Googoosh: The Wrong Voice of Googoosh with review by Tara Dehlavi – The Extraordinary Story of an Iranian Icon | Biography and memoirs

IIf you ask any Iranian to name the most important pop star in our country’s history, they will say Googoosh. Nobody comes close. Over the course of six decades of revolution, repression, and exile, Googoosh has transformed from a singer into a cultural icon, a symbol of the country’s grief for its murdered, imprisoned, and gagged artists, and a living link between pre-revolutionary Iran and its diaspora.

Googoosh was only three years old when she started singing in the small halls and cabaret venues where her father worked. As a teenager, she was a film actress and fashion icon. In the 1960s and 1970s, when my mother was a teenager, Googoosh was everywhere: on television, in movies, in magazines, and on the radio. She kept reinventing herself – her style, her movements, her hair. (My mother and several of her college classmates copied Googoosh’s famous haircut.) For a while, this bold and creative young woman shaped the way Westerners saw Iran, and how a generation of Iranian women understood modernity, femininity, and public life.

Then came the 1979 revolution, and cultural crackdowns drove secular art and music underground. In 1980, Googoosh was arrested and banned (along with other singers and actors) from performing, recording or appearing in public. She retreated into private life, but her songs continued to circulate underground, and my generation played her music as much as our parents did: to dance, to grieve, to fall in love. I listen to the same breath on repeat after every heartbreak, or when I just need a big dramatic scream. Even after her silence, Googoosh was a symbol of a lost Iran, its colorful culture, its rich artistic history, and its strong, bold women.

Her memoir uses her 1980 arrest as a framing device. After a series of investigations, she is thrown into a cell with her old friend, singer and film actress Marjane, and the novel moves between prison and the past. In prison, the treatment of Googoosh by the clergy is horrific, but crammed together in filthy, unpredictable conditions, the women are forced to tell their stories to each other to distract themselves.

Googoosh describes a difficult childhood: the pain of her mother’s departure, and the days she spent serving her father’s new wife, Mu’nis, and protecting her siblings from their stepmother’s wrath. In those days, the theater was her only reliable refuge and her only strength (as breadwinner) against Monis. But Googoosh soon left home, marrying at 17, the first of many marriages that collapsed under the pressures of celebrity, public scrutiny, and oppressive expectations.

Despite this, she was free in public: she wore what she wanted, moved how she wanted, and talked about love in ways most women couldn’t. Her short haircut, short skirts, bold eyeliner, and vulnerability on stage captivated other women. After crackdowns on secular music, Iranian women equated the silencing of their favorite artist with their own silencing, and her disappearance from public life has turned her into a kind of lost saint. They remembered her privately through old cassette tapes: the beautiful face of their unspent youth, their desires and their longing to be heard.

It’s clear, then, that Googoosh’s memoir is exciting to its fans and an important part of our cultural archive. It is a real pleasure to read her stories, with their infuriating power imbalances and dramatic twists. But Googoosh deserved a more experienced memoirist as its co-writer. Her (lived) story is a complex one, full of cultural texture and interpersonal nuance, and carrying historical weight. It deserves a sophisticated novel with strong narrative and attention to detail in the Googoosh voice. As the tone of the Iranian language is stripped or distorted, the writing continually moves toward clichés, one-tone characters, and melodrama. (At a concert: “I felt as if there was a giant octopus with tentacles spread throughout the vast space, causing a wave to form, a wave of energy that grew exponentially as it rushed towards the stage before striking me and the musicians.”) How much more accurate and illuminating this memoir could have been had it been given a skilled literary hand. However, it’s Googoosh and it deserves our attention. She lived a brave and wonderful life that everyone should know about.

She was finally allowed to leave Iran in 2000. In exile, she rebuilt her life from the ground up, releasing new music and touring the world. Googoosh’s first performance (in Toronto) after two decades of silence was historic: the audience cried and remembered everything they had lost. Soon, her concerts became generational gatherings again: older Iranians reconnecting with pre-revolutionary memories, and their third-culture children (and grandchildren) discovering part of their identity through her music. But for Iranian women of my mother’s generation, the ones who had suffered the most at the hands of brutal men, seeing their idol regain the spotlight was a kind of revival – as if they, too, were getting another chance to achieve everything they had missed.