My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir
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I think a half hour has passed without any break in the sounds of the beating. Can anyone live through this? I’m shaking all over, like a child compelled to watch a horror movie.
At last the cell door above slams shut. For some minutes, there is nothing to be heard. He is surely dead, at the very least unconscious. Tentatively, I whisper, “Are you alive?”
The madman begins moaning, in exactly the way he was moaning earlier. He doesn’t reply when I repeat my question.
“Hey, sir, are you all right?” I ask again.
I can feel a type of hysteria building, as if the madman’s moaning has infected me.
“I will cry if you don’t stop!” I shriek.
The madman stops, but as soon as he falls silent, howling breaks from my mouth. I can’t hold it in. I’m convulsed with fear, mixed with longing for my father’s touch. I let the howling have its way.
12
I WAS IN the fourth grade at Reza Zadeh Primary School in South-central Tehran when a decree banning the wearing of white socks to school was announced. Iran was just emerging from its savage war with Iraq at that time, and, as with almost all nations in time of war, those in power defined and redefined patriotic behavior. In essence, the rules amounted to this: the more unreflecting one’s acceptance of the latest tests of patriotism, the better. There is nothing new about this: it was just the same in Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. And there is, in fact, an insidious logic underlying tests of patriotism: those who don’t or won’t comply identify themselves as subversives and can be dealt with accordingly. In Chile during the rule of the junta, teenagers who wore sneakers identified themselves as sympathizers with the left and became targets of the death squads who cruised the streets of Santiago. There was not even a decree; nevertheless, people were expected to know that the wearing of sneakers was offensive to the regime.
In Iran under the rule of the mullahs, everything, even the colors of the rainbow, was (and remains) politicized. (This was the argument of the Iranian film Gabbeh [Rug] made by Mohsen Makhmalbaf in 1996.) There is no saying who in the regime came up with the idea of banning the wearing of white socks by schoolchildren. But one day our principal announced that children who wore white socks to school were mocking the blood of the martyrs who gave up their lives fighting the Iraqis. It was not as though white was considered a particularly cheerful color in Iranian culture; it has, by and large, the same association in my culture as in many others: purity, cleanliness, virginity. So I imagine that the pious lawmakers simply thought black was the only color that adequately honored the war martyrs. White became in their minds (I’m only guessing, of course) the new pink.
When the announcement was made at the school assembly, every kid who had worn white socks that day and even those who weren’t sure glanced down at their feet. Gasps and cries filled the air. We in white socks were horrified at what we had done. We’d blasphemed! Insulted young men who’d bled on the battlefields! But we knew that we hadn’t intended to do any such thing. Kids pleaded with the teachers watching over us, “Miss, I didn’t know! Oh, please, miss, it wasn’t my fault!” You could sense the hysteria. Not one single child at my school had ever deliberately insulted “the martyrs”; it would never have occurred to us to do so. And yet here we were, trembling with fear, our hearts pounding because, somehow or other, by some scheme of the Devil’s, we had been made to appear unpatriotic, unrighteous, and un-Iranian. The principal had to assure us that the decree applied only from the date of its announcement, which was a great relief, because it was by no means out of the question in Iran for tests of patriotism to be backdated.
So we went home that day and told our parents about the white socks decree. The response would have been different in different households. In my house, there was a certain amount of eye rolling. My father was, of course, disgusted. He was and remains a good Muslim, but he objects to his religion having irrational convictions, such as the white socks business, foisted on it. To him, Islam is the great solace of a people, not a bruising avalanche of mindless decrees. My mother simply absorbed the news and made sure that I had good, patriotic socks of solid black to wear to school each morning.
You would think that the fear that had run like wildfire through the school assembly on the day of the announcement would have guaranteed that no child would ever again come to school in white socks. But, in the way of things, there were lapses. Perhaps some parents forgot, or maybe, after a few weeks, the kids began to wonder whether such a decree had ever really been announced; maybe they had only dreamed it. Well, the school took the decree seriously, and the offenders were punished severely. The sentence could take the form of corporal punishment (the cane, just as in English public schools when wretched boys made a mistake of comparable inanity), but the most feared sanction was public shaming. The transgressors—children of five, six, seven, eight years old—were told that they would have to “answer our martyrs in the after-life”—a terrifying thing to have on your conscience.
In the immediate aftermath of the decree, I began to question just a tiny bit whether the martyrs were really going to be offended by white socks. After all, they were in Heaven. Were they going to stop whatever wonderful activities they were enjoying to weep over a negligent schoolchild? But my doubts were easily subdued. What I wanted as much as or more than any other kid in my school was to demonstrate my ability to follow rules with scrupulous attention. I was a goody-goody, probably the chief goody-goody at Reza Zadeh, and I wanted it to be known that any other kid, even on his or her best day, could not come close to me in the exhibition of commendable behavior. During the ten days of the Dawn Celebration, commemorating the period between the return to Iran from exile of Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 and the birth of the Islamic Republic, each class had to prepare a program honoring the Father of the Nation and his great achievement. We sang revolutionary songs, acted out dramas of praise, and wrote stories that excoriated the sins of the Pahlavi era. Although we didn’t know it, we were part of a worldwide congregation of children, all offering up our songs of praise to honor self-proclaimed messiahs, or the Stars and Stripes, or this or that Magnificent Battle, this or that Glorious Revolution. And all of us children had villains to boo, a Goldstein to burn in effigy.
The offerings of each class were presented in the morning before regular classes began, always out in the school quadrangle. The ayatollah had returned to Iran in February, so the programs had to be performed in the cold and wet of that winter month. We didn’t complain openly, but in every heart there dwelled a secret wish that the Father of the Nation had waited a few months before returning to his homeland.
The triumph of the Islamic Revolution didn’t mean a great deal to me, nor to any of the kids I knew. (There were a few honorable exceptions.) But the Dawn Celebration did provide a wonderful opportunity for me to show how clever I was, and how obedient, and, well, how clever. I wrote articles that took a cudgel to the Pahlavis, even though my dad certainly would not have approved, since he remained a little sentimental about the shah. I never showed him my writings for this reason.
By the time I reached high school, I was still very active in displaying my cleverness and accepting pats on the back, but all the while, the seed of doubt that the white socks decree had planted in my mind was putting down fine roots. A sense of justice can always benefit from a complementary sense of the ridiculous. The white socks decree was merely puzzling to me at the age of ten, but at the age of fourteen, it was ludicrous. My friends and I found relief from the burden of listening in solemn silence to utter nonsense by whispering what we thought of as extremely witty jokes to one another. Isn’t it both strange and wonderful that people in countries all over the world who are required to sniff platefuls of manure and pronounce them a delight to the nostrils retain the desire to speak the truth at another time? This seems to have been especially true behind the Iron Curtain in the years of the Soviet hegemony, and it was certainly true in Iran. We kids ridiculed the superpious among u
s, or not really the pious pure and simple but the politically pious. The joy of being able to laugh at the laughable, to ridicule the ridiculous! It guards one’s integrity when all other defenses are proscribed. Of course, one should not go through life merely making fun of political pieties; that would be bad for the soul. But at certain times, doing so saves us from the corruption of prescribed belief.
Fear enfeebles conviction, obviously; the cost of saying what you believe is often too high a price to pay. But another enemy of conviction is ego. At the time that I was ridiculing the political pieties of the regime, I was traveling from school to school in the Tehran region presenting with my classmates a play I’d written to honor the Islamic Revolution—an example of Sartrean bad faith if ever there was one. The play was considered a wonderful piece of work by my more conventional teachers, replete with condemnations of the Pahlavis and exhortations to “the people” to keep the rulers of the state ever in their hearts and prayers. It was a terrific experience, being feted and applauded at each school, and I had no great difficulty in rationalizing my hypocrisy. If I could listen to applause and be awarded golden grades for performing nonsense, then was I not subverting the regime in a particularly clever way? Having my cake and eating it, too? This was my argument to my parents, in fact, to my dad especially. I was sixteen at this time, quite old enough to invent these rationalizations, but also old enough to accept that they were not so different from those the despised regime itself employed. I might have argued myself out of all genuine conviction but for the example set by some of my teachers, particularly Mrs. Azimi.
Mrs. Azimi was no firebrand, but in her quiet way she was perhaps more effective in her subversion of the regime’s lies and pieties than a host of more blatant rebels. She taught history. Teaching history, even in a democracy with tested institutions and a well-established pluralist tradition, is fraught with difficulties for anyone with genuine intellectual curiosity and a passion for the truth. Teaching history in the Islamic Republic was even more of a trial. Just as modern-day primary and secondary students in Japan are offered a version of their nation’s role in the Second World War that glosses over embarrassing and inconvenient events (the rape of Nanjing, for example, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Korean civilians), history texts in the Islamic Republic offer a version of Iran’s history that endorses the regime’s take on things without reference to facts, or at least to disinterestedly agreed-on accounts. Mrs. Azimi was not about to go into battle with a lance and a sword to champion truth, but when the opportunity presented itself, she made use of other weapons to uphold objectivity: she nudged, she prodded, she gave the occasional shove. She took such risks only when she was encouraged to do so by the curiosity of the student. I was curious, and so were some of my classmates. Little by little, Mrs. Azimi lifted a veil and allowed us to see a second, unofficial drama to compare with the official one. This was thrilling. I asked questions; I was given answers. It was not Mrs. Azimi herself who provided the answers; she was too wary for that. Instead, she allowed me to borrow books published before the Revolution and now difficult to come by, in which I was able to find the answers myself.
I know, of course, that there are seldom incontestable answers when it comes to questions in history such as who did what, when, where, and why. But it is possible to find yourself more attracted to interpretations of events in which a greater complexity of thought is evident. I can’t say that I read Mrs. Azimi’s books with a perfectly open and objective mind, but at least I didn’t bring to the task the mind-set of an ideologue. I realized how likely I was to side with views that contradicted those in my high school textbooks, and I cautioned myself against exchanging one blinkered view of my nation’s history for another. I would never say I had a gift that told me when I was reading the truth, but, like many other conscientious students of history, I could at least tell when one account of events was more reliable than another. In my high school textbooks, no space was allowed for reflection; all statements were categorical. In Mrs. Azimi’s books, the authors offered their readers the opportunity to disagree. It was refreshing to see actual evidence offered to support a point of view. Evidence! What a beautiful concept! And, again, how refreshing to see self-interested testimony exposed. These writers took for granted that a statement by someone with something to gain from being believed called for scrutiny. It was as if the writers were saying to me, “Use your brains, reflect on what you know of life, be skeptical, recognize that most people will lie for the sake of advantage, make up your mind in your own good time.”
Something I noticed again and again when comparing accounts of historic events was the sheer pettiness and ill will of the school text versions. An example was the story of the political strife in Iran in the early 1950s, when the prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq, nationalized the Iranian oil industry. Mosaddeq was widely admired in Iran even after the Islamic Revolution for having stood up to the foreign oil companies, particularly British Petroleum. The date of nationalization was observed each year with a public holiday, even under Pahlavi, who was no friend of Mosaddeq and who, in fact, denationalized the oil industry as soon as he got the chance.
I grew up with not one but three versions of this event: the version accepted by the general public, the version sanctioned under the reign of Pahlavi, and the version promoted by the Islamic regime after 1979 and endorsed in school texts. The publicly accepted version was that the shah, acting entirely at the bidding of the foreign oil companies, which had installed him on the throne in 1941, after the Allied powers forced his Axis-leaning father into exile, had connived with the CIA to get rid of Mosaddeq. In this version, Pahlavi repaid the Americans by delivering Standard Oil a 40 percent share of the denationalized oil industry, restoring the remaining 60 percent to British Petroleum. The Pahlavi version (accepted by my father and, so far as I could see, by all those who supported the shah’s regime) was that Mosaddeq had almost destroyed the oil industry by acting without regard to economic realities, such as the nation’s dependence on oil income, and that only the sage intervention of the shah had saved the nation from bankruptcy. (In this version, it is conceded that Mosaddeq loved his country but in a misguided way.) The regime version was that Mosaddeq was actually a tool of the British oil interests and had intended to return 100 percent of the Iranian oil industry to British interests but had been thwarted by the Pahlavi-backed CIA coup of 1953.
A fourth version—the one I found in Mrs. Azimi’s books—endorsed the understandings accepted by the public, although with qualifications and caveats. What amazed me was that the regime should have thought it necessary to discredit Mosaddeq, deny him his due as an enemy of the Pahlavis and a friend to the nation. The Pahlavis were the enemies of both Mosaddeq and the mullahs, after all. Standing up to foreign interests was exactly what the regime was prepared to applaud. If there were one figure in prerevolutionary Iran that the regime should have lionized, wouldn’t that figure be Mosaddeq? But no. When people put up posters of Mosaddeq on Nationalization Day, the regime’s stooges tore them down or defaced them. The regime so detested Mosaddeq that it contrived a highly implausible theory to explain why he had nationalized the oil industry to start with. So I puzzled and puzzled over the regime’s motives, and bit by bit, prodded by Mrs. Azimi, I came to understand: the regime could not afford to concede that a secularist had done the nation service.
At the time I was reading Mrs. Azimi’s books, I had no way of knowing that the regime’s strategy of writing the history that best suited it was employed by despots, tyrants, totalitarians, and democratically elected leaders all over the world. I had not read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, with its portrait of the Soviet regime’s thought police. I had not studied the show trials of Nazi Germany. I had not taken enough interest in British history to discern the self-serving fictions of successive British governments on the question of Ireland. But I could see what Mrs. Azimi was getting at: that, to the powerful, truth is negotiable.
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br /> One anomalous benefit of being educated in an Iranian secondary school is that philosophy was (and is) an elective subject at the higher levels. It was okay for philosophy teachers to nurture critical habits of thought, and the works of great thinkers from Aristotle to Sartre remained uncensored. This liberty of inquiry is explained partly by Persian custom and partly by the philosophy that underpins Islam. Persians have honored philosophy and philosophers since the days of the Persian Empire under Darius the Great, and Islam is not by its nature inimical to daring thought. A competent Islamic scholar will find ways to accommodate the entire output of any of the great philosophers within the capacious edifice of his faith. (Non-Muslims, particularly those in the West, are usually unaware of the extraordinary suppleness of Islam when it is not deformed by a fundamentalist interpretation.) And there is a third explanation for the freedom granted to philosophy teachers: the regime correctly judged that philosophy was harmless without contemporary examples to illustrate or support its contentions, and all illustrations were subject to scrutiny and embargo. Teachers could speak forever about the Aristotelian concept of public virtue but were not permitted to point to anything in the society around them, such as the very un-Aristotelian capriciousness evident in the banning of white socks, to illuminate the lesson. Nonetheless, the training in logic and analysis and the skeptical habit of thought that my philosophy teachers insisted on allowed me and my fellow students to draw our own conclusions.
Later, at the university, my philosophy tutor, Mrs. Ebrahimi, adopted a tactic similar to that of Mrs. Azimi to keep out of hot water with the administration. She encouraged us to doubt and question, but she didn’t participate in debates. She would initiate a discussion, then announce that she intended to leave the classroom. When she returned, she said, she expected us all to be sitting with wide spaces between us, wearing angelic expressions on our faces. So off she would go, and we would continue the argument. When she returned, we would still be sitting in a cluster and arguing with all the passion that nineteen-year-olds bring to such debates. At the next class, Mrs. Ebrahimi would make the same announcement, and it would be disregarded in the same manner. When I recall these wonderful teachers, I am moved by the sheer cunning they displayed in the service of the truth. Perhaps this is how the truth (what truth we have, that is) has survived since time immemorial, through the deviousness and sheer imaginative bravado of people prepared to lie through their teeth to thwart falsehood.