msabaye

A summer in my childhood, my sister took me to Ramsar Camp. I had very little to exposure to people outside my family and neighbourhood in Tehran, and seeing tall, tanned, young men from Sistan and Baluchistan, young men and women with light colours of hair and skin from Hamedan and ... so many different features was quite an experience.

One day, I ran into something that caught my attention: a performance of Zar by young boys and girls from Bushehr. I had never seen anything like it. I never saw anything like it for years to come. The experience stayed with me until, during my PhD program at University of Toronto, I became friends with a student from Sudan. One day, while she was talking about her homeland, she mentioned Zar. I thought I heard her wrong. Then she explained, and to my astonishment, it seemed very similar to what I had observed many years before in that summer camp.  

This encounter set me on a path of exploration and research in southern Iran. The result is a series of articles, essays, multi-media productions (//jadidonline.com/story/22052009/frnk/zaar_ritual"), and a book that was just published.

Cover by Ghazal Razavi