My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir

by Zarah Ghahramani

  My whole body itches with the irritation of hairs that have fallen inside my prison tunic. My head feels—wrong. Not on the inside, on the outside. I want my hair back. Nothing that has happened to me in prison has distressed me like the shearing of my head. And I know it is shallow, I know it is all to do with vanity. But I was pretty once. I liked being pretty. So what is this? A character-building opportunity? A chance to accept how superficial being pretty is? I don’t want the opportunity! I want to be a pretty Persian girl dutifully attending to her studies and having nothing to do with politics. Nothing.

  10

  SO MUCH OF what people believe about the world outside their own country seems to me the product of fatigue, or laziness. In the Iran of my childhood and adolescence, people believed that America was a land of movie stars, warmongers, two-door refrigerators, big cars, and hardly anything else. I believed the same thing. I didn’t have enough interest to acquaint myself with the detailed portrait, so I settled for the sketch. And what was England? The home of a kindly-looking old lady who was said to rule the land as queen. And of the Beatles. In France, you would find the Eiffel Tower surrounded by people who ate frogs and snails. Australia was a nation of swimming champions and kangaroos. Only students and specialists have the time and desire to study portraits, so people can’t be blamed for their ignorance. Any life is dominated by local exigencies, and people, by nature, are more concerned with their immediate neighborhoods than with the regional and world neighborhoods.

  It would have been perfectly excusable if I had thought of my country, of which I had an intimate knowledge, as unique in the world, as indeed it is in certain respects. It would have been excusable if I’d believed that, in all the world, only Iran suffered under insanely dogmatic mullahs. But by the time I’d completed high school and a year at Tehran University, I had studied enough history to know that every country has its mullahs, every country has its dogmatists and zealots, every country has at some time brought down an iron fist on those who question, coax, condemn, criticize. I didn’t know of the reign of Joseph McCarthy in early post–World War II America; I hadn’t heard the term witch hunt applied metaphorically. But I knew of other witch hunts, of other petty tyrants who detested wonder, imagination, inquiry, curiosity, independence of thought. At the university, I had majored in Spanish. I’d read the poetry of Federico García Lorca, I knew how he died. García Lorca became the first hero of my adulthood.

  My earliest hero was my father, and he remains a hero to me. He was my defender in family squabbles, of course, but, more important, the man who stayed in Iran to face whatever the Islamic Revolution might subject him to when he could easily have run away. But having a hero who is also your father rules out the element of romance. García Lorca was introduced to my Spanish class in my first year at the university, and as soon as I read his poetry, I knew that he was the man for me. It was not that I was lost in fantasizing over a wildly handsome Spaniard (who happened to be gay, not that I knew that) but rather that my developing sense of justice was nourished by the story (at least the short, less complicated version) of his artistic and political commitment, a commitment that eventually cost him his life at the hands of licensed police thugs.

  When I reflect on the psychological process that led me into the streets to shout and argue, I always get back to that word, justice. Like most children, I grew up with a very strong sense of justice. What outrages a child more than being accused of something she or he did not do? And what distresses a child more than being exposed to the fact that bad people often win? My childhood stories, read to me by my parents, by my teachers, were stories of good people winning out in the end. It’s the same the world over. Later, I learned that good people don’t have it all their own way; later still, in early adolescence, I learned that bad people very often do have it their way. But isn’t it wonderful how the belief in justice endures?

  For a number of my fellow Persians, justice was God. For me, at the age of nineteen, justice was the right of girls like myself to exercise their powers and abilities and talents without the interference of the clergy. My conception of salvation was therefore more human-scale than that of the mullahs. I wasn’t interested in making cosmic claims; I wanted to be free to walk down the street with the wind in my hair. I wanted to go to the movies all by myself if I felt like it. I wanted to choose my occupation from as extensive a list as could the boys I knew. From the beginning, politics for me was personal but not exclusively so. It never is, is it? My freedom to walk down the street with the wind in my hair wouldn’t have meant a thing unless all Persian girls could do the same. It’s not about creating privilege. How can liberty ever be a privilege?

  Why was it García Lorca among the Spaniards I learned about who so attracted me? Why not Salvador Dalí or Luis Buñuel? I suppose Dalí’s conception of freedom was simply too weird for me. I had no desire to dress up in a goatskin and smear my body with dung. Buñuel worked in images, arresting images, certainly, but I didn’t have the intellectual sophistication to locate the argument in them. My idea of liberty was simple enough to be thought primitive almost. Political theories of history and class went over my head. But some numskull of a boy in his late teens, licensed by the mullahs of my country to bully me when my scarf slipped an inch too far off my forehead, to lecture me, menace me—well, that was intolerable. And there were numskull boys all over the place in Tehran when I was growing up—Basiji, the citizens’ militia of the regime, self-important little pains-in-the-neck poking their noses everywhere, sniffing your breath for the tang of liquor, prying, pestering, firing off insults. I have no doubt that, just as every country has its mullahs, every country has endured the reign of its own Basiji. I think we have to accept the fact that the great majority of teenage boys are hopeless blockheads—my apologies to the exceptions. Give them the right to persecute, put guns in their hands, whips, tar brushes, and away they go, full of righteous zeal, full of stupidity. The Basiji was the Hitler Youth of Iran, and the Hitler Youth of Germany no doubt had its precursors in the Something Youth of Somewhere Else, and back and back to heaven knows when. Girls can be dim, too, I wouldn’t wish to deny that, dim and brutal. But in Iran, one’s experience is mostly of the dimness of boys.

  García Lorca wasn’t an egomaniac. García Lorca wasn’t an ideologue. He was a poet, and that was his great attraction:

  I have shut my balcony

  because I do not want to hear the weeping,

  but from behind the gray walls

  you don’t hear anything else but the weeping.

  There are only few angels that sing,

  there are only few dogs that bark,

  a thousand violins fit into the palm of my hand.

  But the weeping is an immense dog,

  the weeping is an immense angel,

  the weeping is an immense violin,

  the tears muzzle the wind,

  you don’t hear anything else but the weeping.

  What impressed me in this poem was the sensibility of a man, a poet, who could actually hear the weeping. Because the weeping goes on everywhere, and not everyone can hear it. The weeping can fill a room and be unheard by the people sitting and talking. To hear the weeping, your ears must have perfect pitch for the sounds of sorrow.

  In my freshman year at Tehran University, my class performed a version of García Lorca’s play Llerma. We did a good job. The Spanish ambassador came to see the production and congratulated us. I read as many of García Lorca’s plays and poems as I could lay my hands on, and while I read, I felt the quickening of that sense of justice I spoke about. Not that the stories were political diagrams; far from it. But I absorbed the sensibility behind the stories and poems, a sensibility that created vivid images of struggle, of the soul’s imprisonment, and of freedom. The struggle was for liberty; that was how I conceived it. I think most people who find themselves shaking their fists at the mullahs of their countries first find a person, often a writer, who helps them define what they mean
by liberty. Often, that person will be a political theorist, like Marx, but not always. It is quite possible to locate a guide in a poet like Omar Khayyám of Neyshabur, or Sa‘di, or Hafez—poets who wrote of sadness, loss, the casual cruelty of the cosmos, love, desire. Even when the subject is disguised, the real theme of good poetry is liberty, at least in my opinion. I have never read a fine poem or story that condoned repression and rejoiced in the unfettered power of mullahs.

  The liberty of language had found its way into my heart years before García Lorca came into my life. I had enjoyed reading from childhood, but in my teens, that enjoyment underwent the first of two transformations and became a type of addiction. It might have been hormonal. Fevers get into the blood of girls in puberty. In another country, I might have become one of those kids at pop concerts, trembling and shrieking and shedding tears and reaching out to young men strutting onstage. I read in a state of ecstatic transport—novels, film magazines, newspapers, books on politics. I made little distinction so far as quality and merit went; I could get as excited by an essay in my high school philosophy textbook as by the copy in magazine advertisements. Every surface in my bedroom was smothered in words on paper.

  My mother didn’t like it at all. She had nothing against reading, but she could tell from my distracted look that my obsession was likely to twist me out of shape. She would remind me that I would one day be a grown woman and a wife, and asked what my household would look like if all I ever did was read. To calm her down, I forced myself to give a certain amount of time to the traditional crafts of the Persian wife: I sewed and embroidered, helped out with the preparation of meals. I gave every appearance of a girl thinking ahead to home life, home duties, but it was all fraud. I was like a heroin addict who learns how to appear supremely in control and able to negotiate a day-to-day existence while scheming for the opportunity to introduce madness into her veins.

  I made sure that books my mother would approve of—library books on running a household, pleasing a husband, cleaning rugs and carpets, preparing a picnic lunch for a day in the park, recognizing the signs of ailments in infants—were always on top of my piles of books, or that these wholesome volumes were the ones that had their spines facing outward on my shelves. More concealed were the books by Sadeq Hedayat and Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, great heroes of contemporary Persian literature, novelists who were truly subversive of authority in both their politics and their insistence on employing simple, clear prose that did not hide its meaning. My mother knew of the Hedayat and Jamalzadeh books, but she believed that they were of less importance to me than the books of which she approved. Or maybe it was just that she was touched by my willingness to make it appear that way. After all, a person who takes pains to spare your fears and concerns must love you, mustn’t she? Not that my mother was in any doubt about my love for her.

  Hedayat and Jamalzadeh did not frighten my mother nearly as much as Kafka and Sartre. When the works of these authors appeared in my room, late in my high school years, my mother made it clear that she believed I was in serious danger of turning into an unmarriageable intellectual. She threw up her hands in despair and asked aloud if there was some special reason that, of all the mothers in Iran, she had been given a daughter who couldn’t tell a crochet hook from a cooking pot. But I hadn’t abandoned the aspirations of other girls my age; I still longed for the love of a good man, for marriage and family. At the same time, the poets, novelists, and philosophers I was reading so avidly had created a more complex world for me to inhabit. I was reading to educate myself about the way the world worked. I wanted to know that. I wanted to uncover the irreducible truth.

  When I was sixteen, my experience of reading underwent its second transformation. I was no longer able to think of reading as “fun.” The enjoyment it gave me was a new sort of enjoyment; it was not the beauty of the words that thrilled me now (although that could still happen) but their meaning. The way I had enjoyed literature up until the age of sixteen was related to love—strong feeling, yes, even feverishly strong feeling, but tempered by joy, tenderness. The new way of enjoying books was more like passion—dangerous, consuming, and, although you would die for it, unlikely to lead to happiness. It was like waking up one morning and finding that the sky was no longer blue but red. Instead of fretting about the loss of blue skies, you simply say, “Yes, the sky should be red, and from now on, only red skies will do for me.” Somewhere within, though, the reader you once were begins to mourn for you, attempts to warn you that you should not turn your back on blue skies and happiness so readily.

  My mother began to look at me as if I were in need of medical attention.

  What was happening to me was something that happens to teenagers everywhere, or to some of them: the lessons of my reading, the lessons of my observations of the people around me and the world around me, the insistent voices in my head and heart and soul were all striving to unite around a theme to carry me into adulthood. I know that the theme many teenagers in some Western countries now arrive at is not that complex: make a good living, pleasure yourself the livelong day. But in those same countries at other times, in the 1960s, for example, the theme was less self-interested. The theme I was searching for was given focus by García Lorca, then by the Basiji, but it was only when I saw my cousin in the hospital, most of her skin burned from her body, that I truly developed a conviction about justice.

  My cousin was living in a village in the west of Iran. She had been very young, just fifteen, full of enthusiasm at the prospect of living in a big city, when she married a man from Tehran. It was only a few months later that she doused herself in gasoline and put a match to her clothing. I went to visit her at the Burn and Trauma Hospital in Tehran. The smell of cooked meat was so strong that I had to fight the urge to throw up. According to the doctors, 85 percent of her body was burned. The unburned 15 percent included her lips, circling her startlingly white teeth. I recalled her wonderful smile on occasions when we had visited her and her family on their farm. She’d been such a happy kid, full of laughter, always showing those brilliant teeth. I’d thought of her as one of those people for whom joy was a normal state of being.

  There was very little that I could say to my cousin. The usual comforting clichés one would offer to a patient—“Get well soon,” “Don’t worry, you’re in good hands”—were obviously out of the question. All the while, I was thinking about her motive. If you saturate yourself with gasoline and strike a flame, you are not simply crying out for help; you are crying out for death. Sometime later I saw a semidocumentary film by Dariush Mehrjui set in Ilam, a city in the west of Iran where ten girls and young women commit suicide each month. Ilam is not exceptional; suicides among young women are frequent in all regions of Iran. But the method chosen by young women in Ilam and in the region that surrounds Ilam—self-immolation—is exceptional; elsewhere in Iran, young women poison themselves, drown themselves, hang themselves, leap to their deaths. Dariush Mehrjui’s film suggests that, by a macabre tradition among distressed young women in the region, each successive suicide by fire honors all the others that have gone before. In this way, a type of sisterhood is established. Self-immolation becomes a serial suicide note, each victim saying, in effect, “My motive is the same as that of those who went before.” Unlike in India, where countless young women are put to death in this way by relatives, there is no question of murder in these cases. In Ilam and the Sunni western region of Iran, young women have chosen death by fire over life. The tradition may be atavistic, harking back to an ancient and violent pagan worship of fire, to which Zoroastrianism gave a more beneficent expression.

  Why do these young women kill themselves? As far as the filmmakers, and I, could see, their motive is the intolerable disappointment generated by growing up with heads full of dreams and desires that have so little chance of being fulfilled. My cousin and I would lie down in the grass on her father’s farm, and she would ask me how boys and girls in Tehran got to know each other. She asked me if I had kisse
d a boy yet. She asked me if I agreed that Mehdi Mahdavikia, an Iranian soccer player, was handsome. She said she would love to see him close up one day. She spoke about love and romance and kisses and the gallantry she might one day encounter in a suitor as handsome as Mehdi Mahdavikia. Her imagination bubbled with spiritual ambition, erotic ambition.

  Although I would now be inclined to say that my cousin’s ambitions were hopelessly unrealistic, do I really have the right to say that? What was she hoping for, after all? A palace of gold, eternal bliss, the devotion of a prince? No. What she hoped for was the love of a good man, and the chance to express her own love. That’s not asking for the moon and stars. Except that, for many young women in Iran, and in many other countries—many!—it is. Your husband may be a stranger to you at the marriage ceremony, chosen for you by your parents, a stranger a month later, a stranger ten years later, a stranger forever. Not always, of course. You may win the lottery. Many Iranian men (and, I would guess, American men, too) have fine qualities to offer a woman; I’ve personally met a number of them, especially at the university, sometimes in the bazaar. But there are only so many winners of lotteries, and the odds against winning are greater, surely, when girls and young women from poor families (in particular) are matched with much older men, or with men who have not been prepared by upbringing and culture to pay much attention to what the child they have wedded would wish to have coaxed from her heart.