For my parents
and in memory of Firooz
‘Somewhere beyond right and wrong is a garden. My Friend, I will meet you there.’
Rumi
‘Call it [the tree] of Paradise, if you do not know why you should call it the Cypress …’
Ferdowsi, Shahnameh
Contents
Map
Prologue
Part 1 Home
1 Longing to Go Back
2 Metamorphosis
3 Tehran
4 Shiraz and the Abbasians
5 ‘I wish to go to Iran, to see my much-praised father’
6 The Family House in Abadan
7 New Beginnings
8 Bending on the Branch
9 Khaleh
10 New Iranians
11 Revolution
12 Covering Up
13 God’s Government
14 Escape
Part 2 Exile
15 London
16 An English Boarding School
17 War is Coming
18 Displaced
19 The Mask of Englishness
20 Returning
21 Saying Goodbye
22 Back Home
Epilogue
A Note on the Cypress Tree
Acknowledgements
Dramatis Personae
A Note on the Author
Prologue
‘Nothing. I feel nothing,’ the old man declared, his expression inscrutable.
Here he was, the saviour of the Iranian people, the architect of the Islamic Revolution: Ayatollah Khomeini, returning triumphant to his country after fifteen years in exile, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi toppled and fled, two and a half millennia of monarchy interrupted. And Iran was waiting, holding its breath to hear what he would say – this old man whose words had undammed rivers of blood to wash through the streets – on being asked how he felt to be returning to his country after all this time.
This had been his answer.
This response, squeezed dry of any feeling, provoked silence from the disenfranchised, poor, illiterate citizens who had brought this man back on a tide of violence and chaos and longing. There was a pause in homes across the land: in the sprawling detached houses of the middle classes, smart families wearing Europe’s latest fashions gathered around state-of-the-art televisions, and in the mud villages where the population thronged round the ancient set belonging to the local landowner’s estate manager. For the space of one heartbeat, the country was stunned.
I was a chubby child of nine addicted to reading and chocolate, sitting on the floor, a book in my hands. Underneath me lay a carpet of silk and wool flowers spun into meadows of colour. I hadn’t been to school in weeks, and I could sense the tension radiating from my parents. I knew that the shah had left the country and I knew that I had to be careful of what I said when I was out of the house – my mother had said that there were ears everywhere and though I had not understood how that was possible, it had silenced me nonetheless. I had felt the violence on the streets moving ever closer to our home and I knew that every night more of our friends and neighbours vanished from their beds where they slept, never to be seen again.
Despite this, I was more bewildered by this thing called a revolution than scared by it. I thought I understood what was happening: the shah was gone and the joy emanating from this penetrated even the compound that protected us and our modern, middle-class lives. Iran would be free! Esteghlal, azadi, jomhooriy-e Eslami. I had heard the chants on the streets, their insistent rhythms echoing through the walls: independence, freedom and an Islamic Republic! I understood even less what this meant but I felt the excitement of it anyway. But as I watched this man, the author of so much destruction in my world, the cause of so many murders and disappearances, and listened to him say those words – ‘I feel nothing’ – for the first time in my young life, true fear entered my heart.
Home
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil,
this air,
Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and
their parents the same …
Walt Whitman, ‘Starting from Paumanok’
1
Longing to Go Back
My father has never spoken much of Kurdistan. Most Kurdish people, even those without any nationalistic fervour, are so steeped in their own culture, language and environment that they cannot help but fill their talk with the mountain air of their land. Without direct mention of Kurdistan, my Kurdish friends and family – even those who have lived away for over fifty years – seem to sigh rushing streams and the pleasure of lying dappled with light under a walnut tree in fields of gold.
But my father has never shared these memories. He has never talked much of his extended family either, of all those weddings where he must have perfected complicated Kurdish dance steps. He was known for the accuracy and nimbleness of his dancing and I see this still as he trips about the sitting room in north London leading us, his women, unrhythmically in his wake, the choupi in his hand a white napkin from the table, unable to break down the steps adequately so I can learn them, and equally unable not to dance when the music is playing. My mother, an anarchic Khuzestani with fire in her veins, gets bored and breaks the circle, whirling like a dervish in the middle as she creates the chaos which my father, with his precise steps, tries to contain. Of course, he does not succeed. He cannot succeed. The Abbasian women have always been driven by fire and the Mohammadi passion for order has only ever, at best, imposed a loose structure on my mother. She continues to be the nucleus of our family, our little tribe, just as her mother was before her and her sisters continue to be in Iran, our lost paradise.
My parents didn’t share much of their past with us, but they did try to share their culture; it was me who wanted none of it. I was nine years old when we moved to London and as I grew up I turned my back determinedly on Iran and all things Iranian. I realise now that the things I regret – the loss of fluency, the ability to read and understand our greatest poets in my native tongue, my ignorance of Persian epithets, songs and dances – are not just the result of estrangement from our land, but also of the gap that opened up between us children and our parents, the abyss that yawned between us, separating their Iranian culture from our adopted English one. On their side were poems quoted liberally at parties, traditional songs sung as their friends gathered around the piano, jokes and a litany of teasing and banter that flew between them all in poetic Farsi. On our side were Duran Duran and the Famous Five, my passion for ponies and pop music. Disappearing into the gap between us fell my parent’s entreaties for us to speak to our extended family in Iran, threats to send us to Farsi school on Saturdays and pleas for us to stop running away from their friends and parties.
I had no idea why I was turning my back on Iran, except that I was angry. Angry and ashamed; such a complex cocktail of shame I was carrying – shame for the revolution, shame for the hostage crisis, shame that we had had to leave, shame for the austere looks of Ayatollah Khomeini and the radical images and ideals of the Islamic Republic. In some strange way, I was ashamed of standing among these reasonable English people and of not being like them. I sought to erase the shame by fitting in and ignoring Iran as if just by willing it, by denying its existence, I could cease to be Iranian, cease to be from a place that had dealt my young heart such a shattering blow.
Iran would not be willed away. It was there on our screens, a collage of familiar elements made unfamiliar by their juxtaposition; there were the plane trees of Tehran’s Pahlavi Boulevard, but they were providing the background for a march of revolutionaries, there were the familiar American cars like the one we had owned, but instead of driving down the street, they w
ere on fire by the roadside. Iran was also inside me, our rose garden, noisy family gatherings and balmy nights spent sleeping on the rooftop of my grandmother’s house in Abadan. The memories and the longing for my country seeped inexorably through me until one day the knowledge had risen to the surface, undeniable, and I knew that I had to go back.
It still took me years. The pull back to Iran was easy to resist when all the pleasures of the Western world were at my disposal. Finally, I found myself outside the Iranian consulate in a quiet square behind Kensington High Street, resentfully adjusting a makeshift headscarf as my father led me inside to apply for my Iranian passport. I was apprehensive, even of the bearded man behind the counter, but contrary to my expectations these representatives of the revolutionary government were charming, not impassioned and angry but smiley and full of ta’arof, the elaborate Persian form of courtesy whose deciphering has dogged my life.
Over tea at Barkers afterwards, as my father filled out the piles of forms, I was overwhelmed by twin feelings that have become familiar companions on my travels to Iran: anxiety and inadequacy. Anxiety because my last memories of Iran were of streets full of angry unshaven men punching the air, shouting, rioting, of a bloodlust that every night claimed the lives of our neighbours. Inadequacy because despite my degree in literature and burgeoning career as a journalist, I could not read or write well in Farsi, and could only speak it hesitantly and with an English accent. In my mother tongue, I was practically illiterate, an uncomfortable space for an intellectual snob to occupy.
The drive back to Iran continued almost in spite of me and finally, one day I found myself fiddling again with my headscarf as my mother and I started the journey back to the land of my birth and my forefathers. I was twenty-seven and it was eighteen years since I had last been in Iran.
2
Metamorphosis
My metamorphosis into a citizen of the Islamic Republic of Iran started at Heathrow airport, October 1996. Shrouded in a long, loose coat and wearing one of my mother’s slippery Hermès scarves on my head, I hoped I wouldn’t be spotted as the impostor I felt. Travelling with IranAir may have meant (as I discovered later) the world’s most delicious airline food, but it also meant that from the moment of check in, you had to adhere to sharia, the Islamic law that governs Iran and so I was already clad in a hejab in London.
For many, Iran conjures up the Green Wave and the haunting stare of Neda as she died on camera, the axis of evil, the US hostage crisis or Ahmadinejad’s innocuous sports jacket and his less innocuous comments on the Holocaust. For me it is simply the country of my birth. Home both to one of the world’s greatest ancient civilisations and the most shocking revolution seen in modern history, mine is a country so contradictory that even its children are divided as to what they call themselves and how they present themselves to the world. Iranians living outside the country and having to deal every day with the reactions that being from there provokes, fall into two camps as to what they call themselves: Iranian or Persian. Some of us remain stridently and unashamedly Iranian, although for many Westerners this recalls images of revolution, fanaticism and black-robed women; others choose instead to call themselves Persian, an exotic word that brings to mind splendid carpets, fluffy cats and the griffin-topped towers of ancient Persepolis.
I have, over the thirty years I have been exiled from my country, made the transition from calling myself Persian to calling myself Iranian. For me it is now merely a matter of accuracy – to call myself Persian while I am in fact half Persian, half Kurdish would be like a Scotsman calling himself English. He may call himself British but never English and similarly, Persia does not contain the whole picture for me.
It was the Islamic Republic of Iran that I was going back to. To me, Iran was not just the Islamic Republic as glimpsed on the television, the almost monochrome society depicted as repressed and joyless. Iran, to my mind, was still a place of golden memories of building sandcastles by the Caspian Sea, beloved cousins coming to visit, snuggling under the korsy in my Kurdish uncle’s house in the winter, my grandmother’s jet-black plaits hanging over earlobes elongated by heavy gold earrings. I also had darker memories of death and fear, of a time when my mother had no patience, the tense cab ride through Tehran when she had chided me for mentioning the shah’s name – (‘That’s not a name you can say in public any more,’ she had hissed) – and the day we ran away from our house without saying goodbye to any of my friends. There they all were, jostling with each other for space, fragrant memories infused with jasmine and orange blossom and terrible ones weighed down with dead neighbours and lost friends.
Fear gnawed at me as I boarded, adjusting the scarf that slid forward over my forehead, just one of a million adjustments I was to make to this innocuous piece of fabric over the next few weeks. I was not the first Iranian woman to discover how much a little square of silk can rule your life, though later I found it an unexpected ally when I flicked it across my face to deter the unwelcome attentions of one of the male stewards.
To try to calm myself I imagined Iran’s birth unfolding beneath us; a large plateau riven by faults in the earth’s crust, one of the most earthquake-prone zones on the planet, the soil piled on some of the world’s richest natural resources, oil as yet undiscovered, huge reserves of gas fizzing under the surface, giving it an explosive, volatile nature, liable to go off at any moment.
To the south is the long, languid stretch of the Persian Gulf, a lapis sea of fever and pearls, and up to the north, carried on the back of the sitting cat that is the map of modern Iran, is the Caspian Sea, foaming with oil and caviar. Ranges of mountains ruck up to the heavens, snowbound and magnificent, permanently cloaked in clouds. Full forests and fecund valleys, wild places stalked by wolves, bears and lions, lie carpeted in a weave of wild flowers. And then deserts, seas of sand and scrub holding in tight embrace oases of green palm plantations and rivulets of water, underground springs that are channelled by the inhabitants into qanats, underground reservoirs that conjure up gardens from the bare desert, lush groves of towering trees – cypress, juniper, linden, pine – and orchards of pomegranate, pear, apple and peach, all cut through by straight canals of water, gurgling into rectangular turquoise pools, delighting the senses and reflecting the beauty all around. The ancients called this pairadiza, and it’s still our vision of paradise.
For every Iranian the vision of paradise encompasses our land. The very soil of the place feels familiar to us, we are tied to it, to the changes that have befallen us and have formed us, so many thousands of years of bloodshed, violence and uncertainty that have coded themselves into our genes. Our roots go deep in Iran – we are exiles with a lost paradise forever swimming in our eyes, steeped in the culture of our lost land while living in foreign countries, following every beat of news, perusing the opinions of the young on the blogosphere, anything so as not to let go of Iran – ours is not just romantic love for an idealised country but also an expression of the loss each of us feels on being physically separated from the land.
We have been here a long time; Iran is the longest continuously inhabited land by a single race. First we were great: the mighty Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great was consolidated by Darius the Great, the man immortalised in the Bible for freeing the Jews. He built great palaces at Persepolis in marble and gold, black stones polished to a mirror-like sheen, set amidst a chequerboard of pairadiza – dream gardens rising out of the dusty earth of Fars. He received tributes from subjects converging on Iran from the furthest reaches of the world, different races living together in tolerance and peace under the embracing wings of Ahuramazda, the Zoroastrian god.
Then we were conquered. First by Alexander the Great who burnt the palaces of Persepolis, carrying away their treasures on 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels, the mighty Persian Empire and all the splendours of the Achaemenid kings turned to ashes.
Then it was the Arabs, whose conquest we have never recovered from. They came out of the desert, the crescent moon of I
slam scything across the country, converting the populace as well as absorbing the land into another empire, this time one united by belief and the sweet sound of the call to prayer. Although the Arabs tried to erase all traces of Persian culture, burning our books and changing the alphabet, we Iranians resisted Arab cultural dominion. And yet we fell deeply in love with Islam, with its peace and charity, and this faith in the unseen gave new life to the arts and crafts at which Iranians already excelled. The poet Ferdowsi gave thirty years of his life to fashioning the Shahnameh, a mythical history of Iran’s past, our Illiad, Odyssey and Aeneid all rolled into one, a work of such devotion to Iran that it rescued our heritage and language from the Arab onslaught. Despite the Arab insistence on devotion only to Islam, Iranians continued to celebrate Nowruz on the moment of the vernal equinox, the ancient Zoroastrian celebration – the basis of Easter and other less ancient religious festivals – legitimised in Islamic society by the judicious placement of the Qur’an on the New Year table.
Iran had survived the Macedonian upstart Alexander the Great, and even assimilated Islam, but it didn’t stand a chance against the genocidal force of the rampaging armies of Genghis Khan. The Mongol hordes plunged in from the north-east, conquering Samarkand and killing and raping innocents as they went, allowing nothing to stand in their way. Genghis Khan poured molten silver into the eyes and ears of his enemies and the plateau was flooded by the blood of the thousands that died. For two hundred years, the brutalised people of Iran lived in a state of terror so acute the stench of fear seeped into our genes. Even the land did not remain the same after the Mongols, who thought nothing of diverting rivers and wiping waterways from the map to subjugate enemy cities.
More Mongol warlords followed with Tamerlane’s brutal reign, but Iranians held on to their ways – great art and architecture had come into being under the earlier Seljuq rule and continued to flourish under the descendents of Tamerlane. Persians have a habit of thriving when times are tough, somehow finding a way around the obstacles, infiltrating the dominant culture of the invader, transforming it to glory. In the first thousand years of our life as a country, Iranians learnt best of all how to survive. Our elaborate manners are designed to protect our private selves and this trait, born of so many invasions, has made Iranians adaptable above all else. Wherever we are scattered in the world, we integrate.
The Cypress Tree Page 1
