Identity, patriarchy, and a global lens

Nassrine Azimi Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
From Evoke Media, I'm Sabrina Merage Naim, with me is Kassia Binkowski, and this is Breaking Glass, a series of conversations with women around the world who are shattering glass ceilings and challenging social norms. They are audacious, gutsy. And their stories are echoed across borders and generations in a rallying cry and that is changing the narrative for women everywhere. Today's conversation is taking us to Japan. We're talking with Nassrine Azimi about her life as an independent woman growing up in Iran and traveling around the world before settling in Hiroshima. She's a published author, a visiting professor, and senior advisor to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. Nassrine's most recently the founder of Green Legacy Hiroshima, a project to spread worldwide, the seeds and saplings of Hiroshima as a bomb survivor trees.

Kassia Binkowski
Sabrina, I think one of the most interesting parts of this conversation is really the global lens through which she looks at world. I mean, she has traveled all over the world. She's sharing stories today about how her father's decision to invest in his daughter's education completely transformed the trajectory of her life. And she's sharing the story of her evolution from an oppressive Middle Eastern society to a lifetime of social impact, education, and advocacy. I mean, the travels that she's taking us on today are truly impressive.

Sabrina Merage Naim
You're so right. And I think the real heart of the story is Nassrine's commitment to be true to herself, to define her life on her own terms, which is something that women everywhere wrestle with. We can't wait for you all to hear this conversation. Nassrine, thank you so much for being here.

Nassrine Azimi
Thank you, Sabrina. And thank you Kassia. I'm very happy to be here. It's the first podcast of this nature that I've ever done. And I wouldn't have wanted to do it for people other than you. So very happy to be here, even from Hiroshima.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So Nassrine, I've known you my whole life, you are one of my mother's closest friends and share memories with her back to your grade school days in Iran. I've always looked up to you as a mentor and a model for how one woman can have such a global footprint. You are a published author, a visiting professor, a New York Times contributor, and your diverse history and global lens really highlights your evolution from an oppressive Middle Eastern society into a lifetime of social impact and education, and advocacy really. So today you are the senior adviser to UNITAR, our United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and a founder of an incredible project called Green legacy Hiroshima. But your story really starts as a young girl growing up in Iran before the 1979 revolution. Tell us about your childhood there.

Nassrine Azimi
Yes, that would be a wonderful starting point. I was born actually not in Tehran, but in the south. Very close to by what is today the Iraqi border near the Persian Gulf in the city of Ahvaz so I have very few recollections of Ahvaz itself. But I can reconstitute it in my mind, because of the happiness my parents had living there. It was becoming a prosperous city. I was born in 1959. So Iran has, you know, just gone through one disaster after another and occupation and loss and war. And somehow from the mid 50s, onwards, limping struggling, it was sort of moving in a direction that allowed a lot of people to, to imagine a better life, imagine education for their children imagine all sorts of things that were absent at the time my parents were born. My parents retained very beautiful memories of Ahvaz. It broke my heart a few years ago when I read that it was now listed as one of the most polluted cities, if not the most polluted large city in the world. I lived in Iran till the age of six. We moved very soon after my birth to Tehran. I do not have very fond memories of Tehran, I think my first beautiful memories of early childhood, were when we went to Pakistan. Pakistan suddenly opened very new horizons for me. We, my brother and I, were both born in a Muslim family. We attended, attended the convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi, which was at the time the capital of Pakistan. And I think this sudden shock of exposure to all these differences was already Pakistan, which was very different from Iran. And the language was different, the culture was different. And then in the middle of that, being plunged into an Irish sisters school and being exposed to English for the first time, being exposed to Christianity for the first time, that was really, I think, transformative for my six year old person.

Kassia Binkowski
You've had an incredibly global upbringing, or at least kind of a global lens. From a very early age.

Nassrine Azimi
I guess so. I think the I would say, both my strengths and vulnerabilities come from the fact that I was exposed so young, to such differences of people and environments. The good side of it is that you could leave me anywhere, and I'll probably manage to find some beauty and depth.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That sounds like such a strength to me, why vulnerability?

Nassrine Azimi
Because it means that nowhere do I really have roots. So you need to balance that I think were now in '61. And where the bits and pieces are being reconciled is that you can be what in Persian poetry, you know, we refer often to the reed. And this idea of the floating reed is very powerful in Persian poetry, because Iran was a country forever occupied and figuring wars and occupation, so people had sort of gotten used to moving around. And this concept of being floating reed is very powerful, I think, in our psyche. The weakness of that is that you're forever alien. And my, I think, where the bits and pieces are coming together is that I feel comfortable with being alien, and yet being citizen everywhere, in so far as I can have some depth and understanding. In other words, the idea of - I really don't like this idea of a global citizen. But I think I feel comfortable with being a human being trying to understand even if not grow roots everywhere. So in that sense, you know, from the age of six, I've had to figure out how deep of roots do I need to take my place here? And where is it okay to just breeze through?

Sabrina Merage Naim
I would say have a pretty unique story with your upbringing. It's not so often that you hear of young girls in their families moving from Iran to Pakistan and back and having that, like Kassia said, that global lens. And when you came back, you were now in a Jewish school, is that correct?

Nassrine Azimi
When we came back, I spent two years the last two years of elementary school, which in Iran was about six years, was then six years. And they were some of the most miserable other than the revolution years. Those two years were very difficult because precisely because, you know, we had so much oxygen. In Pakistan, there was such diversity we were exposed to so much. And usually the option for Iranians who came back were either to go to full fledged Iranian Persian, Iranian academic school, typical academi, school or go to the American school, the British School of Tehran or the international school which you in a sense, you had to sacrifice your mother tongue. And the first two years, my parents wanting us to be comfortable with our language of birth, had us go to regular Iranian schools, and they were very difficult for us. Because, you know, we were bullied, we were at that point, I was better in English than in Persian. That was very difficult. And so by the beginning of high school, I was very, I started school early. So I was just about 11. My parents opted to send us to the Jewish school of Tehran, which had the particular advantage of having the regular Iranian curriculum. And it also had a very strong English Program.

Kassia Binkowski
You've got now Jewish school in your background, you've got Catholic school from Pakistan, your family, correct me if I'm wrong is Muslim. Your family is clearly had a huge influence on you. And it's just a beautiful intersection of cultures and exposures in your childhood. Your dad had a real kind of "serve the world" ethos, is that right?

Nassrine Azimi
I think my parents, the decisions they made really opened up worlds that would not have happened otherwise. And when my father was asked that, "Why would you send your children to the Jewish school?" his response was, "Why not? Forever you know, those two words, is that, "Why? Why would it be an issue?" And again, maybe Sabrina knows from her family's story. This was not so obvious in there, even in the early 70s. Though, progress was being made in the late 60s, early 70s. It was not an obvious choice. But that decision made for maybe the happiest years of my schooling, maybe some of the happiest years of my life. Because it wasn't just that I went into a Jewish school. It was that being in a Jewish school, I got to know a different kind of Iran, I would say the real Iran. Because I had classmates who were Zoroastrian, Armenian, Assyrian, Bahai. We were just the few. I mean, I think we were two Muslims, one a Assyrian, and the majority were Jewish. But it exposed us to what we could be. And that was really very beautiful for me, definitely.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That I think is such an indication, even at an early age of the formative years, that paves the way for a lifetime of diversity, of travel, of global exposure. And I want to ask you about a story that you told me when you were walking with your family, with your father as a young girl and your brother was going away to school leaving the country. And you were challenging him on why you couldn't go because you were a girl. What did he say?

Nassrine Azimi
Usually people sent their kids abroad, mostly sons. It was rare that the girls were sent abroad. And so it became very clear by the last year of high school of my brother, who was two years ahead of me that he would not be able to pass the Konkour. He had to be sent abroad and plans were being made for him. And I recall vividly - this is, I think, the story I shared with you - I usually walked with my dad, he was a very strong walker, and he would just be very steady, I would jumping around and I was talking to him. And he was telling me that my brother would be going to the US, but I would have probably no problem whatsoever to get into my first university of choice. And so whatever the plans were, I should prepare in two, three years to take the Konkour and enter the university I wanted to in Iran. And I remember I said, I really I was longing to go off to fly, because that is what you wanted to do when you were 15 or 16. And I, and I paused and I told my dad, "That seems so unfair, because I've been such a good student all my life, and I've been working so hard, and as a result, you're not allowing me to go but allowing my brother to go to the US." And he practically stopped in his tracks. And, you know, he I saw him actually taking this information in. And he said, "You know, you're right. It's not fair." Because I'd said, you know, it's not fair. And he said, "Yeah, it's not fair. So, okay. You too, can go."

Sabrina Merage Naim
So let's paint a picture for a minute. Because this maybe for some of our listeners may sound like a small thing, but it's actually quite remarkable. Iran at the time, pre-revolutionary Iran was a relatively modern country, but still quite patriarchal. The son was very much the head of the family, the hopes and the dreams, and had much more freedom. And there were were more dreams and ambitions that were put on the sons than on the daughters at the time. That is certainly true. Now, post-revolutionary Iran is much more stringent, much more patriarchal, religiously focused, and women have even less rights today than they did back then. And there's much more oppression against women today than there was even back then. But I think that it's important to note that this one conversation that you had with your father, where he took in that information, and acknowledged the imbalance of it, right, how unfair it was - that paved the way for your entire life trajectory, really. And to have a family that was so supportive of you and elevated you and your dreams and your ambitions and a similar way that they would for your brother, I think is is something that should not go on noticed in this conversation that it really was a catalyst for you to then be the strong, independent, ambitious go getter that you are today. Very much founded in conversations like that. Do you agree with that?

Nassrine Azimi
Definitely, I think I. I also need to paint a picture of precisely this pre-revolution, pre-1979 Iran. In that it had problems obviously, many problems still. But it had incredible qualities that have been lost. And one of them was it was a place of hope. In other words, when I look at my extended family, five brothers on my father's side, eight siblings on my mother's side - with some differences, everybody was headed in a better direction, in the sense that for the most part, all my female cousins were going to school. For the most part, many of my female cousins my age and younger, and maybe even one older, could even contemplate college. Now maybe they couldn't contemplate college abroad or any college, but that says a lot about how Iran has changed in just, you know, less than one generation. And I would really say that this extended family, it was decidedly middle class. So it wasn't a unique family. It wasn't a special kind of family. It was a sort of very mixed kind of family. And it says a lot about Iran, then that there was this place of progress. And the other thing was, there was a certain openness because people had been confined or constrained for so many decades - I'd say for so many centuries - there was this open mindedness that okay, we could maybe do it differently. And definitely, I would say, my parents were open to that. So yes, I think I owe everything to my parents. In so many ways in the beginning, one is always rebelling against one's parents, if they had done this, if they had understood that if I had done this. But clearly, knowingly or unknowingly, they made decisions that have changed my life for the better.

Kassia Binkowski
So you left, you know, briefly before the revolution and and after leaving Iran, you've clearly lived and traveled all over the world. Looking back at this lifetime of travel, which pieces of which cultures have you really held on to which have really shaped your own identity as a woman? Your own kind of definition of womanhood specifically? I guess I'm curious, what are you a mix of having had such a global life?

Nassrine Azimi
That's a very good question. I wish I knew if you find it. Um, I would say, I'm very thankful, again, to the Persian language, which I could keep, again, maybe, thanks to my father. He was a soldier poet, his mastery of Persian poetry was unbelievable. And had it not been for his love of Persian poetry I wouldn't have mastered the language. So I would probably have lost a very large part of my culture. I, thanks to that, I could hang on to really being deeply Iranian. And I can say, because I went there - it was the first time I was living alone - Switzerland, also deeply marked me. So I would say, my, I feel much more European than anything else. But European in a very broad sense in that European, a Swiss of Iranian descent and in Iranian roots.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So let's rewind for a minute, because you have said to me and Kassia, that your upbringing was, the thought was always move west, move west, move west. So you were in Iran and Pakistan, in Turkey, you move to Switzerland, you move to the United States. And now for the last 16 years, you've been living in Hiroshima, Japan. And what I want to understand from you is the dichotomy between the country of your birth, which, as we've mentioned, is a patriarchal society that does not put the woman first, right? And the country that you live in now, which puts a lot of pressure on women. Tell me a little bit about the dichotomy of that experience for you as, as a woman of the world as someone who has come from a lot of different places, who has seen cultures and what women have had to go through to get ahead to succeed to, you know, to get there, what has that been like to see the dichotomy from one country to the other?

Nassrine Azimi
Japan, both as a woman and a person who has lived all over the world, Japan has been the most fascinating is still the most fascinating experience. Because it is both so close. It's an Asian country. So you would think that I would feel most at home here. And in some sense, I do. And it's the most different of anything I I have known in my life, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Switzerland in the US. I had visited Japan before as a tourist and when it was decided that I would come and live and work here everyone told me "As a woman, as a foreigner, you will really learn to dislike it because the more you see the real face, not the face of the beautiful tourist Japan but the deeper face of Japan, the more you will realize how difficult it is for women and for foreigners to integrate." And, truth be told, quite the reverse has happened in that the more I have known Japan - warts and all - the more I've appreciated it.

Kassia Binkowski
You once said that Hiroshima sets the bar higher than just one life that there is no perfection. I mean, is that a product of this kind of sordid history that the country has endured that you just alluded to? Where does that come from?

Nassrine Azimi
I think for Hiroshima, Nagasaki, it comes from a very specific place, which is, how do you revive after you have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon? You know, it wasn't just the 66 cities in Japan were carpet bombed at the end of World War II in 1945, just in three months. Tokyo in one night had more than 100,000 people killed in the bombings by the US Air Force. But Hiroshima, Nagasaki didn't have to deal just with this catastrophic destruction, they actually had to deal with the aftermath, because nobody knew what radioactive disease was. And so for months, actually, there was talk not to rebuild Hiroshima here, because people were just dying off. And the way they dealt with it, there are three themes that run through Hiroshima: Never again. So to turn this experience into something that does not happen. They try to transcend their own suffering. The second one is moving from a military city because Hiroshima was a military city people forget it often, moving from a military city to a city now recognized all over the world as a city of peace. And the third experience was reaching out to spreading the message. So in so many ways, I think watching Hiroshima for me has been, "Okay, how do I just not tell my singular story of a woman, Iranian Swiss American, now living in Japan, a Muslim raised in Catholic and Jewish schools, and now aspiring towards Buddhism and Shintoism. But rather, "What can I as a human being, do to make this one life useful?" I think, thanks to my father, who somehow seemed not to differentiate between his daughters and his son. So on a micro level, thanks to that spirit and my mother supporting that. And maybe thanks to the exposure to my work around the world, to my work with environmental issues, which are absolutely common heritage, and then being exposed to Hiroshima, of raising the bar. It's not just about one person, it's so much beyond one person and trying to sort of meet that aspiration. I think that has helped me, in a sense, direct my activism because my activism has been the most important component of the last 10 years of my life. And to some extent, my teaching and my writing, in a new direction, not just as a woman, but really, as someone without roots but part of this world. How can I make myself useful? And how can I make this matter that I always owe to Hiroshima and to Nagasaki, of course, because it's just as important.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Your life has been a beautiful portrait of, of independence and of aspiration. You have worked for the UN and specifically UNITAR or for a majority of your career. You're a writer, you have published books and articles, you have created your own foundations. You are a professor, you are also an independent woman who was married and then divorced. You have not had children. You've traveled the world without a partner. And we're curious, how is this life different than what you expected for yourself?

Nassrine Azimi
I had no reason to choose the life I chose. Because I could have had, I think, a very beautiful life with a very beautiful family and in Switzerland and still do many things. Because my ex-husband was both very open minded, himself and very adventurous, and well off that we could basically do what we wanted. So what made this sort of not very experienced 28 year old that I was, despite myself, packing my life in two suitcases, and heading off to Geneva, to embrace a career and, and a different life. I honestly, Sabrina and Kassia, if I if I could explain reasons I would. Other than that I had to make my path on my own. And in fact, the very rootedness of my husband simply made me feel how uprooted I had become, so that I had to reconstitute myself in a different way. And my work, I never really called it a career. In the sense we give to it now, this calling this work was what would be the dominant theme in my life. And obviously, in a way, thanks to this choice, I could really build very powerful programs with UNITAR in Geneva, then open and head, the unit, our office in New York. I loved working and living in New York, it was fantastic. And then the highest honor, because of what Hiroshima stands for, of opening and directing for six years, the first UN Office in Hiroshima. I stayed, I mean, rationally, one can say and argue, oh, you could have stayed and been married and had a family life, and done all these things. And there are women who've done that. I couldn't. And I think there was a feeling that maybe not explicit, but that I had to make a choice. And I will say to you that my father - who had been forgiving of all my foibles and failures and requests - when I left my husband, because my parents really loved my ex-husband, and I loved his parents and his family. But when I informed my parents that I was leaving, it was the only time I saw them both cry, and my father didn't talk to me for nine months. So I think it was the one time I broke his heart, that is to say, how serious a decision it was. And that when life somehow pushes you to make these decisions, it may well be that it is the only choice you have.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think it's so important to acknowledge that your experience between you and your ex-husband, and then your family's response to that is so indicative of what women around the world face also culturally and familiarly, which is that we are kind of expected to put our spouses and our families first before our career aspirations, before ourselves, before even oftentimes our mental and emotional health. And I think that what we're seeing here is you decided that you needed a different path, you needed to take a different path that has led you now to what you feel was the right path for you. And now looking back so many years, you know, even having love for this person and your family who loved this person. This was the right thing for you and hopefully for him and look what you've created. You have now blossomed into a very accomplished woman who has done so much for the world and for now, Japan and I think it's really important to just acknowledge that that was the hard road to take. That was the more challenging road even with such a supportive father as you had that he was so frustrated with the decision that you made, but it was the decision that you needed to make for yourself.

Nassrine Azimi
I think that's the right word "needed." It's not as if I had other options at the time. It really felt I needed to do it this way. And I did it really screaming and crying and resisting. It's not that I joyfully jumped into this life of freedom. But it has been tremendous.

Kassia Binkowski
No, it's so clear from where we sit and listening to you reflect that they were all the right decisions for you. And I think the lives of so many brilliant and powerful women are riddled with these hard decisions. You left Iran over 40 years ago, you've had such a rich, professional and personal life in that time. I'm curious, what is it that you wish for the next generation of women?

Nassrine Azimi
I always make the time to teach and now is particularly precious because I teach in Kyoto at a woman's college. We have this idea of you know, Japanese woman as being weak. I can tell you, Japanese woman are incredibly strong. The Japanese women are the finance ministers in their families, they run the education of their children. The young generation is incredibly ambitious, albeit still confined to this idea of perfection. And I think that my job is to tell these very strong Japanese woman who can so easily combine their femininity, their delicacy with the sort of resilience and talk about go getter, a doggedness, never giving up - I want to tell them to be more ambitious.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Breaking Glass is a production of Evoke Media. Evoke is a nonprofit organization that exists in order to elevate the people and stories that are working to make the world a more unified and equitable place. Learn more at weareevokemedia.com