After 25 years
Part 1
July 14, 2004
iranian.com
Returning to Iran after twenty-five years may best
be compared to a bout of manic-depressive disorder. One moment
the highs of sheer elation, followed by the depths of utter despair.
I had tried to unload the emotional burden of memories of the past,
and discard the prejudice of a person whose life, house and name,
and even the grave of a husband who died young (five years before
the revolution broke out), had been confiscated and dragged into
the mire of revolutionary excess.
Throughout the ordeals, my love
for my language and culture had not been affected at all, Nor my
faith in my people diminished by an ugly passing phase, such as
many other countries in the old world had known time and again,
and one that might ultimately be edifying enough to rid the nation
of the stultification of patterns of thought.
Major transitions are never easy, and often imply a regression
of sorts and ours was the damned generation who had had to pay
the high price before another Iran could reemerge from the cinder
heaps left by revolution, ignorance, war, corruption, abuse, intrigue,
and a host of ills so widely and gleefully and at times a little
unjustly brandished in the Western media.
Siavush's ordeal
of fire might yet engender Kei-Khosro, who, this time around, would
manifest himself, not as a king but as the very nation iself at
the grassroots level, with its feet firmly rooted in its own traditions
but looking with confidence to a long overdue evolution imposed
neither from above, nor from outside.
I had kept up as much as
possible with events and was beginning to feel that the evolution
was beginning to make itself felt. I often felt dismayed that Westerners,
nourished by biassed accounts, should view us as a kind of Saudi
Arabia.
What extremes of absurdity such views of Iran and Iranians could
reach hit me hard in the taxi on the way to the airport, as the
driver remarked about my impending flight to Tehran, 'You
will be hot in that coat' (I had chosen a shapeless black
overcoat for this first visit back). 'It has been snowing
in the mountains to the north of Tehran', I tried to explain,
but the image of snow did not fit in well with cliché images
of 'Middle Eastern' Iran. The 'Middle East' (which
now has no Far and no Near and changes its meaning according to
the needs of realpolitik) conjured up images of desert sands, fanatics,
oil rigs and sheikhs who rob a hardworking driver of his meagre
earnings.
When I told him that my house had been confiscated, he
asked where I would stay. With my mother, I said, in a two-story
house, now crushed between a pair of highrises of the kind the
new regime equates with modern progress (even the Shah had expressed
his desire to fly his helicopter over a landscape of highrise
buildings). And what does she do with her life over there? At ninety,
I said,
she supervises her father's endowment (the Malek Library)
and receives an increasing number of scholars coming from abroad
to study the manuscripts and coins.
High-rises in Iran? Snowy mountains? Working women and Western
scholars? Two-thousand year-old coins? It was too much for him.
His universe of knowledge was falling apart, and he was reluctant
to believe. He put me to the test and thought he was right on
target by asking me about religion. Are you a believer? He was
hoping
to hear an affirmative that would allow him to follow up with
a discourse about fanatics. Well, hardly, I replied. He almost
had
a fit, so strong is the impact of the media on minds fallen into
the lethargy of what I have named 'the vacation syndrome' which,
in the case of the United States, might be better termed 'the
eternal shopping syndrome'. Either way, the result is that
the brain is benumbed by creature comforts, and shuts off everything
save the half-digested reports of the media news.
The 'vacation
syndrome' leaves no room for nuances, nor for the subtleties
that transcend simplification; nor does it give due to the
idiosyncrasies shaped over millennia from a wide range of very
different sources.
So they lump us together, because of Islam and oil politics,
with strange bedfellows, few of whom have much in common with
us in
terms of character, customs, language, history or any of the
habitual markers that distinguish a nation with a sense of identity
as strong
as our own. That identity has indeed remained strong, as I
was to find out, regardless of the fact that foreign intrigues
are
chipping away at its vulnerable edge.
As I advanced through the lounge at Mehrabad airport, I was
struck at first sight by the unsightly bands of Koranic script
framed
in bright red and green. The workmanship was bad and the script
was devoid of the elegance of the work of Persian calligraphers
who had carried the art to heights unequalled anywhere else
in the Islamic world. If the people who run the country today
cannot
even produce a better example of calligraphic art, not even
for the Koran on the basis of which they claim to derive their
legitimacy,
I could only expect the worst.
I had heard and read much about
the ugliness and kitsch of Tehran, and was happy that at night
I would not see much. But as soon as I had passed the checkpoints
and come into contact with the people, I knew I was home. I had
travelled a lot in these twenty-five years, but the place where
I landed, despite the ugliness, was its own special self. Naturally
I had found reminders in places like in Central Asia, in the
pre-Taliban Afghanistan as well as in eastern Turkey, though
less in the so-called 'Middle
East' to which we are supposed to belong. This was Iran and
these my people, like no other I knew (no value judgment
meant).
The next morning, the morning of Nowruz, I woke up to fluffy
snowflakes falling all over the little garden patch still
miraculously left
in my mother's possession. I wished I could have sent a
postcard of that scene to the taxi driver. The majestic snow-covered
Alborz mountains rose above the city, fully visible thanks
to the exodus
of the Nowruz period. The Haft-Sin was ready to receive
visitors
who came bearing bouquets whose flower arrangements would
have made a Parisian flowershop proud.
And they all used
the ta'arof
formulae I liked - with moderation. Nor was that restricted
to our guests alone, as I was to find on my first venture
out into the streets of Tehran. The populist speech that
had favoured
addressing
women as madar or khahar had vanished
with the Mojaheddin, and neither will be missed. The
Persian language, with
its range
of nuanced refinements and courteous formulae, its subtle
metaphors and delicate humour, and its singing poetry
was very much alive.
But the names of the streets were alien to me.
I had been warned that the people had become very hard,
but my stay was perhaps too short to encounter that
unfortunaate trait.
If anything, I found the people to have improved -
more educated
(a better than 90% literacy rate is as high as it gets,
even though quality has suffered apace), more aware
of the world
(with some
misconceptions, but much less than the West has about
Iran), lively and curious, talkative, subtle, inventive
with words,
and able
to joke, not the silly gratuitous jokes that were common
before, but pointed ones focussing on the present regime
and its incompetent
staff.
The capacity to joke, the subtle humour, which
Iranians have developed into an art, has allowed
the nation to defy
adversity again and again. Maybe Nowruz had something
to do with the general
mood, especially in a year, when, although coiniciding
with the two Shiite months of mourning of Moharram
and Safar,
the more
cherished feast of Nowruz had been officially acknowledged
by the mayor of
Tehran, who had sponsored bonfires for Charshanbeh Suri.  By Sizdah
Bedar, with everyone picnicking on patches of green where the
snowflakes had thawed to showi fruit blossoms on branches beginning
to come
back to life, one could hardly believe that this was a land sandwiched
between two benighted countries. No wonder many of the two million
Afghan refugees, including many Pashtuns, refuse to go home.
(In fact, they are the ones who do the hard work, much as the immigrants
in Western countries, except that they have no language problem).
If ever there had been a dream of America saving Iran,
it had vanished
as surely as the century-old planes and cypresses that had
graced the gardens and streets of Tehran and many other
cities of the
Iranian plateau >>> Part
2
Author
Fatema Soudavar Farmanfarmaian was born in Tehran in 1940 and
studied in Iran and Switzerland. In Iran she was on the committe
of a number of organizations, including the Museum of Modern Art
and the Women's University. She also did volunteer work for the
Deparment of the Environment, where she planned education for schools
and TV on environmental subjects. Since the Revolution she has been
focusing on research and writing. Her latest appeared in The
Journal of the Society for Iranian Studies (Summer/Fall 2000)
called "Haft Qalam Arayish: Cosmetics int he Iranian World".
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