CHAPTER TWO
Homecoming
He said I want that which cannot be found.
—RUMI
Arabs dance with their hips, Iranians with their arms and shoulders, concluded Huda, sweeping her waterfall of dark hair out of the way as she adjusted the volume on the stereo. For all the sinewy, seductive motions of an Iranian dance—the hooded, luring gaze, the twitching, butterfly-sweep of the hands—there is no overt sensuality in the movement of the hips. We were fascinated by this, and spent our afternoons in her dorm room before the mirror, executing these various styles to Huda’s library of Persian pop music.
Do Afghans dance Baba Karam? I asked her, referring to the most seductive and intricate of all Iranian dances. Huda was from Afghanistan; her grandfather had been president before the turmoil of the Taliban years. While the other second-generation girls of the Islamic diaspora—Egyptians and Pakistanis and Somalis, raised in places like London and New York—bonded by praying together and dancing hip-hop in Cairene clubs, Huda and I fused Persian-Afghan cuisine on her flame-stove, traded stories in Farsi, and shared our longing for Kabul and Tehran. Of these two cities, of course, neither of us had much memory, but they were the poles around which our respective universes centered.
It was exactly one month into my year in Egypt—far too early to conclude I wanted to be elsewhere. It was perplexing to realize that I wanted to go to Iran—a physical journey, not some abstract spiritual one, and now, not at some indefinite point in the future. But the slow awareness was also a relief, as though I had finally found out where the homing device planted deep inside me was directed. The path to Iran led through Egypt, spiraling through the region with confusing twists and detours. It wasn’t until I was nearly right up against Iran that I realized it had been my destination all along.
The knowledge revealed itself to me one night in Cairo, during the spring of 1999. It was a summery spring, hot enough that by nine in the evening the air hung heavy. Cairo displays its charms at night, so we slipped out from the air-conditioned apartment into the heat, and arranged our chairs in a semi-circle overlooking the lights of the suburban district. It was me, and the only two other Iranian women I knew in this city of millions, where I had come to study Arabic. Somewhere in the city, filed away in the gleaming offices of the Fulbright Commission, was a grant application that claimed I wanted to study this language to prepare myself for researching women’s rights in the region. I had suspected for a while that this was only partially true, and tonight I knew for certain.
The balcony belonged to an older Iranian woman who had lived in Cairo for decades. In the intervening years, she had located the Iranians who float through the city, and plucked them into the circle of her company. She had also invited Scheherezade—whom I came to call by her nickname, Shazi—an Iranian correspondent for AP, because she knew that I aspired to journalism. We scarcely knew one another but were brought close by our shared need for the familiar, the company of other Iranian women, adrift in a place where there were few of us.
As we chatted quietly, and sipped our tea—perfumed as Persian tea should be—my own questions bewildered me. They were about the wrong place. Does Cairo smell different than Tehran? I asked. Does the street peddler clanking his way down the alleys yell “rubabekiya” as in Cairo, or something else? The baklava in Tehran is more dense with almonds, isn’t it, not too syrupy sweet, like the Egyptian variety? My mind could not focus on Cairo, preoccupied instead with its difference from the Iran of my imagination.
What I wanted, though I chose not to admit it to myself, was to figure out my relationship to this other country, to Iran. Originating from a troubled country, but growing up outside it, came with many complications. Worst of all, at least on a personal level, was that you grew up assuming everything about you was related to that place, but you never got to test that out, since the place was unstable and sort of dangerous, and you never actually went there. You spent a lot of time watching movies about the place, crying in dark theaters, and feeling sad for your poor country. Most of that time, you were actually feeling sorry for yourself, but since your country was legitimately in serious trouble, you didn’t realize it. And since it was so much easier and romantic to lament a distant place than the day-to-day crappy messes of your own life, it could take a very long time to figure it all out.
That, really, was why I wanted to go to Iran. To see whether the ties that bound me were real, or flimsy threads of inherited nostalgia. The momentum grew inside me, tentative and slow, but I called it by other names, unprepared to begin fiddling with the rubik’s cube of my identity. Going to Cairo bought me time. I was in the same region, short hours away by plane, in nearly the same time zone; closer than I would be in London or New York, separated by a cultural hemisphere, a long journey across time and space of all kinds. A rest house along the way, a caravanserai, Cairo allowed me to dither, to work up my courage. The proximity was comforting; the leap appeared less intimidating.
As we chatted quietly in Farsi, I felt my skin tingling with the possibility of getting on a plane, holding a boarding pass that read Tehran. I tuned back in for Shazi’s summation of her recent trip there: “It was unbearable,” she was saying, jabbing a spoon into the frosty glass of grated cantaloupe, soaked in rosewater. “I’ve never seen so much ill in people as I did there.” Her shoulders sagged, her eyes, her entire posture recoiling at the thought of Iran.
Eventually, the conversation turned to how long it had been since I visited—don’t you want to go, they asked—and I slowly pronounced the words, just to feel them on my tongue.
“I’m aching to go back to Iran. I want to live and work there.”
“So go,” said Shazi, in that tone of hers I would grow to know so well, flip but deadly serious. Just like that, as though she was suggesting we order pizza.
No one had ever said this to me before. For my tribe of Iranians, the Iranian-American diaspora, Iran was a place you wept and argued over, sang about and professed to pine for, but physically avoided.
But Shazi was different. She still lived in the region, and included Iran in the physical constellation of her life. When Shazi spoke of Iran, her voice changed. She lapsed into this intimate, weary tone that seemed to come from the deepest place within her. It seduced me, this tone, with its echoes of the unspeakable. I wanted to experience what she had, to see what it was that required its own timbre.
We shared a taxi home that night, and as we skittishly tried to cross the yawning wide street—still full of traffic at that late hour—she grabbed my hand nervously. We hovered near the curb for a full five minutes, taking tentative steps forward until a black-and-white taxi hurtled too quickly toward us and we jumped back. “They won’t stop, you know,” she warned.
A couple of months after that evening, I was still treading water in Cairo, spending a sweaty summer reporting mind-numbing business stories about privatization for a local Cairo weekly, and sucking vast amounts of chunky, fresh mango juice through a straw. Iran still dominated my thoughts. Twice a week, I stopped by the fakahani, the fruit vendor, who set up his brimming crates on my corner when the sun set. He promised his perfect, crunchy white apples were exported from Iran, and I bought bagfuls—for my roommate, for my landlady, for Huda. Are you certain they’re Iranian? I asked him one night, after watching him sell a Russian prostitute a single mango for $10. Yes, I swear to God they are, he said, feigning a look of deep hurt. And so the days went by, and I aired my longing for Iran in the evening fruit bazaar of a distant capital, awaiting a cue that would direct my return.
One slow afternoon, as I read the wires in the elegant, decaying villa in Garden City that housed the weekly where I worked, a breaking news headline immediately caught my eye: “Student Demonstrations in Tehran Descend into Mass Riots.” The hard-line judiciary had sparked the riots by shutting down an important independent newspaper, the first publication to criticize the Islamic establishment in years. The newspaper was the banner of an emergin
g, loose movement of intellectuals and student activists trying to nudge the autocratic regime into recognizing some basic political and civil rights. The students had been demonstrating in Tehran against the newspaper’s closure.
The night of their protest, security forces raided a dormitory where many of the demonstrators stayed, breaking down locked doors, attacking students asleep in their beds with clubs and batons. Some students jumped in terror from the balconies of their dorm rooms.
In 1999, the Islamic regime tolerated little dissent, and conducted itself with unchecked brutality. Some of the ruling clerics were checked out, out of touch with the frustration of ordinary people; others were aware, but were warped and fundamentalist enough not to care. The dormitory attack outraged students and everyday Iranians alike, and they poured into the streets by the tens of thousands, chanting death to the regime’s leaders, looting buildings. It had all come without warning. Frustration with the country’s lawlessness, the poor economy, and severe social restrictions dominated Iranian life. But never since the revolution had grievances exploded into such public turmoil.
Sitting in Cairo, watching this unfold through lines of text on a dusty computer screen, I was stricken. The last time mass riots overran Tehran, a revolution followed. Could it be happening all over again? Without me? How could there be another revolution when I still hadn’t understood the first one? The thought that Iran might change overnight, undergo another defining upheaval that I would miss, was unbearable. I was naive enough to believe I had a duty to witness history, if only as a tourist-spectator.
I ran home, packed a bag, phoned the travel agent, and rushed to see Shazi at work on the way to the airport. Can you give me phone numbers for sources, I asked urgently, pacing back and forth along the terrace overlooking the Nile. She gave me a strange look. Khanoum, what do you mean sources? These are protests. Your sources are people on the street. I was afraid she would say that. I didn’t know the streets of Tehran, and my Farsi didn’t include the vocabulary of political rage. I was petrified. I didn’t understand how foreign correspondents worked, didn’t know it was possible to hire fixers and drivers who could pick you up at the airport and drive you straight to your story. I thought I had to do it all myself. Shazi, please. Just give me some numbers.
Arriving at Mehrabad Airport was ominous, but mostly I was impressed that my Iranian passport, which had acquired dust for years, actually had a function. The long wait for customs check seemed endless, not because of any official, repressive policy, but due to the thick issue of Vogue stuffed down my pants. Images of unveiled women were banned in Iran, and I knew the fall fashion issue would never make it past the censor. The customs agent rifled through layers of papers and sweaters, and produced a Botticelli mousepad. He studied the painting on the plastic foam with narrowed eyes, and deemed Venus on the half shell pornographic, tossing her into a cardboard box underneath the examination table filled with other confiscated obscenities.
I arrived, and my aunt and uncle swiftly barred me from leaving the house. If anything happens to you, your mother will kill us. Have you gone mad, coming here for a reason like this? I paced around the apartment on Shariati Street, ready to climb the walls; I knew they were right, that it would be stupid to go outside at a time like this, when I didn’t even know how to count toman, Iranian currency. Once they realized I was on the verge of doing it anyway, they appointed a committee to help me deal with the riots. A family friend chaperoned me down to the university; another, a journalist, briefed me on everything he knew. We drove to Evin, Tehran’s notorious prison, where hundreds of mothers held vigil outside, wailing and demanding to know what had become of their children. Scores of students had been arrested, but no one knew exactly how many. Everyone I spoke to crackled with emotion—fear, adrenaline, fury. Police patrolled the streets around the university, keeping an eerie, post-riot calm.
To absorb and make sense of it all was impossible, but the challenge thrilled me—going home, reporting a cataclysmic news story, rediscovering old relatives. At night I couldn’t sleep, as though an electric cloud hovered over me, disrupting my thoughts, tweaking my balance. Overwhelmed, I busied myself with the task of counting the number of students who had been injured, arrested, imprisoned, and killed, respectively. The summer before moving to Cairo, I had interned at Human Rights Watch, and my old boss Elahé was flying in from New York. She had called ahead and asked me to begin reporting a tally. We met at her room in the Homa Hotel. Certain the room was bugged, we communicated by scribbling notes back and forth on post-its, our hands shaking.
Over the next few days, as students flooded in to see Elahé with fresh stories of kidnapped organizers and updates on the injured, I sat and listened. Being a politically active student in Iran, I found out, meant compromising your studies, your safety, your family’s safety, and your future. They came alone, and in huddled groups, whispering urgently and eyeing the undercover intelligence agents—unmistakable with their two-day growth of beard and aimless gait—who crawled throughout the hotel lobby. I pushed little tea cakes around, and sat mute in fascination. Everything about them shocked me. First, their belief that the regime could be fixed.
They said the reform movement had bold schemes for challenging the entrenched clergy. Over time, it would revive the Revolution’s original ideals, and re-chart the system toward Islamic democracy, setting a defining example for the Muslim world. Clenched between their fists, tucked under their arms and in their backpacks, were the independent newspapers of the day, filled with strident critiques of the ruling clergy. They insisted that there would not be, in fact should not be, another revolution.
The revolution of 1979 had already frozen the country’s development for two decades; another violent upheaval would only devastate yet another generation, they argued. I listened carefully, fiddling with my pen, realizing with deep disappointment that if these students’ views were at all representative (they were middle class, from all around the country) the Islamic regime was here to stay.
Deep in the heart of every Iranian expatriate lurks a hope for another revolution, one that would reverse the catastrophe of 1979 overnight, swiftly and bloodlessly topple the mullahs, and return our country to us. There is a consensus—among Iranian television networks in Los Angeles, exiles who host dinners for congressmen in Beverly Hills and Bethesda—that Iranians will eventually overthrow this regime, and that it is simply a matter of time. That conviction underpinned our lives in the diaspora, and in its defense we saw revenge and redemption for everything we had lost.
I had always thought that way myself, in part because I knew very little about post-revolutionary Iran, but more importantly, because I wanted it to be true. As the demonstrations breathed life into my conception of Iran, I saw that the expatriate view—Iran as a static, failed state in unchanging decline—had little to do with the country itself, and everything to do with the psychology of exile. It was an emotional trick to ease the pain of absence, the guilt of being the ones who left, or chose to stay outside. It was a delusion that deferred a mournful truth: that we would never regain the Iran of before 1979, that we would never go back. That if we wanted to deal with Iran as patriots, it would have to be the Iran that existed now, wounded and ugly with its pimples and scars.
I lay awake at night, my old ideas about Iran shattered, with no new framework to understand any better what might happen. The society I had stepped into was precarious, that much was clear. One day, perhaps very near or very far, its current reality would collapse. But how would this happen, barring the bang of revolution? The uncertainty was transfixing, and I spent hours talking until I was hoarse, filling pages with notes, trying to understand.
The slogans the students chanted that summer of 1999, together with the gigantic outpouring of public discontent, fell two decades after the Islamic Revolution and marked an important turning point in its history. Two years prior—in 1997—a moderate cleric named Mohammed Khatami was elected president and promised to tra
nsform the Islamic regime into a more gentle, democratic system governed by the rule of law. I remember standing at the magazine stand of a chain bookstore in California, watching other Iranian-Americans cast curious, hopeful glances at the covers that screamed things like “The Beginning of the End” and “Iran’s Second Revolution?”
An array of progressive intellectuals and activists of varying backgrounds, ranging from the ardently secular to the liberally Islamist, backed Khatami’s efforts. The whole process, from the president’s reforms to the grassroots activism, came to be known as the reform movement. The premise that held these disparate forces—socialists, secular intellectuals, both liberal and militant Islamists—together was that Iran could be, indeed must be, transformed from within, without another revolution. This absolutely everyone I talked to agreed with—from my elderly great-aunt who kept a photo of the Shah on her nightstand, to teenage punks who listened to rap and raced motorbikes.
Some of the reformers were concerned with internal political and civil rights, and sought to nudge Iran from autocratic theocracy toward tolerant democracy. If they managed to amend the Constitution, their thinking went, they could abolish or dramatically curtail the power of unelected clerical bodies that ran the country and controlled its economy. Many from this reformist camp, however, wanted to retain the revolution’s anti-Western ethos and its commitment to religio-political causes such as the liberation of Palestine. It was a don of the reformist camp, for example, who organized the Palestinian Intifadeh conferences that would be held in Tehran, gathering young and old militants, among them notorious most-wanted-types, to munch on pastry and poke a collective finger in the eye of the West.
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