Iran Writes at the Bayridge Peace Fair

Iran Writes appears at 27 minutes 40 seconds. For the rest, click on the link immediately below:

Saturday, October 27, 2007 peace fair sponsored by Brooklyn for Peace in Bay Ridge.
Nasrin (visiting Iraqi teacher): 0-6:10

Wallace of Peaceful Tomorrows: 6:25-16:38

Raging Grannies: 6:51-23:15

Granny Peace Brigade: 23:15-27:33

Mina Zand Siegel: 27:40-48:40

Share International (Maitraya): 48:41-56:55
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Jimmy Carter: The Man from Plains

I still remember the January 1976 when President Carter gave his inauguration speech. I was student then and living in International House. I watched on television him with a few other Iranian students in the little pub in our dormitory. I think, although we were all there on student visas, we were more excited than our American friends. We Iranians were the only foreigners who cut our classes just to listen to the speech. We were excited and hopeful. The changes we had long anticipated might occur at last. He ran on the human rights ticket and we knew Iran was the target. Our generation considered itself a legitimate heir to the fruit of fifty years of struggle for which the previous generations had paid a heavy and dear price. For us, President Carter was a means to that end.

Last weekend, in the Angelika Film Center in SoHo, I and my old friend Cyrus, who, incidentally, was with me that January day in International House, saw the film

on Jimmy Carter’s life after his presidency.

It was nostalgic, too nostalgic. Our hopes are gone, the revolution went completely off course, our homeland is not an “island of stability,” our history is rewritten for us as if we never existed among the civilizations, we are portrait to the world as terrorists and even barbarians, we do not enjoy full human rights even in this country as US citizens, and above all, all our youthful energy and cheerfulness has turned gray.

That day I was standing at the entrance of the pub and, while listening to the speech, hundreds of pictures formed in my mind. I fancied our future life. I thought about democracy, about going back home, teaching in Jundi Shapur University in Ahvaz, living on a collective farm with my students, teaching Medieval Iran, and cramming over the Shahnameh. What I did not dream of was that I would still be here twenty-seven years later still waiting to see what the “presidents” have up their sleeves for Iran, that I would still be here after twenty seven years going to hear what President Carter had to say, although it does not matter anymore. This time I am mature enough to know that even if he would have been president, it would not matter very much; there is a world apart between what the politicians say and what they mean. This time I have learned there is a phenomenon called hypocrisy which masks itself as pragmatism.

The film focused on only one aspect of President Carter’s life, his Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid, which he published in 2006 and for which he was criticized harshly. After the book was published, it soon became a bestseller and Carter very candidly appeared on radio, television, and university campuses to answer the questions. It was interesting to know that the majority of questions objected the use of the word “apartheid.” The objections were not as to the unfairness of the labeling Israel with such a derogatory term as much to the one-sidedness of the argument. The protesters, ranged from Harvard scholars to university students, who thought that President Carter had ignored the suicide bombers. One would wonder if apartheid would be justified if it happened as retaliation. Oddly enough, Carter did not bring up the issue, nor he did not bring up the issue of fair punishment. (He used that argument for the Iraq war). Nor did he not bring up the unequal war either, though he simply said, “I’m not talking about Israel, I’m talking about Palestine which is under the apartheid by definition.” He did however, say that the situation the Palestinian live under is a total violation of human rights and in many cases is worse that South Africa under the apartheid.

There was one question regarding his failure to get the hostages in Iran released. An interviewer asked why he did not use military forceful (e.g., did not bomb Iran) to that end. To that question he answered “Yes, I could have used stronger force, but in that case not only would the hostages have been killed, but thousands of innocent Iranian as well; I did not use a military attack and the hostages were ultimately back home safe and Iran did not get destroyed.”

While in both cases the answers were convincing enough, there remains the fact that these questions indicated a pattern of contemporary American thought: “Lets destroy at any costs whatever comes between us and our interests.” What amazes me was not the callousness of the ordinary people to demand a thing, as much as President Carter, who is considered as a champions of peace and human rights and indeed a Nobel Laureate, not to see that that is the kind of mentality which produces apartheid and which causes the human rights to be dismissed. Even a superficial glance at the cases in which human rights are violated tells us that it took place just to secure some party’s interests in its powerful position. Once again, President Carter, just as when he was in the White House, failed to address the issue, since his commitment to human rights is more likely along the same lines as when he was in the White House, just to mask his real intention: to Islamize Iran to prevent the spread of Communism. I hope we should not wait long to find out what is behind this mask. For sure peace is not the main issue, or else he would have brought up its basic and primary hindrances: selfishness.

After the movie we went for dinner, where my husband, Evan, joined us. Cyrus was uncharacteristically in complete disagreement with me. He even accused me lining up with the monarchists in my position on Carter, when I reminded him how of his New Year trip to Iran and his famous toast to Shah and Empress Farah: “To you, Your Majesty, and your beautiful country, an island of stability,” just a few months before the revolution. Cyrus, agreeing with my husband, thought that President Carter did not know about the situation. Did I believe the President of the United States, which brought Shah to power and stayed on top of everything since 1953 did not know that such an uprising was taking place? Was it a failure of CIA in collecting the information or a lack of cooperation between the White House and the CIA or the chaos in the political apparatus of the country? Our heated discussion ended well. Cyrus, dropping the charge of being a monarchist, thought I was being idealistic, which I am, and said I should be pragmatic, which I won’t be. My husband took his side and thought things had gotten out of hand, and maybe he was right. In our way home, when there was no Cyrus around to place me in such a minority, he could not come up with a good answer as to what about now. Are things out of hand? Could he not tell those students in Brandeis University, “Guys, wake up! We do not, and we should not, have the right to bomb a country for some finite number of people being taken hostage. We have a responsibility far greater than that. We have to maintain peace, which would never be achieved if we acted upon our whims and our likes and dislikes and relied on brute force. I have a Nobel Peace Prize!”

At home the sense of nostalgia was too overwhelming to be pushed back. What if when he was president he had been as candid as he was being now? What if he had not listened to his team of advisors? What if he had not thought it wise to support the religious fanatics to take over the most secular country in the region? What if he had have been more courageous and really pushed for human rights and have pushed Shah for a real change and elections rather than resorting to deception?

However, there was one good thing: the last question, from a Brandeis student, was, “What should we do to get peace in the Middle East?” “Well, form a committee of ten, with some of your faculty among them, and go there for yourself and see it for yourself, and judge it for yourself.” At least he gives a little credit to knowledge as essential to achieving peace. I am grateful for that.

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Independent Films on Iran: Religion and Politics at a Nonreligious and Nonpolitical Event

Bahman Maghsooudlou welcomed a whole crowed to the Asia Society-sponsored International Short Film Festival: Independent Films on Iran. The Ziba Foundation’s Nina Ghavami, the organizer, emphasized the festival’s non-religious and non-political character.

I’m sure that the amount of work involved in organizing this festival could not have left any time for the organizers to contemplate what would be considered religious or political. The spheres of religion and politics has become such a frightening realm that every organization runs from them. This is so widespread that not only is their meaning lost, but their effect as well.

The first program, “Art and Culture,” was indeed more religious than one might have expected. Five films in this section had a heavy religious tone, even if we call it culture. This was sufficient enough to puzzle at least our non-Iranian audience as to what it meant for the festival to be non-religious, and this aside from the emblem of the festival being a pair of farahvashi wings!

However, religious sentiment was not celebrated, but mourned with a grim, nostalgic eulogy for the death of religion. Almost all of the films either concerned pre-Islamic arts or Zoroastrianism’s tenets, with the exception of one Safavid Mosque. In all these films, religious sentiment was tied with the life and history as inseparable. The most noticeable in this category was The Persian Tree, the saga of Zarathustra. At the opening scene, a bird is bathing in the river with flowers floating over, when we hear a hymn from that Gathas on Vahoumana’s appearing to the prophet to lead him into Ahura Mazda’s presence to receive his mission. The seed of life which is sown in our land and has sprouted has gone through a lot, resisted much, and has spread far and wide is nothing other than our age-old Zoroastrian culture manifested in the form of large palm trees in Kashmar, reputed to be thousands of years old. The film maker had not written a hymn of celebration but a dirge; and the closing scene of the dead body of a bird in the polluted dirty river was an undignified funeral for what is not needed any more. Our Good Religion, as well as its God, was presented as dead; its livelihood, which is the function of practicing both its meaning and its rituals, was replaced only with a sense of nostalgia. It is indeed true, and could be said very safely, that what is left of that wonderful religion is the same several thousand years old tree of Iran every shred of which we now hang onto, even if it means tying a tiny piece of cloth to its withered branches.

The second day’s films were highly political indeed, though some films deliberately declared that they were “not political.” Well, “A rose by any name smells as sweet.”

Two films in this section very well illustrate the blend of politics with life. Alireza Darvish’s Foot Steps of Water, echoing Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem of the same title. The film was a very personal experience of Darvish, who left the country as a political refugee, and in his transmigration he notices that he had to change his symbolism from the dry land language to that of the seashore. He learns the universal medium of the books and words and, in his case, the brushes and paints he depicts the life with. His messages are nothing if not political; it is about the freedom and expressing it, freedom and sharing it, freedom and treasuring it, freedom and spreading it, freedom and guarding it, all through the single medium of animated paintings. Darvish, while very consciously portraying his innermost world, his thoughts, and his experiences, describes an undeniable universal message which transcends the borders of time and locality. While trying to avoid politics, his message is nothing but political; secular as he is, he is like a monk piously worshipping while his wife and three children stand by his side smiling.

The other film in this series was Underneath My Father’s House. Two years after the Islamic Revolution, a leftist intellectual, who does not have the heart to burn his books and newspapers, buries them underground in his father’s old house. After twenty years, in 2001, he returns to find that what he did not have the heart to do, nature and time had done for him. The books were corroded underground and had turned into a mound of rubbish. While the camera was showing the salvaged pieces of newspaper and pamphlets, I could see it was all leftist pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers; all standard of what we call “political” has turned into rubbish. Oddly enough, the professor goes to the post office and receives bundles of books shipped to him from Iran, all of them classical Iranian literature newly published in fancy hardcover editions, the mystical poets Hafez and Rumi among them. While the standard obvious “politics” disappear, true politics persists and carries on indeed.

On the opening night, I talked to Hafez Nazeri about their next performance in the Carnegie Hall. “Next year,” he said, as if it were tomorrow. “Of course it is tomorrow because he is so passionate about his work,” I thought. While talking about peace, politics, and art, and their interconnections, he said, to my surprise, “I’m not political, but Rumi is political. One cannot sing his poetry without feeling political.” Hearing a young artist who is trying to mix traditional music, something which he has inherited from a master-father, with modern western music, talk about “Rumi and politics” and “feeling political” was a testimony sent to me from heaven; yes we can, yes we do, yes we will, and yes we will succeed in bringing life to a unified circle. The statement, had it come from an authority, could not have excited me as much as an unpremeditated and spontaneous expression of an artists who is no authority and has no claim over a giant like Rumi. It was just coming from him which made it a testimony to the truth which I appeal to.

I would not be surprised if the director or the screen writer of The Persian Tree wanted to celebrate the persistence of the Good Religion in our present life. I have no doubt that Darvish may not have wanted to sound so pious, nor do I doubt that the director of Underneath My Father’s House wanted to arouse the audience’s sympathy. However, they had the opposite effect on me. While they all focused on their points of view, some of us peeked through different windows to observe their intended objects. Thus is the world according to our prism-shape looking glass.

Religion as an act of devotion could manifest itself in art or in human services. Politics as a governing skill could be applied to small organization, even one consisting of a single person. Picking up a piece of garbage from the street could be done with one of the above or both intentions. Similarly, holding an arts festival could be motivated by either one of these intentions. (I personally categorize true artists, literary writers, clerics, and journalists as holy people who devote their lives without gaining any material reward.) While religion and politics, in their narrow sense, can be mutually exclusive, their broader meaning does not allow such restrictions. By emphasizing this kind of exclusion, we are either saying something trivial (that the film festival is not a new sect of religion or political party) or we are saying something which is not true. In either case, it is no less hypocritical than the Islamic Republic’s piety.

Let us be done with this non-religious, non-political labeling. Let us be religious, since we all are, and let us be political, since we all are, let us be truthful to ourselves and more important to each other, since many of us are not.

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Poets and Pahlevans

Salaam.

My name is Marcello Di Cintio and I am a writer based in Calgary, Canada. My latest book, Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran, chronicles my travels to Iran in 2003 and 2004. I would like to thank Mina for inviting me to be a guest on this blog and giving me the opportunity to share some of my Iranian experiences with her readers.



The purpose of my travels to Iran was to seek out two distinct ‘phenomena’ of Iranian culture. The first is the Iranian love of poetry. After reading about the great Persian poets and how they are revered by Iranians, I decided to make my own ‘pilgrimages’ to these poets’ tombs. My second focus was on traditional Persian wrestling. As a retired wrestler myself – I have the scarred ears to prove it – I was interested in the ancient wrestling forms that were practiced in the rural areas of Iran. I resolved to seek out these styles, if they still existed, as I traveled in Iran. Fortunately, for both myself and my publisher, I was successful in both pursuits.

I spent four and a half months in Iran altogether; six weeks in the summer of 2003 and another two months the following autumn. In that time I managed to travel through much of the country. I spent a fair but of time in Iran’s big cities. I learned the pleasures of sipping tea under Esfahan’s bridges. I joined the devotees of Hafez in Shiraz and the pilgrims of Emam Reza in Mashhad. Most importantly, perhaps, I learned how to cross streets of the capital without dying. In fact, when people ask me if I ever was afraid in Iran – and they ask me this all the time – I say I was most afraid of being run down by the motorcycles that sped along the sidewalks of Tehran.

However, my dual focus of wrestling and poetry led me into some of the country’s lesser-visited regions. I found myself a guest at a Turkmani wedding in a village near the border with Turkmenistan. There I watched alish wrestlers fight in the dust for the entertainment of the groom. I found the tomb of poet Parvin E’tesami amid the splendor of Qom’s Hazerat-e Masumeh. I broke the Ramazan fast with a family in a desert oasis, and shared a funeral meal with mourners in the Zagros Mountains.

In Iran, I became fascinated by the concept of the pahlevan. The word is common throughout the Middle East and can mean, simply, ‘wrestling champion.’ In Iran, however, the pahlevan holds a special cachet. The pahlevan is not just a gifted athlete, but a good man. He is a community leader, a good father and husband, a person of great integrity and honour. He represents a sort of masculine ideal. The pahlevan has its origins in poetry, namely a first-century epic poem called Shahnomeh written by the great Persian poet, Ferdosi. (His tomb in Tus was the first poet’s tomb I visited) In Shahnomeh, great warriors fight over and over again for the survival, and glory, of Persia. These men are the archetypal pahlevans.

The idea of the pahlevan is, arguably, an old fashioned one, but I had the good-fortune to encounter modern-day pahlevans during my travels. I met an eighty year-old wrestler in a zurkhane, a sort of archaic wrestling gymnasium. The man told me about his successes as a wrestler and about his former feats of strength. He also told me that a revival of the pahlevan tradition could change Iran for the better. Then he removed his shirt to show me the tattoos on his arms and chest. They were characters from Shahnomeh. I saw poetry and wrestling collide in ink on this man’s flesh.

This was not the last time I would see the combination of wrestling and poetry, however. At the annual loucho championships near the Caspian Sea coast, poems were sung before the competition began. Some of the poems were indigenous to that region of Iran, but verses from the Shahnomeh were also sung. An announcer recited poems of the great local poet Makhtumgoli before wrestlers battled for the groom at the Turkmani wedding. Sung poetry inspired the ritual exercises of the men in the zurkhanes.

For Iranians, though, none of this would be unexpected. I learned early on that, in Iran, poetry is everywhere. Taxi drivers recited poetry to me as we navigated the clogged streets. In the Tabriz bazaar, a kebab vendor, his shirt translucent with grease, took a moment to write for me on a napkin verses about traveling from the Shirazi poet Sa’adi. I met a man who told me that when he was a sailor in the Shah’s navy he used to read Molanna every night aboard his ship.

My favourite ‘poetic’ moment, though, came in a small village in the Sabalan Mountains in northwestern Iran. An eleven year-old Azeri boy asked me to write something for him in English. I wrote my name, my age and where I was from on a scrap of paper. I translated it for him, then I asked him to write something for me in Farsi. He tore a page out of his mathematics workbook and wrote two lines:

Answer my pleas,
You who are the Friend of Love.

That scrap of paper is one of my most treasured souvenirs from Iran.

Poets and Pahlevans started out as a traveler’s exploration of two divergent facets of Iranian culture. The book ended up, unsurprisingly, as a 300-page love letter to the Iranian people. A reviewer in Canada said that the best parts of the book are not my discussions of poetry or wrestling at all, but the moments I spend with everyday Iranians. I would say that the best thing about Iran is the Iranians themselves. If this book succeeds in portraying this reality to its readers then it is, for me, a success.

I want to thank Mina again for allowing me to commandeer her blog. If anyone is interested, Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran is available at bookstores in Canada, and through Amazon.com everywhere.

Best regards,
Marcello Di Cintio

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My Day of Peace

Brooklyn for Peace invited me to give a short talk in a rally held in front of the Supreme Court in the Borough Hall in Brooklyn and at a Peace Fair in Bensonhurst, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. They were small gatherings, mostly middle aged, of peace activists, a few politicians, old commies, and some academics, and almost all the women’s peace groups. The absent of young people was striking and discouraging. In contrast to our country, where, since Constitutional movement of a hundred years ago, we never had any movements which had not been initiated by or tied to the younger generation and university students, it seems that in the United State the only time students became involved in the affairs of life was during the Vietnam War when there was a draft.

In my talk, I focused chiefly on how war is a desirable and marketable commodity in this country. An attractive packaging covers war’s ugliness and an exaggerated, vilified portrait of the enemy, who might have been friend just the day before, is usually enough to legitimize war and even wins over public opinion. I told the audience that I wanted them to would see the face of the enemy which is supposed to be bombed next.

My face.

I told them of the earliest memory I had from the same very government which is involved in two unfinished wars, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and now wants to start a third one.

When I was a child in Iran, we lived, with my parents, in a military camp which was the center for the army’s chemical industry. Parchin was a half hour drive from east of Tehran. It was located on the outskirts of the Alborz Mountains, and a river, Jajrood, ran along it. It had originally been built with the help of the Swedish government and was improved by Germans and then by British. By the time Iran was tied to the Americans, the base functioned self-sufficiently. Due to the sensitive nature of the activities there, the entry and exit were closely monitored and limited to the residents and their visitors.

One day, my father rushed home hurriedly, turned on the radio, and listened intensely. I was playing outside and followed him in, with the hope that he would pay a little attention to us now and then. He was so occupied with the news that he did not even notice me. I went outside and saw a few of our neighbors were practically running home. My mother arrived from summer school with my brothers and sister, almost everybody running. Apparently she had closed the school and had sent children home. All I knew was that something had happened, but I did not know what. Very soon, electricity was shut off, and as the air darkened, the whole camp slid into a deep silence and darkness. My mother in the kitchen, with a very grim face, was preparing food as if we were expecting lots of guests, although no announcement had been made and the house did not have the festive atmosphere which usually followed that kind of activity in the kitchen.

After nightfall, guests arrived one by one, all in uniform. It was the first time they would come to our home at night in uniform. Some of them rushed to another room and came out as women, whom I recognized as the wives of some of these officers. Since martial law had been declared, only military men were permitted out in the street, and the officers’ wives had to dress in their husbands’ uniforms. Very soon the large living room and dining room were filled with almost every military man in the camp. They sat and talked and drank. We, the children, were not allowed to walk in, but at some moment I peeked through the crack of the door and I saw that almost everyone was crying.

For much of the next day, the mood of whole camp was as grim as that night. I do not recall how long it took for life to return to normal, but it was too long to bear. There was no laughter, no joking and no teasing when playing backgammon. There were, however, more social gatherings, almost every night and all in silence. I felt that someone had died.

After a few years, though I was still a child, I learned what had happened that night. It was the 1953 CIA coup which toppled Prime Minister Dr. Mossadegh’s democratically-elected government. In the following years, much happened in the country as well as in our private lives, but I never saw my parents’ faces as grim as I saw them that night, and I never saw that crowed the way they sat down in silence and cried. Never!

Now, when we hear the news of attacking Iran and the threat of hitting the nuclear facility, particularly after Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University and his denunciation as a little dictator and so on, the picture of those event some half a century ago came to mind.

While I contemplate the possibility of war, with Parchin as a prime target, all I remember is the face of my parents and their friends in that room behind the closed door, wet with tears. It was not just a loss or a failure. I think it was shame, it was the tears of humiliation, those officers had not even been given a chance to defend their country, to do the job that they had been trained for. Some foreign agents had easily smashed their entire lives’ work, all the hope for a modern state and a lawful society. Though I was only four years old that night, that story was told and retold, again and again, so often that it became part of my very being. That shame and humiliation carved into that identity forever and always comes to mind whenever Americans want to deliver and dispatch their democracy anywhere in the world and whenever they want to rescue the freedom from the hands of villains.

Ironically I’m American now, and I’m not expected to care less for the country which is day and night portrayed as “my” enemy. I feel like a centaur, half of my life I was Iranian and half American. But what does it means to me? Am I an enemy of myself? Where do I have to draw the line? That blue passport in my pocket book or the red one in my desk draw? Should I wait here and share the Thanksgiving dinner and blessing with my American family when they bomb Parchin, when the school which was built practically and physically by my mother is turned into ashes; when those families whom my father helped to become part of a modern Iran die under the ruins caused by my fellow Americans? When did all this happen? When love united me with a man who happened to have a blue passport? Did that unity divided us?

In despair, many times I asked my husband what would we do if evil appears in the guise of democracy. He did not hesitate even a second: “We will go home together.” There was not the slightest doubt in his voice. Deep in my heart I know we are not alone. There are millions of Iranians who feel that way, millions of us in whom an Iranian heart still beats.

Some half a century later, we are again losing to shame and dishonor. This time the world is gazing upon us, with all the humiliation we have to face. However, as an adult I do not look at their shame and tears from the crack of the door. I would prefer to cry with them and die among them.

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Saffron Sky, A Life between Iran and America, by Gelareh Asayesh

A young, educated, pampered, highly-achieving Iranian woman who immigrated to the United States at a very young age writes her memoir. She came from a privileged background, and continued to live a privileged life in America as well. She is one among many second generation Iranian immigrants who occupy prestigious positions as doctors, engineers, computer scientists, university professors, lawyers and journalists. Even in her field, journalism, there are enough young Iranians for her to lose her novelty. She is not abandoned, she is not abused; she has not suffered. With my painful experiences of reading the solicited memoirs of the younger generation in mind, I found Gelareh Asayesh’s memoir a delightful exception. This is the second book in the row of this generation that has come counter to my expectation. Does it mean the age of Not without my Daughter is over? Just few months ago came the horror of Camelia.

Saffron Sky’s opening chapter put it off to a good start. In her short prologue, she recalls her new home in the Maryland and the first day she is not working outside and is left alone at home, writing:

I had achieved, purely by chance, a reincarnation of past happiness. I lived a dream of childhood days in Iran, when activity ceased in the heat of the afternoon sun, and the neighborhood slumbered in silence, and my grandmother’s garden filled with the sound of the wind in the apricot trees.

Asayesh is not the first of Iranian to seek her identity and her past, and to be nostalgic about it. She is not the first who finds it difficult to stop being Iranian and start becoming American, nor is she the first who does not know where one ends and the other begins. However she sees very clearly the blurry line drawn between the two. The book is partly an examination of what appears as bridges which seem easy to cross to reach the American side, and the experience of crossing these lanes which are, in fact, quite narrow if not impassible.

The fully aware young teenager finds, at a very early stage, that there is no easy way and what appears as easy is just a mirage. In Chapel Hills, North Carolina, they cross the roads very quickly and easily.

Sometimes during the first year we were overcome by the futility of holding on the past. Iran was far away, and piece by piece we started letting go of the old and embracing the new. I bought a pair of rust-colored corduroys. My sister acquired, amid great family tension, a boyfriend. Homajooon (mother) started cultivation African violets. Baba unbent enough to venture outdoors in flip flops instead of proper shoes.

As for being American, it takes more than mere adjustment; most of it comes from the difficulty of being Iranian in the past tense. The pain of what to do with our past remains to be solved. Carrying it into our life here? Forget it? Deny it? Simply be nostalgic about it? Asayesh tells us about her conflicted school years’ experience: Her memoir of high school years stands up well among her other chapters. “To fit in,” she feels, requires more than “studying well and behaving well. It requires growing faster than what an ordinary person takes to grow and it does not matter that in the end you just pretend that you have grown.” She founds soon:

But in America childhood seemed to end early, to be replaced by cultivated cynicism that masked both vulnerability and immaturity. I was still a child, with a child’s joy in simple and pleasures and a secret delight in the safety of rules and restrictions. Going to high school in America felt like a violation of my childhood, an abrupt and painful loss of innocence.

In spite of what she knows and all that happens counter to her intuition or upbringing, the inevitable must be met, one needs to grow and survive. It is at her prom that she arrives at the decision to fulfill the unspoken agreement of an immigrant:

That night, the web of belief and expectation that bound me broke apart and formed a new pattern. I slipped the tight moorings of my heritage and began to yield to the imperative of the here and now.

Later on she writes:

When I was in high school and college, I longed to be delivered of the burdens of the past, to be free to belong in the world of my peers. Now that I lived outside the constraints of family and culture, I discovered in myself a need to belong in ways that transcended the superficial acceptance of my friends.

It is not only the past which is haunting her; the present, daily existence, appears as ghostly as past, where she is dealt with as a third person, when everyone is trying to cut her from what she had been, and she has to assent to it.

"You know, it says in the Bible those people over there are descended from jackals.”

"Actually, I’m from over there”

He looked at the TV screen above the City Desk and said, “I have nothing against the Iranian people. I had a roommate once who was Iranian. He was really nice.”

What is missing in her life is not only the tangibles, she craves, indeed, for something whose nature she is not fully aware of, though, but she feels its absence. Once, covering a murder story—a young women was murdered and was left in the middle of field—she writes:

Once death had been noted on the murder tally, it was forgotten. But the experience haunted me. At night, lying in bed in the silent apartment I shared with a largely absent roommate, I was overwhelmed by the sense of being alone in a cruel world. Cut off from family and friends, I felt myself adrift. There were no buffers between me and life’s harsh realities, no cocoon of familiarity and routine to shelter me no one’s love to anchor me.

She can draw a line between “belonging” and “getting adjusted to” or attaining the "approval of the judges," and it is "belonging" that she seeks, belonging to herself, for which she must first come to terms with her past and with her Iranian being.

Though she became an American in the ways of thought and language as well, still she sees in herself something which others are unable to see, her “Iranian inside,” though it is too far away, with a big gulf which she desire to cross, but feels it is impossible.

In 1990, when I obtained the green card that cemented my foothold in the West and permitted travel to and from Iran, it was instinct that drove me to return. With that first trip back, I began the long slow road toward resurrecting a buried self. And vowed I would never suffer that inner shriveling of an isolated core, the immigrant’s small death, again.

And again:

Though, in practice we stayed here because it gave us better life. Because we had endured so much in leaving Iran; and it was too hard to go back.

 Interestingly enough, being from the holy city of Mashhad, most of her trip is spent there as well as the villages and other noted towns in the area. And there, one of the first places we visit with her is the Shrine and we hear her aunts talking about the pilgrimage. Asayesh’s recounting of the pilgrimage as the “a pilgrimage of soul” might very well be a two-edged sword. I felt a religious tone in her secular trip; it was indeed her pilgrimage of her body and soul to the shrine of her being Iranian.

No, her trip to Iran was not a lavish feast she would invite us to. Indeed we, the reader, did not matter at all. It was not a grand tour for the American tourist there either. She did try not portray the better side of Iran and the so-called Iranian heritage. No grandiose Iran this and that, but a humble, modest, and honest report of one’s trip back home as if it had taken place in her absolute privacy. As if she was not seen, as if she had no witnesses. The book came from the depth of her solitude, as if she were whispering to herself.

She tells us she always brings back plenty of saffron flowers to enclose in the Christmas cards she sends to her friends; I found her whole account of her pilgrimage as a bundle of saffron flowers sent to all of us readers, I sensed its aroma. It may be my medievalist side which attaches such a mystique to aroma rather than color, and it is from my medievalist side that I can even appreciate more the mystique she brings us with her book. True, young as she is, with such an earthly profession, journalism, the word “mystique” might sounds a bit out of order, but I did not have the heart to dismiss whatever comes to me from those delicate description of her grazing site with anything less than aroma.

It is not only the various circumstances and feelings that she is fully aware of. She seems to be aware that she would probably be one of the last who sees some of the Iranian artifacts, rituals and ways of life and characters that very soon all depart and end up in the time capsules in museums. Whether she is describing her attendance in the public bath or her dialogue with her aunt over the installation of the European toilet seat and paper holder for her American husband; whether she is describing the slaughter of a sacrificial lamb or the mourning passion plays; a wedding or family visits; drinking tea with a total stranger in a tea houses by the road or taking a nap in a public gardens after the meal; going to the cemetery or shrines and praying with her aunt or getting into arguments with her secular friends; all and all equally come with an aroma since they have emerged from a truth-loving soul.

She seems to return home with her hands full. She is content with her pilgrimage since she has gone there in earnest and she returned fulfilled.

This is a book which I do recommend to all, as usual, to our younger friends, Barzin, Parisa, and Payam, Sarvin and Nasim, Tammy and Rad and Sina and Parsa and Ava, Tara and Amir Hussein, Shahrouz and Rouzbeh and Sharareh. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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Ahmadinejad in New York City: A Lost Opportunity

Once more a golden opportunity was lost while we looked on with disbelieve and dismay. Mahmud Ahmadinejad was back to our beloved city, the capital of money, politics and noise. He was received with a blast of the harshest insults and rudeness and bowed to all of them with his tough skin and dazed look and semi-vicious smile. He gave a lengthy speech with zero content in the Iranian gathering at the Hilton Hotel on September 23. He gave a much more blown out of proportion talk in Columbia University the next day and the United Nation the day after that. He was on Charley Rose and Sixty Minutes. He was not permitted to pay his respects to the victim of 9/11, but was given an ample platform to repeat the typical diatribes of the conservative Islamic Republic of Iran.

In the Hilton Hotel’s iftar party some two thousand Iranian gathered. His talk was more or less a repetition of his last year’s speech—how good we were, how good we are, and how good we always will be, we the Iranian people. It is striking that in the whole speech there was not a word of the Islamic Republic or the Iranian government, as if there were no such animals; instead, we the nation of Iran and the Iranian people were present from seven thousand ears ago till now in our full majesty. We all like it though we all knew that our seven thousand years of majestic life would be diminished as soon as he got into his airplane and headed for Tehran.

Things were more chaotic in Columbia University. Thousand of students had rallied against his presence there and criticized the president of the Columbia University for inviting him. The placards bore all sorts of messages, calling him evil, a dictator, Hitler, a criminal, and a terrorist.

It seems that President Bollinger had given in to the conservative students, and I believe, to the trustees as well, and did something quite uncommon for a president of an Ivy League university; he was rude and arrogant and insulting. But Ahmadinejad took all the insults and went up onto the stage with same vapid smile and glazed expression and repeated the same rhetoric and laughed and made some of the people laugh along with him.

Attaollah Mohajerani wrote an article in his blog which was published in Rooz on Line and quoted the Israeli daily Haaretz to the effect that the real loser in all this was the Israel. He also noted that Bollinger did not gain anything by insulting Ahmadinejad with his unconventional insolence and ranged him second among the losers, following Israel, since he gave Ahmadinejad some sympathy for being the underdog.

I was invited to the NY1 cable television news program “Inside the City Hall” on September 24, following the Columbia University president’s speech. My reaction to it was one of dismay and bewilderment. I recalled Ronald Reagan when he called the Iranians a barbaric nation over the hostage crisis. Well, I was not sure that it was appropriated to use the word on television, I suffice to express my disbelief in what I had just heard and how unbecoming if was of the President of Columbia to talk that way, regardless who the guest speaker was. I wondered why they invited him at all; they could have cancelled his invitation and then called him whatever they wanted. But how on earth does one invite someone and tell him to his face that he is stupid, illiterate, a dictator and small?

However, what bothered me the most was the fact that another opportunity had been lost to confront this insolent people for whom nothing penetrates. The Islamic Republic is left there alone and the international community, if there is such thing at all, is somehow silent regarding their treatment of their citizens. Human rights are totally ignored, women’s rights are ignored, minorities are ignored and they are as harshly discriminated against as can be. The laws of the sharia, which are incompatible with the standards of human rights, are imposed where ever possible. Luckily Iranians in many cases follow their own traditions and culture and continue to tailor their conduct accordingly to avoid further confrontation. However, social life requires some sort of lawfulness, which is totally missing. The Islamic Republic, in spite of its democratic structure and the appearance of checks and balances, by excluding the majority of Iranians, i.e., those who are not considered Islamic enough, does not have the legitimacy of a representative government.

The advent of the internet and satellite communications has made it impossible for the government to keep the public from access to information to a great extent and that is another factor which gives a false appearance of some sort of freedom of expression, other wise the regime would be as totalitarian as the Baghdad caliphs. However, the socio-economic facts of life, along with the geopolitical situation of the country has rendered it immune from many compromises that other neighboring country are asked to make.

Once a year when an Iranian delegation comes to the United Nation, an opportunity arises for all of us to meet these people out of their safe cocoons. We all have a hope that while the whole world is watching they would appear to give an account of what they are doing. We all are hopeful they would be asked questions that they had ignored while they were back home. It is with this hope we wait for September in New York every year. Alas, from the time the Iranian Delegation was led by Princess Ashraf, the Shah of Iran’s sister, to this September with our president Ahmadinejad as the head of the delegation, our hopes have been dashed.

Mohajerani is just deluding himself to think that the losers are the Israel and Columbia University. The real loser is us, the Iranian people whose name was use at least fifty times during Ahmadinejad’s speeches on every occasion. We Iranian people are waiting for a miracle of justice everywhere, but all we received so far has been nothing but watching and waiting. We lost our chances one more time when the President of Columbia University acted unwisely and got lost in the traffic of insults and the competition of rudeness. I wished he would have remind as worthy as the head of the institution of such caliber and would not have given him such an opportunity to answer a question with question, not to have given him a chance to play victim, not to have given him a chance to lie and not to have given him a chance to dodge every question. There are the clips of films of the bloody demonstrations in which women in the streets were beaten and abused by police either for peaceful gathering or so-called bad hejabs. There are photographs of the prisoners who are tortured badly. The famous photograph of the young student whose back is carves by knife reading “Tir 18” is such a convincing document and the photographs of Daryoush and Parvaneh Forouhar’s bodies cut to the pieces are more convincing than any other verbal accusation. The students could have covered the walls with all these undeniable documents and instead of all these insults we could have invited him to explain. Just explain. For three days, instead of all the sensationalizing propaganda about why he wants to wipe Israel from the world map, we could have asked him in what position and capacity he wants to do so, and if he has any, what is his time frame. I do recall last year when President Khatami came to the United States and very clearly said in various interviews as the former president of Iran that the foreign policy of Iran is not solely in the hand of the president, indeed his weight in these matters is very insignificant. He could have been asked if he is up to his claims. A few credible dissidents could have confronted him with the fact that he does not even have any constituency in Iran and, with only one year left of his presidency, was in no position to make good on his threats. Instead of calling him Hitler we should have let him show himself a Don Quixote.

President Bollinger saved his position and did what the conservative students and the board of trustees wanted him to do. The American media was happy for a few days; they were hosting evil and his ensemble and it sold well. The students had a little excitement for a change and experienced something which is alien in this country, street talk over politics. Ahmadijnjad found a chance to sing his songs, Comedy Central comedians found good bits for their sketches. And we, the Iranian people, are left with a pang of pain in our heart. We, the Iranian people, here or at home, were the real losers.

And lastly Kian Tajbakhsh (a Columbia University alumnus) got out of prison just the day Ahmadinejad came here, but women, students, activists and journalists are rotting in jail.

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The Columbus Dispatch Cartoon

One more cartoon, one more insult, one more humiliation, and a million more protests. I hope this time we learn what we must learn, what we should have learned long time ago and did not. It is hard to believe but true that we live in a biased and fanatic country. We live somewhere that racism and sexism and fanaticism is as widespread as anywhere else in the world with the difference that we the immigrants do not want to believe it. A young Iranian journalist, Gelareh Asayesh, in her memoir very eloquently showed that in the process of immigrating to the US

one endures so much that it is hard to return even if one wants to. This is true on all account. We come here, either by choice or by forces beyond our control, the process of adjustment takes so much from us that we have to close our eyes and become callous towards many things that the pain becomes unbearable we protest only for the wrong reasons.

We rely so much on what we call objectivity and fairness and we assume that Americans, being so modern and sophisticated, are infallible in those regards that when we see those cartoons we become “saddened.” To tell you the truth, I don’t feel saddened. Not that I don’t feel bad that some idiot portrays us as cockroaches, but because it happens so often and almost everyday, one way or the other, that it loses its effect.

Did not we protest against the movie 300? Did not we protest against the Pope’s speech? And the Danish cartoon? We did. Though we did nothing or said nothing when we ourselves did no better, portraying ourselves as mean or handicapped. Did you not read Reading Lolita in Tehran? Did you not hear of Camelia? The authors were not American or Danish, they were one of us indeed.

The other issue closely connected to this constant disappointment is this artificial line that we have drawn between ourselves. We artificially separated ourselves from some seventy million other Iranians. In a way it is true we live differently and are different from those ruling in Iran. It is true we constantly become embarrassed by the government which does not represent us. However, not everybody knows these tiny, thin differences. Why should they? We need to draw this line because we need it for our survival, but that division is totally immaterial to the cartoonist who has to compete with a thousand others and won’t get to the front pages of newspaper unless he sensationalizes.

What is the use even if we mange to force the Columbus Dispatch to apologize? Would it be the end? Unfortunately, we are the cause of it ourselves. As long as we identify ourselves as Iranians we are one with whatever is Iranian, Ahmadinejad and Khameneii included. Don’t you hear Ahmadinejad’s speeches everyday? Don’t you get angry and disgusted? Do you think he portrays us much better than those cartoons? I don’t think any of us wants to admit he is one of us, an Iranian. But he is, and the whole world sees it that way, no matter how hard we try to separate ourselves from him. For sure, these Americans won’t see us differently, and they don’t have to. If we need to be respected collectively, we should be respectable collectively and need to act respectfully, all us Iranians. It is time to learn that either we are Iranians or not. If we are, we share that with a whole nation. Not such a happy face, right?

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The Other Farrukhzad

Some fourteen years after the untimely dead of the famous Iranian poet Forugh Farrukhzad, the country still passionately keeps her memory alive. Few books written by Iranian or foreign writers which do not refer to her as an Iranian icon. Younger poets and the young generation keep her in mind by using the images she pioneered, growing their hands in gardens, wearing twin cherries as earrings, and so on. While we remember her with all our hearts, we have almost forgotten another Farrukhzad who emerged in the Iranian artistic arena for a very short while, though he had a stunning effect on our modern culture.


Fereydoun Farrukhzad was Forough Farrukhzad's younger brother. He studied in Germany and returned to Iran few years after his sister’s death, appearing on television as a showman of a weekly program called The Silver Carnation. The whole concept of the show was very new to Iranian audience, since similar programs from foreign countries would never be broadcast in Iran.

It is said that he was given time on television out of respect for the relationship with one of the directors of Iranian Television to his sister. However, he very soon became more popular by his own merits. I did not see the first show, though I remember that the next day there was nothing more important to talk about at work than Farrukhzad. Had the prime minister been assassinated there would not have been more discussion.

Very soon Iran divided into two camps, for and against Farrukhzad. However, the division was rather chaotic. Unlike similar cases, it was not divided by gender or generation or class. What made it more difficult to classify his fan base was the fact that many people found it difficult to admit liking him. Even those who declared that they did not like him would never miss his show.

It took me quite a while to see his show due to my schedule, but I finally managed to watch him. That night a few of our friends, who were soccer players, would be on his show as guests. He asked one of them, the captain of the famous Shaheen team, to tell the most memorable event of his life. The guy very shyly said that was the day he met the Shah. “Well,” he asked, “Could you tell us your next most memorable event?” “The day I met the Crown Prince,” he replied. Farrukhzad laughed his beautiful childish laugh and said, “Come on, we all feel proud and excited to meet a celebrity and see leaders and heads of state, but it has nothing to do with our lives. These are not part of our lives and are hardly personal. There are many events happening in our lives that we never forget, like our wedding night, like our first kiss, like the birth of our children, like falling in love.” I very vividly recall the man’s face, the despair in his eyes, the nervousness in his face and hands. He was sweating, turning right and left and I think he was praying for a miracle to cut the electrical cord and end the program. He was so anxious to escape from the show and run away to the soccer court and kick the ball to relieve himself from all the nervous anxiety he was suffering. I do not remember if he finally told him of any memorable event in his life, but I do recall how deadly the question was to him, and how he preferred to do whatever in his power as not to answer the question.

Indeed, it was highly unusual in those days in Iran for anybody to talk about what was considered personal and private. It was very uncomfortable to talk about our feelings, our likes and dislikes, in addition to the political pressure placed on celebrities such as actors, actresses and athletes not to rise above what was supposed to be the most important person in the country, the Shadow of God, the monarch.

It is to his credit that Farrukhzad broke that taboo. He asked that question from every single guest again and again. I’m not sure if he received any answer, but eventually the question lost its horror. A few nights ago when I watched his later shows on Youtube, which I had never seen, I notices how easily his guests became accustomed talk and laugh on screen without being worried that the monarch was watching.

Part of the reason I like Farrukhzad was my mother, may she rest in peace. She was in her fifties, a tribal women, semi-religious, a loving mother and a completely devoted wife to my father. Like many Iranian mothers, she had no life but her family. But there were two nights that we had to struggle to get her attention: if there was any play on TV and on Farrukhzad nights. She loved him (my Iranian reader may not believe me) just for his dancing. He danced while singing in a very rhythmic and humorous way. In spite of what she said, I thought she liked him for his cheerful, gentle, and kind disposition resembled one of my brothers whom my mother adored.

With him something happened in Iranian pop culture. For the first time a man appeared who was exclusively appealed to women and was loved by them. He had the reputation of being gay, though he was married and had a son. That might have helped his popularity among the women, being safe and also touching a paradigm border. I do not think it was only my mother who loved him for his dancing and gentleness, I think other women saw in him a delicate child-son as well. But above all he became an image, all unreal, fantastic, like no one else, not a man and not a woman, something just like himself that men did not like and so left him alone for the women to love.

His fans were not limited to women. He was very popular among children and young teenagers as well. He had a talent to relate to ordinary people of any class so easily through the simple lyrics of his songs. Once in the streets of south Tehran, young kids recognized him and gathered around him and one of them screamed and called the attention of others and said, “Hey everybody, he is the one who if the moon came down from the sky and knocked on his door, he wouldn’t open it because he was busy with his guest!” That was a line taken from one of his popular songs which, like all his songs, was saturated with his character and his life. In spite of his well-groomed appearance, his tailored black ties and ruffled shirts, and his trimmed Omar Sharif mustache, and in spite of his sometimes off-color remarks on some neighboring countries, in spite of his carelessness, bordering on arrogance, towards politically correctness and his lack of concern for appearing khalqi (common, popular), he was truly a man of the people.

He invited actors and actresses and singers to his show. Most of them were young and, as a result, were generally better-educated than the older generation of their profession. He would make a point of bringing up the subject of their education even if it was at a simple professional school, like flower arranging or decorating. He would always introduce them by saying “X or Y, artist, beautiful and educated.” This become like his trademark. Though we all made fun of him calling someone educated for only attending six months’ classes somewhere or other, even at that time we thought he was taking the early steps of change in a traditional society which was looking differently at women pop singer or movie actress.

I liked him, though I watched him only a few times, for all the happiness he brought once a week to the people. His laughter was his best feature, and his memory is always mingled with joy, though I heard he was not a happy person.

A few nights ago, a friend and I stumbled upon various clips of his show on Youtube. The old ones from Iran were indeed very nostalgic, but the later ones in England were very daring.

He was murdered in Germany in his apartment in the same fashion as Shapur Bakhtiar and Daryoush and Parvaneh Forouhar were murdered, more likely by the same group of people and for the same reasons. Years to come, we might remember him differently.
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Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Right after the book Reading Lolita in Tehran was published, I read it eagerly with pride and prejudice. Proud of the fact that an Iranian had achieved such a well-received book, not on Iranian literature but on Western literature, and prejudiced for the author being an Iranian woman of my generation, if not of my socio-economic and cultural class.

We discussed the book in our book club, which consisted of seven women who all are ardent fiction readers, although only one of them has a literary career. There is one judge, one lawyer, one English teacher, three university professors (two sociologists, and one math teacher). I do recall we enjoyed the book tremendously. What my friends enjoyed most was Nafisi’s passion for fiction, her love of teaching, her teaching style, her interpretations of fiction, and the way she would relate various western stories to present life in a very different part of the world, Iran.

None of these women in our group is Iranian and I have not seen any of them interested in Iranian politics beyond being off and on worried about Israel getting hit by some sort of Iranian bomb or missile. Unfortunately, the energy spent on Iranian politics was wasted on our group.

The book did not fare any better for me, who is very concerned about Iranian politics. When my friends asked my opinion about the various situations described in the book, I humored them that I do not expect accuracy of any kind in a work of fiction. Indeed, I read the book as fiction. I found it a charming, intelligent, though depressing, blend of fact and fiction; a mixture of composite characters who could have existed among some of the then over fifty million people of Iran; and a creative drawing of past over the present or vice versa. I found the book written cleverly and imaginatively. However, I found it extremely bitter, sad, and pessimistic. I was surprised that none of the characters committed suicide; and there was no indication of any of them using Prozac (which is commonly used in Iran) even though they all were suffering. Had they been in the West, I’m sure some good percentage of them would have been on various anti-depressants.

I would have also congratulated the author for beautifully blending all these small anecdotes and stories and weaving them so vividly into the network of the works of fictions of four novelist, two of whom, Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I like very much. I was hopeful she would recreate her Lolita wherever she went. Alas, Tehran was her first and last destination.

After almost four years I’m still waiting. I thought it would be very interesting to read Lolita in Washington, DC. First one would have to find seven young students to come so devotedly to read Jane Austin and F. Scott Fitzgerald no matter how they would have to bend their schedules. Second, I would have loved to have seen who would have tried Nafisi’s friends, all Toms and Daisies in DC who make a mess and don’t even expect anyone to clean after them. As a matter of fact, when reading the book for the first time, there were a few places in which I played the game of changing the names and the locations to see what would happen. I changed Khomeini to George Bush and Iran to the United States and the Guardian Council to the Supreme Court and felt not the slightest difference except a certain degree of depression.

In my defense, I have to say I have learned to read memoirs of this nature as fiction. When memory is mixed and tinted with the narrator’s interests, motives, pains and pleasures, and life, it could hardly be considered as solely composed of ‘events’ to convey any non-personal message. When the narrator is a participant in the events that are narrated and is indeed the hero of the story, then obviously we are reading fiction. This is particularly so when the narrator is an imaginative and creative person. When the characters assume other names or professions, when two or three of them become amalgamated into one, when they are relocated from one episode to the other, and when the narrator has strong ideas about the course of events and a strong desire towards certain directions for the whole story, very likely we get a fiction, though it might reveals many valuable lessons or historical insights.

The Iranian community was divided over this book. The monarchists and some independent anti-Islamicists praised the book and acknowledged the author on various occasions, while others denounced it for equally political reasons. The fate of the young musicians who played the Gypsy Kings in Tehran (see below) was repeated here. Neither of these praises or denunciation did justice to the writer since neither one concerned the book for its values, but for its author’s the politics. Judging from the writer’s lack of response, I think it did not matter very much to her. The book sold by the million and who cares about the rest?

Among the book’s critics, two had a chance to stand up due to the positions they held, though they both failed. Hamid Dabashi’s article published in Al-Ahram was probably the first criticism of this book, viewing Nafisi as a tool to implement “the New Orientalism” which portrays the East and the Islamic world and the Moslems as villains and preparing the ground for the West to “defend” itself against these demons. Dabashi’s article was just a plain and pure polemic against Azar Nafisi. He simply stated his ideas about the villains in Johns Hopkins and Princeton, and Azar Nafisi as a “comprador intellectual” who played into their hands and worked for them in their interest. What was strange in this article was that there was not even a single reference to the book beside its cover. Dabashi thought that it was designed to be suggestive and bore stereotyped “Orientalist” images about under-aged sexuality in Moslem countries and among Moslem women, and that the blurbs on the back cover by Bernard Lewis, whom he called Humbert Lewis, enforces his claim. He wrote that “whatever is in the book is like the cover of the book!”

The other criticism appeared in Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmines and Stars, More to Read than Lolita in Tehran. The author in this book echoes Dabashi without any reference to him, again criticizing Nafisi’s politics and the school of thought she adheres to. Keshavarz, while objecting to the intent of Nafisi to portray Iran as “Orientalists” do, goes further and objects to the writer for not introducing the better side of Iran reflected in the poetry of Saadi and Rumi; or why she did not teach Farrukhzad. One wonders if Keshavarz noticed that Nafisi was teaching in the English Department and not Persian literature. Unfortunately, she missed the unique opportunity to evaluate the book as it is, since she is a woman close to Nafisi’s generation and is academically on her level.

After reading the Keshavarz’s book, I doubted my own comprehension of the book and felt compelled to consider if I might have been among the group that our views was overshadowed by the sense of pride we felt as an Iranian woman. Reading the book as a harmless story, while I did not agree with the author’s view on many issues, I was far from considering it as the first step towards World War III.

Indeed, I thought I made a huge mistake in not taking it as seriously as Dabashi and Keshavarz suggested. Taking to heart Keshavarz’s remark that we need the light and a window to look and see things differently, I thought she might have a point that I had let my initial excitement and my sense of pride overshadow the danger hidden in this text. So I decided to reread it, not as fiction but as a memoir and a witness to life in a certain period. I had to read the book in a new light.

So I read the book for the second time, intending to check the quotations Keshavarz brought from the book and also read it as facts and not fiction.

What I found in the new RLT was astonishing. The book is indeed more fiction than the I remembered. The story took shape after Vladimir Nabakov’s “The Magician’s Room,” a gifted writer and critic whose love of life, literature and film is taken away from him, is driven underground. He selects his visitor friends and refuses to see many others who wished to be part of his hidden kingdom. This Magician is apparently a model for one of the character of the book, called “my magician,” who in turn is pushed underground by the Islamic Republic. Our narrator in RLT, who is one of the privileged few admitted into the “my magician’s” circle, later on is transformed into a magician herself with a little touch of Dorothy in Wizard of Oz and a little bit of Alice in Wonderland, mixed with the elitism of Shahrzad of the A Thousand and One Nights. She reinvents her own kingdom and selects her own circle of friends, though unlike the other two magicians she does not advise them, but leads them to find themselves and to invent or re-invent themselves through their imaginations, through reading and discussing the works of noted writers. Later on in the book, the reader and the narrator together learn that many were wishing to be part of her circle as well.

She has a room of her own with a window to the Alborz Mountain with a painting in it as well. This room is described the same way as the other two magicians’ rooms are described.

As the narrator’s life resembles the stories she reads, her girls’ lives run parallel to the respective novels they study. I was not surprised to find the seven girls each fits to themes and motifs of the novels. Defiance, inventing and re-inventing their own image through the use of imagination, dreaming for the future, independence, audacious use of the imagination, hating and resenting men, being abused and molested, being under the thumbs of some father, brother or uncle, being control by family and being bounded by social and traditional customs, and above all the perception of one’s life through the eyes of others (something unique to Iranian women!) vs. independent-minded European heroines all respectively are sampled in each anecdote narrated.

There is an undeniable miniature quality in the book which is more suitable to fiction than memoir. Almost all the characters in it have some definite function and are portrayed only in order to display it. We see only that aspect of the character that is needed for Nafisi’s story come to life. Azin arrives when her sarcasm is needed. Nassrin comes with her hatred and resentfulness, and Mahshid with her meekness arrives on cue. The Magician arrives when Nafisi is short of breath for more sarcasm and needs help to finish her sentence. It is interesting that even the family members all arrive just in time to throw a resentful fist to the well-choreographed show of the hideous life in Islamic Republic of Iran as depicted by Nafisi. These seven girls seem touched up by our imaginative narrator. Each one of them is abused either by father, brother, uncle, boss, teacher and all together by Humbert-Khomeini so conveniently, something possible only in fiction. In reality, one would have to place advertisements in quite a numbers of newspapers to gather such a group, but of course if one has a good imagination it wouldn’t be that difficult.

“My magician” not only remains unknown to the end but also non-existing to the end. He remains a fiction in his fictitious room throughout the book and then vanishes into another fictitious world. I say so since in the Tehran University of those times, no one with his features could have remained unrecognized. I can summon any Tehran University graduate of that period for testimony.

The work of imagination is extended to the events as well. Though many events described in the narrative are real, such as the bus trip to Armenia or the serial killings, there are events that, if they happened at all, did not occur as narrated. A Bahai friend who knows the Bahai community very well, including how it operates, denied the Bahai’s story as it was described. After reading the book, she asked Nafisi who this Bahai was. Oddly enough, she did not remember the name and had lost contact with him! Some of the events in the University, beyond the general strikes, could raise some questions if they are taken as facts. It is not difficult to check and verify the events in Iran, no matter how insignificant they might be.

The narrator seems the most unreal person to me. The lack of kindness, compassion and love; the coldness and detachment; snobbishness and arrogance manifested all through the book are way beyond the image I have of Iranian women, particularly if she is a mother. I am sure there is wisdom hidden in the creation of such a character, although I do not see it. All the events appear as a backdrop for the narrator to pour out her rage, anger and frustration. There is not a single narrative which is not combined with the narrator’s harsh opinion and judgments. The reader is bombarded with her opinions and beliefs on every issue. In short, our vast country is becoming populated by abusive men who tyrannically rule over their wives and daughters, women who are subordinate to their men even if they have American educations, brothers who have nothing else to do but watch dog their sisters, and those who make a joke when someone sets himself on fire. In this nasty world, our narrator's criteria are not only the norm but the rule.

I cannot imagine that the principal of love, compassion and generosity is valued in any field more than literature. In writing a memoir, as in history, one must look at the events and persons involved with kindness and give them the benefit of the doubt since they are not present at the pages of our writings to defend themselves even if they are alive, and if they are not alive so much more power to that principle. The author is in great violation of this principle in her book if it is a memoir at all.

Nafisi has no mercy on anybody, dead or alive, in the book. Mrs. Rezvan is not spared the author’s nastiness even though in essence she is more on Nafisi’s side and identifies with her. Her only problem is that she adopts a different approach to live and survive in the Islamic Republic. Nafisi does not hesitate to show her contempt for her even though while writing the book she knew she had died of cancer. Her contempt for whatever is not Nafisi overrides even her commitment to the moral lessons she values in the novels she is teaching. I think when reading The Great Gatsby she turned the very first page quickly or choose not to quote the magnificent opening line by Nick, the narrator, which says:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

Nafisi either forgets or does not know that Mrs. Rezvan is not the daughter of the mayor of Tehran and one of the six women representatives in the parliament. She had not been sent to England or Switzerland for school. She did not study in the United State and probably never had the kind of luxury Ms. Nafisi has. Still, she loves the kind of literature that Nafisi does and sees the good of it as well as she does. However, being in a lower station that Nafisi, she not only does not despise her, but idealizes her, helps her, fixes the pin in her scarves and checks on her not to get into trouble with authorities. Nafisi admits all this very openly, but we see her as one of the outcasts from Nafisi’s closed circle, coolly called by her family name and the title of Mrs. There is not a single positive word about her in spite of their family friendship. All this rage, anger, and criticism remains without any explanation. On pages 293-295 Nafisi does not miss the last chances to make clear how much she dislikes and resent this woman. She describes her last few years of her life with the same contempt she holds the previous years in, up to the last conversation when she is finally in dead bed

She was optimistic about the latest treatment, although her cancer had spread far. She asked me about my work, I did not tell her that I was healthy and writing a book and on the whole, enjoying myself.

The lack of compassion manifests itself not only in Mrs. Rezvan’s case. Those “her girls” took their share of it as well. And, gee, I hope they learned something. On pages 258-259 the girls are talking about love and marriage, Azin says

Nowadays, girls marry either because their families forces them, or to get green card, or to secure financial stability, or for sex—they marry for all kinds of reasons, but rarely for love.” Mahshid says: “Not all of them. Many women are independent. Look at how many businesswomen we have, and there are women who have chosen to live alone.” “Yes you are one of them, I thought, a studious working girl still living with her parents at thirty two.”

Needless to say, Nafisi herself lived with her mother though she was married and had kids. We Iranian readers understand this; sometimes the necessities of life make us do things which may not be our exact choice. Besides, not all of us prefer living alone. Many Iranians prefer living with their family, particularly their parents, even though it means sacrificing a bit of their privacy.

What amazes me the most is the silence of Iranian women scholars abroad regarding the various claims in this book. The image of Iranian women according to Nafisi is far from flattering. One wonders then who are those thousands women who have formed the most united organized oppositional body of politics in Iran. Who are those thousands physicians, lawyers, engineers, university professors, environmentalists, teachers, actresses, and journalists, accountant, etc.? One wonders if those millions of women who stick to their jobs and did not give up, those who went to the universities and courageously resisted the Islamic rules calculated to marginalize them, those who did not abandon their position, were not brave enough. Then how one defines courage? I’m sure if Henry James, with all his war record, would have been present in our time, he would have written a different version of Daisy Miller. He would have defined courage differently to give Iranian women pride of place.

Nafisi’s Iran is the most perfect imperfect world that could be created: a world of total malfunction. The men are all cruel and abusive, the women all crippled, the government is brutal, the dead remains on the ground without proper burial, the music is played out of tune, the clerics lie and cheat, the universities breed stupidity, people are all mean and bigoted, and mothers are all meek lambs lead by their husbands and sons, and, above all, no one is aware of all these maladies which surround them. The only thorn in this perfect imperfection is her few compliments to the giants of Iranian literature which seem to be there simply to save her from total embarrassment. Otherwise how could someone so committed to the magic of fiction give that power up and turn into reality?

Oddly enough in the book as a memoir we do not see anything of the real author’s experiences. We do not know how a wonderful French-educated father whose command of the French classics won him the Legion d’Honneur award marries her daughter at a very young age to someone whom she “despises.” We do not know how he did not insist that she have a profession prior to her marriage, as was very common even prior to her generation. We do not know what effect a mother who is one of the first six women representatives in the parliament had on her growing up. Was it half as effective as reading Jane Austin? If not, why bother with all this fuss. Let us get some books and read them and be done with all this nonsense. And finally, did Ms. Nafisi find a chance to ask her mother what they were doing in the parliament? How did she campaign? What was it like to be a woman and campaign to a seat in the parliament? What was the men’s reaction to that? Whom did she represent? How many people voted for her? What was her constituency? How did it feel to convince people, if she did at all, to trust her to advocate their cause and what were the important causes she advocated? What was her voting record? Did she ever vote against any bill? In favor of any? Etc.

If Ms. Nafisi would have answered a few the questions of this sort in her memoir and would have connected them to the readings she had done, it would have made a good memoir. Otherwise the book would remain as a solicitated fiction.

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