The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran

by Majd, Hooman

  Throughout our stay, I vacillated between deep pessimism over the future of Iran, despairing that peaceful change could ever come to my country, and hope. Hope that perhaps I was too old, or too removed from Iran, even as I lived there, to recognize Iranians’ determination to bring about a change that would finally realize the hundred-year-old dream of a truly representative government, even if that government or regime would not be to my specific liking. I’d be pessimistic when I saw youth who seemed more preoccupied with leaving Iran than with staying and working to effect change. I’d be optimistic when I spoke to reformers, or to young friends, like the one who had been warned to be a “good boy,” who believed they would outlast any dark period in Iranian politics. For personal reasons, I was saddened that Khatami might not be a significant agent of change, and that he might not outlast the ayatollahs who had turned on him; and in a strange way I admired his nemesis, President Ahmadinejad, not for his views or his policies, but for his courage and his determination to be a part of whatever changes would come to Iran.

  Ahmadinejad was indeed determined to be a participant in the cultural evolution, political and otherwise. To the delight of the media and conversationalists all over Iran, he continued to battle other conservatives who were less socially liberal than he (whatever his motives), like a boxer almost down for the count who nevertheless always seems to have the energy to get back up, bloodied perhaps but still sure on his feet, for one more round. Neither Ahmadinejad nor even the Persian annus horribilis were going to go away quietly for the leadership of the republic, not if he had anything to do with it. At one meeting between the Supreme Leader and the “three powers”—the executive, the judiciary, and the legislative—Ahmadinejad showed up with a file under his arm, according to someone who was present. He was under continual fierce attack, his aides were threatened with arrest (some were subsequently imprisoned), and his political capital had sunk to an all-time low; he had already pronounced, obliquely, that he had his own “red lines” that the regime must not cross, including going after his cabinet members and closest allies.

  And now he told the Larijani brothers, who represented the other branches of government, that should he or his top aides find themselves out of a job or in prison, then the files he was holding, containing information about foreign bank accounts, details of children living in the West, real estate holdings inside and outside Iran, and the like, would be made public. The first file, he said, looking straight at Ali Larijani, the speaker of Parliament, who had the power to impeach him, is yours. Yes, to understand political Iran, you have to understand the culture: the traditional culture—unquestioning of authority, distrustful of strangers and foreigners, unwavering in loyalty to the state’s interests—that determines the elite’s behavior, and the culture of the Tehran street, which Ahmadinejad so perfectly represented. And street culture, more of a constant in Iran than any other, is always going to be a part of Persian culture, no matter how it evolves.

  Shaban Jaafari, known as Shaban Beemokh or Shaban “the Brainless,” was a street tough, a laat, who had been instrumental in gathering other laats to demonstrate in the streets, with clubs and other weapons, for the return of the shah after his flight to Italy in 1953, when Mossadeq was at the height of his democratically elected power. As much as the generals and politicians who conspired with the CIA and MI6—which provided the cash needed to pay the laats—he was responsible for the success of the coup that brought the shah back to his Peacock Throne. Later, after the Islamic Revolution forced Jaafari into exile to California, he is said to have remarked, “We laats made a coup and handed power over to the intellectuals, while you intellectuals made a revolution and handed power to the laats.” He wasn’t entirely wrong, if one considers the political culture surrounding the presidency of the street tough named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But the laats of 1979 are today really the elite apart from Ahmadinejad, the ruling class who seem to have bought into the unquestioning political culture that Khatami insists must change. It is ironic, then, if not yet another paradox, that Ahmadinejad, the figure who sparked a searing conflict within the regime, may one day be also thought of as the person who sparked the change, when it properly comes, in the political culture of the Islamic Republic.

  12

  HOME

  “What are we going to do about fruit when we go back to New York?” Karri and I wondered. We certainly didn’t mean the fruit for guests, the pretty, imported fruit that is set out in bowls in every Iranian living room, next to small plates and cutlery. No, we meant the sometimes bruised local fruit, the only kind we bought and that our greengrocer would pick out for us, in our rhetorical question, which we wondered aloud more often the closer we got to the end of our stay in Tehran. Tasty as the fruit was, I suspect we asked the question as a way of expressing sadness that our adventure was coming to an end, and that we would actually miss Iran, despite all the things we didn’t enjoy about life in Tehran and the oppressive political atmosphere that affected us probably more than the average citizen. I would miss Iran more than Karri, naturally, but we also wondered if Khash would miss it, or miss the attention he received from strangers, the hugs and sweet talk he experienced every day, and yes, even the fruit, which he loved and which, as we expected, he is now much less fond of back in Brooklyn.

  I reflected on how the way my son started his life in some ways mirrored how I’d started mine. I was born in Tehran but left at eight months of age for the English-speaking world; he was born in New York and left at eight months of age for the Persian-speaking world. My awareness of language, Farsi at home and English outside, was the opposite of his experience—English at home and Farsi everywhere else, some of which he understood by the time we were ready to leave. Dast-bedeh, “Let’s shake hands,” and Beeya, “Come here,” the refrain of our doormen every day, would have him running to them. He spoke his first words, baba (Persian for “dad”) and mama, which he first pronounced as “ba” and “ma,” in Tehran, and he took his first steps in an apartment in Tajrish; mine too had been spoken and taken abroad.

  He was fascinated by the cats that roamed the streets, alleys, and joobs of Tehran and occasionally took up residence in apartment building courtyards like ours, or in the gardens of houses where residents fed them. That fascination wouldn’t remain with him long, but it was a part of Iran—for most Iranians, the concept of animals as pets is alien—and I was glad of it. My own first pet of sorts was a stray kitten that had wandered into my grandfather’s garden one summer when we were vacationing in Iran. My brother and I quickly adopted it, naming it Doody (for its color, gray), feeding it and playing with it, until the day it decided it would move on to greener, or more enticing, pastures, exactly as the cats in Iran do today.

  I also reflected on whether, after leaving this time, I would ever be able to return to the country of my birth, and whether Khash would ever come back, with or without me. A close friend said to me that he was shocked that I had come to Iran to stay this long, and that I had been foolhardy; our stay had, as he said, be kheyr gozasht, “passed mercifully,” but I shouldn’t think of returning for a very long time. While we were there, my father in London talked to us on Skype every day, and if he couldn’t reach us, sometimes because the Internet or the VPN or both weren’t working, he would call on the cell to make sure we were still okay. At least under a strict dictatorship, he later told me, you know where you stand, but in the Iran of today, you never know who’ll come after you. He was right, of course, but I couldn’t worry too much about it, even though I knew people who had spent time in prison for lesser offenses than my writing and my commentary in the U.S. and British media.

  I felt a little guilty, actually, for abiding by the law, for not speaking out while in Iran, since unlike many of my compatriots I had a platform, if I chose to avail myself of it, from which I could rail against injustices. Injustices like the imprisonment of Nasrin Sotoudeh, the lawyer separated from her young children for no apparent reason other than her defense of c
ivil rights activists. Or the unjust fate of Haleh Sahab, a democracy activist exactly my age who had been furloughed from Evin to attend her father Ezatollah’s funeral, where she was beaten by Basij forces and died on the spot. My cousin Ali had driven to the funeral but had been surrounded by the Basij as he drew near. “Do you want us to smash your car right here?” they asked him, rather less politely than it sounds. “No thanks” was his reply, and he turned around and left. He drove a brand-new Lexus, after all. And I needed to stay out of jail for selfish reasons, too, if only to ensure that my short time with Khash—short because of my age—would not be cut down further.

  Still, I wondered about my self-preserving silence in the face of injustice. There were countless such stories of injustice, but none of them seemed to matter to ordinary Iranians. Was I like them now? We had a life in Iran, and we were mostly concerned about the same things others were: what to eat every day, the health and welfare of our child, where to find a little respite from the daily routine, how much money was in our bank account, and how we’d replenish it. We lived better than the vast majority of Iranians, yes, but if this was my home, then shouldn’t I be playing a part in making it better? No, I was surely more of an intruder in my country, no matter how much I felt at home, with my American wife and American child, one who might learn some Farsi but would grow up American. Even my pen was of no use here.

  Yet I continued to feel that I was home. If anything, Iran is a land of contradictions, and Iranian-ness a mess of contradictory emotions. During our trip to Dubai, even on our sightseeing excursion to Yazd and Esfahan, I had felt twinges of guilt for embarking on pleasure journeys, not so much for having the luxury of being able to take them, but for taking them at this time. I felt a little guilty, too, when I’d see a war veteran, someone who had defended his country—I hadn’t even done my national service, having been exempted from it a couple of decades later due to my advanced age; or when I’d see soldiers in uniform, nothing like the security forces, who would stand in line at the bakery to take a sangak or two and were unfailingly polite and respectful of their civilian counterparts, some soldiers even offering me, their elder, a seat on the bus. If war ever came, I reflected, it was these boys, mostly conscripts, who would fight and die, while I would be safe in New York, pontificating on the injustice of it all. Life is shameful indeed.

  If I was ashamed of myself, though, I was proud of Iran. Proud of my fellow Iranians for accepting my family as their own, proud that Karri had found my country to be so very ordinary in so many ways, and proud that despite the difficulties of life in the Islamic Republic, a life that so many, especially young people, seemed to dream of escaping, it was hard to find suffering on a scale that both Karri and I had witnessed in other countries. When we had returned from our short sojourn in Dubai, walking through the airport in Tehran felt not all that different from how I feel landing at JFK or La Guardia. Throughout my adult life, I had always felt myself to be Iranian and American in equal measures, but I had never really felt that Iran, the country itself, was my home. As a child visiting for summer or Christmas holidays, I’d felt it was my parents’, really my grandparents’, home and not mine—my home was a rented apartment in some foreign country or an embassy-owned dwelling in Washington or Tokyo. To live in Iran, with an apartment of my own, and to share it with my wife and son, was a little disorienting at first, for I had never imagined that I would even visit, let alone live in Tehran, for many years after the Islamic Revolution.

  But the nagging sense of belonging somewhere else remained with me all along. I would have dreams in which I somehow arrived in Tehran but couldn’t figure out how to leave, waking up in a panic sometimes at the thought of being stuck in a country that I desperately wanted to be part of but also wanted to be able to escape. My status as a dual citizen today gives me that advantage over the vast majority of my fellow countrymen who live in Iran: I can leave anytime, subject to the fancy of various intelligence agencies, of course, but a comforting thought nonetheless. But it was different now. This time, walking through the corridors with other Iranian travelers, even though I worried a little about passport control and the ever-changing lists of undesirable Iranians it maintained, I felt like I belonged.

  The flight from Dubai that day had been full, and we dutifully stood in the line snaking around passport control, me holding Khash in my arms. Unusually, the line for foreigners was long, too, although only a quarter as long as that for Iranian nationals. As we got close to the inspection booth, the officer working the foreigners’ line left his post, probably for only a few minutes. A German man standing next to us, frustrated by his slow-moving line began to complain loudly, telling the Iranian officials off, saying how incompetent they were. In English. The officer manning our booth finally yelled back, telling him to shut up. In Farsi.

  It was presently our turn to approach him, and as I handed over our passports, he grumbled, “He can get lost, shouting in a foreign language. Who does he think he is? He can wait, or he can get lost.” He scanned our passports, paused a moment after mine was swiped, and looked up. “So you’re Hooman Majd!” he said with a slightly malicious smile, lips curling downward. Again, the signal, given to all Iranians under scrutiny of the Intelligence Ministry, that I was being monitored, was designed to make me feel a little less welcome in my home. The same treatment is doled out to other members of my family, especially the Khatamis, at least those who are still allowed to leave the country, the difference being that they have only the one home.

  But accustomed to this act by now, I just nodded, and he handed back our passports. “Tell me,” he said, before we walked off, “how do they treat Iranians in foreign airports? Not well, I imagine. The foreigner can wait until he goes blind.” Or “blue in the face,” as an English speaker might say.

  My concern that my comings and goings were being carefully noted by the authorities—and that they wanted me to know that they were—was offset by my empathy for the immigration officer’s irritation at the boorish foreigner. Would the German man have screamed at immigration in JFK, for example, where the wait for foreign visitors to enter the United States can be excruciatingly long? Or would an American scream at Heathrow, where Karri and I have both had to endure waits of over an hour to get through passport control? I actually felt like slapping the foreigner, telling him to respect my country—my home.

  Getting into a taxi and giving the address of our own apartment, not a hotel or a friend’s house, and telling the driver the best way to get there only added to my sense of being home. Karri, who had automatically whipped out her scarf and manteau and put them on in the plane, seemed placid even as she struggled with Khash, who decided, as he always did in Tehran cars, to stand on the seat and look out the back window. Karri wondered out loud if I had instructed the driver to take the best route, something she inevitably did when we got into a taxi in New York. Yes, in a strange way that I would never have imagined, she was home, too.

  Beyond her struggles with the restrictions on dress and behavior, I was struck, and delighted, by how well Karri adjusted to Iran. I was truly shocked at how very much at ease she had become with life in Iran when one day at a restaurant she ordered a salad for lunch and was told that by law they couldn’t serve salads anymore, due to a cholera outbreak. Cholera? That would have sent her into a wild panic in New York, but here it seemed not to affect her much at all. She had the fish. The fact that restaurants were forbidden to serve greens of any kind due to a handful of cholera cases—which had come from Afghanistan, the government assured its citizens—was reassuring in a way, and it bolstered her belief that the government, awful in some other ways, was as health conscious as she was. (The smoke-free restaurants, cafés, and public spaces helped, too.) And that was saying a lot. What, she wondered, were we supposed to do with the sabzi, the greens that we bought from sidewalk vendors and produce stands? If we could even find any, for a lot of sellers, the sabzi-foroush, would stop selling greens, I told her. But then we would
just have to wash them more thoroughly than before. Or cook them, as the government recommended. The cholera scare—and it was more of a scare than anything else—lasted a few weeks. But before it was officially over, sabzi was again available in the markets and on the street, and slowly the restaurants started serving salads again. What was more surprising to me than her initial reaction was her asking, every time we ate out, if the salads were back on the menu, without knowing for sure if the danger had passed. I guess she had her amulet with her, and in Iran, of all places, she was at ease.

  The concept of home has always been amorphous and indistinct for me. As a child, I knew home only to be where we lived, which changed every few years because of my father’s career; I also knew that Iran was the real home of my family, albeit one I didn’t know. As an adult, the question “Where are you from?” has always confounded me a little, since the answer implies having real roots somewhere, which despite my strong attraction to the country of my birth, I’m not sure I have. Anywhere. The struggle for me—feeling like an interloper in a society, Iran’s, that I have no right to intrude upon while also feeling a strong emotional connection to it—actually makes me feel more at home there, not less. Mainly because the emotional connection is largely, if not entirely, due to Iranians’ attitude toward any other Iranian: whether you (or they) like it or not, you are one of them.

  That is something I’ve never completely felt anywhere else, except at times in America. Years ago, when I was in the music business, somehow the subject of Iran came up in a conversation with some colleagues. I warmed to the subject, and one person asked me how I knew so much. “Because I’m from Iran, of course!” I replied. “Where did you think I was from, with a name like Hooman?”