with Moradpour, her divorce was finalized.
But during the interview, she seemed optimistic, saying she was happy. Just two weeks earlier, she graduated from PNCA with a master’s degree in critical theory and creative research.
She cheerfully showed off the Darth Vader toaster she had just acquired before sitting down to talk about her path to Portland — her facial piercings now gone, a tattoo she got on her ring finger when she was 20 removed, and her dark curly hair its natural color.
“I’ve grown up a lot,” she said, although she’s struggling to find her place in American society. Everyone in her family, including her parents and younger brother, still live in Iran.
“I think she’s definitely turning Portland into her home,” Zappa said, “but I still believe she is kind of stuck between two worlds.”
Moradpour says she feels “very alone.”
“Now that I’m here, I can speak my mind,” she said, but “I can’t relate to people.”
Americans, she said, “they all think that I am so oppressed. They always think that, ‘Oh my God — from that culture? You must have had a bad time.’ No! I was fine. Literally, I was fine. I went to jail, I went to solitary confinement, and I’m still saying, I was fine.
“People think that I live a life of a typical, oppressed, self-sabotaging, man-hating, self-sacrificing woman, which is so untrue.”
While homesick at times, she said she cannot move back to Iran. There’s less competition for jobs in the U.S., and she has to earn money. Plus, she said, she’s grown accustomed to the sense of community she has with her neighbors.
According to the Statistical Centre of Iran, between March and June, the unemployment rate among working-age women was nearly 20 percent, although 60 percent of college students are women. The unemployment rate for men was 9 percent during the same period.
For the past few years, Moradpour has worked for a company that provides translation services. Through her employer, she often assists Catholic Charities and Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization with new arrivals from the Middle East, helping them find housing and other services by translating Farsi. She said many Iranians who practice the Bahá’í faith are coming to the U.S. for religious freedom. She also helps acclimate refugees from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
She says she never wanted to be politically involved, but the current political climate in Iran turns every Iranian into an activist. In August, she attended a rally at Pioneer Square in support of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
She said many of the Iranian immigrants she’s met have political opinions about the Iranian government, but they’re afraid to speak out because they have family back home.
“It’s just this paranoia,” she said. “Nobody’s going to knock on your parents’ door and say, ‘We’re here to kill you because your daughter said something in U.S. against the regime.’”
But she has a few holdover fears of her own. Zappa said Moradpour still gets anxious around police.
“She has to retrain herself to realize that the police won’t — most likely — stop her without cause, and if they did,” Zappa said, “they’re not going to lock her up without due process.”
She said for Moradpour, it’s “hard being so far away from her family, but she sees more opportunity here and appreciates the ability to speak openly.”
Moradpour says she misses Iran, especially the chic parties.
To remind herself of home, she likes to infuse her apartment with Esfand. She put a pinch of a blend that smelled like chocolate into an incense burner on her electric stove and then waved it around the apartment and above her guests’ heads in a demonstration of the tradition. “Now you are safe,” she proclaimed.
Smoking a hookah makes her sick, she said, but she brought one with her from Iran and keeps it in her kitchen. Her aunts smoke hookahs heavily.
And there’s one more tradition she likes to revisit occasionally. About once a month, she nostalgically wears the hijab she so often evaded in her earlier years.
This story is an installment of Planet Portland , a periodic series by Street Roots on the personal journeys within Portland's immigrant communities.
emily@streetroots.org
