Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  For Navid, this partly explained Hassan Rouhani’s reelection in 2017.

  “The government was never going to play with the vote like they did in 2009,” said Neda. “They learned their lesson. They didn’t want to see people back in the streets. They weren’t going to take that risk. But will they really let him accomplish anything that will improve the situation in Iran? We don’t know. If they feel that it’s necessary for them to stay in power, they will. To stay in power—that is all that matters to them.”

  A weighty question hung in the air: Could protestors again take to the streets, demand an overhaul of the entire government, even an end to Islamic rule? Surprisingly, no one could envision Iranians back in the streets again, battling the security forces and incurring martyrs for the liberal cause, like Neda Agha-Soltan, who was gunned down by sniper fire after being stuck in traffic near the site of an antigovernment demonstration. The video of the young woman bleeding to death on the pavement generated sympathy for the Green Movement around the world and stigmatized the government as another brutal dictatorship oppressing its people with bullets. Now, they said, the government was smart enough never to risk such scenes being repeated, and the liberal forces knew better than to risk another violent crackdown. The result was a Mexican standoff: Neither side knew how far the other was willing to go.

  One thing was certain: Many Iranians, this group included, explicitly did not want to see another revolution, with people out in the streets, even if it would lead to the toppling of the Islamic regime.

  “We’ve been through that once before, and we’ve seen what can happen,” Nassim said, referring to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “People don’t think straight in times like that. Look what that brought us. And look at what is happening all around us—in Syria and Iraq, where society has completely broken down. Do we want to risk that?”

  This was a familiar refrain. Many Iranians, even the most fervent opponents of the government, had no appetite for open revolution, and actually preferred not to see the regime removed completely, at least not now. What had changed? Within Iran, nothing. But in Iran’s geopolitical neighborhood, everything. The Arab Spring of 2011 saw the tumbling of autocratic regimes in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. Violent riots broke out on the streets in Bahrain. Syria descended into a bloodbath; competing forces have virtually destroyed the country. Worst of all, from an Iranian point of view, larger external powers—Russia, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, jihadist forces—have filled the void to pursue their own interests, turning the countries in which they are fighting into near failed states. Most Iranians do not fear their country descending into Syria-like carnage if the regime falls, but, for the time being, the uncomfortable and repressive stability that they know is far more preferable to radical, unknown instability. With powerful, self-interested forces all around them, this was not the time for upheaval and the uncertainties it would bring.

  Shapur cut in. “Look at all the foreign powers that have gone in there and taken control. You create a—” void, he indicated, with a gesture, but I supplied the word. “Yes, a void, and see what fills it. We’ve been invaded too many times, and I don’t want to see that happen again.”

  Then how would the political landscape fundamentally change, I asked. Were those wanting change willing to wait forever, for “the right time,” however long it would take?

  “Maybe something like a ‘managed transition’ would be best,” Neda answered.

  Have you ever known anyone to give up power willingly?—I wanted to say, but bit my tongue.

  It was time to ask something that seemed facile to many Iranians, yet poignant to outsiders: How did we get here? If Iranian society as a whole wasn’t particularly religious, how could the country have been taken over by religious zealots, and how could it stay in power if there was so much opposition to it?

  Ask this of one hundred Iranians and you will receive two hundred explanations. None of them are comprehensive, and yet all of them contain a bit of truth. A general consensus reads something like the following: Forty years ago the people had had enough of the shah, his megalomania, his increasing leaning toward dictatorship, the oppression and brutality of his SAVAK security force. They wanted something new, but there was little thought of the consequences. The Ayatollah Khomeini, living in exile in Paris, saw his moment.

  “He lied to us,” Nassim said. “He said he wasn’t going to do anything to change the role of women, that he would only be a caretaker leader until Iran stabilized once again, and so on and so on. We believed it. And he lied. Soon after he took power all the restrictions came. Alcohol was banned. The hijab, even the full chador, became mandatory. All the Western literature disappeared from the bookstores. He totally changed Iranian society.”

  Shapur picked up on this: “These rulers have been in power so long they’ve become arrogant. They think that they can control us, that they can run our lives, that they can make us accept their values and live like they think we should.”

  Neda added: “They want to take our—.” She paused, searched for words, and placed her hand over her heart.

  Shapur had more to say: “But they really aren’t in control anymore. They’re struggling to stay in control, but they greatly underestimated the people’s reaction in the 2009 election. They thought we were stupid, that we would accept anything they told us, or were far too timid to express our opinions.”

  I ventured a question I knew couldn’t be answered, not in a single sentence, or two, or twenty. I was more interested in the group’s reaction than in getting anything like a decisive reply.

  “But why are they still in power?”

  Neda whispered something to Navid: “She says they wouldn’t be if the U.S. would help us.”

  “In what way?”

  Again, Navid translated: “Militarily.”

  “You mean send in the marines, take over the country?”

  “No, just kill all the leaders and leave.”

  This was wishful thinking, and everyone knew it. As far as this group was concerned, there was no Persian Spring over the horizon and none was sought. If a dramatic change in the government were to occur, it would not come from the streets. Navid proposed another way: “Now there is an enormous amount of debate over government policies, and the pushback by the people against so many restrictive laws is so constant that the leaders have had to open society up, little by little. I don’t think the regime will collapse, like what happened in Libya or Egypt. More likely, over time it will just wear away.”

  Other members of the group nodded in assent, but cautiously rather than convincingly. Trying to predict the political future in Iran was more precarious than storm chasing, but for many Iranians any possible path that would lead Iran out of the morass in which it had been mired for four decades was welcome and worthy of hope. I told them I was skeptical that Iran would ever see such a smooth and seamless transition. Certain changes to the status quo would be so dramatic and symbolic that they would signify the end of the Islamic Revolution—eliminating the mandatory hijab, for example, or loosening the ban on alcohol, if only for non-Muslim tourists in designated hotels. But such changes would open floodgates of reform that the government could never hold back. Incremental changes appease the masses for a while, but in the evolution of any society there comes a tipping point when, I argued, “Islamic democracy” and all the contradictions it stood for would be no more.

  There were tentative nods of assent, but in the faces of these young Iranians there was more tentativeness than assent. This was nothing unusual. Any prediction of Iran’s future was torturous and had been for decades. Few would go out on a limb to venture any view on what the future held. A painless transition might not be in the cards, but any scenario that would free Iranian society from the stranglehold it has endured since 1979 could not be dismissed. To deny it was to deny hope. But among this group of young Iranians none of them expressed the desire to leave the country for a more fruitful life in the liberal West. They had already been educ
ated in respectable universities—one of the reasons young Iranians want to go West. And likely they had been raised in families that bucked conservative traditions, so social constraints had never cast a shadow over their adult lives—a major concern of many Iranian women. For other Iranians, however, the West came calling. With the U.S. almost closed off as a destination, Canada had become the next-best option, and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and New Zealand. But not for this group.

  “They aren’t going to drive me out of my country,” said Nassim.

  “They can go to hell,” Neda chimed in.

  What about the brain drain? This question troubled me, as it should any Iranian. This quiet, creeping ailment had nibbled at the fabric of Iranian society for decades, and it was only getting worse. Many of Iran’s best-educated young people had given up expecting any meaningful changes in Iranian society, or hope for its immediate future, and have left to set up new lives abroad. Hard facts are hard to come by, but as many as five million Iranians have left Iran since the Islamic Revolution, and the exodus continues.

  “It’s a dead country,” one friend told me, who eventually migrated to Canada.

  I asked this group of young, educated Iranians if the government wasn’t concerned about losing them.

  “They hope we will leave,” Neda responded.

  “Fewer of us to bother them,” Nassim chimed in.

  The conversation had hit rock bottom, as most conversations about politics in Iran eventually do, but then it took a more promising turn. For many years Iranian cinema has been arguably the most accomplished in the Middle East and executed on a level equal to the highest international standards. Politics may be endlessly and depressingly uncertain, but there is no doubt that Iranians are forever proud of their cinema. Near the beginning of Asghar Farhadi’s international hit A Separation, Simin, the wife of Nader, tells a judge, cryptically, that she wants to emigrate with her daughter because she doesn’t want her “to grow up in this situation.” Such a loaded remark passed the scrutiny of the government censors because of the ambiguity of the word “situation.” Did it refer to politics? Or economic hardship from international sanctions, of course the fault of the West? In art, interpretation is everything. The censors read the comment one way, cinema-savvy audiences another.

  With this group of young Iranians, mention of the scene dispelled the gloomy clouds of emigration and threw us into the far more uplifting topic of Iranian cinema. Neda asked if I knew of the directors Majid Majidi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. That I was not only familiar with them but had seen several of their films surprised her more than the fact that she was talking cinema with a visiting American on a takht under the stars in Abyaneh.

  Iranian cinema has long been winning accolades around the world through the work of Majidi, Makhmalbaf, Amir Naderi, Bahman Ghobadi, Masoud Kimiai, Parviz Kimiavi, and giant of the cinema Abbas Kiarostami, who passed away in July 2016, plunging Iran’s cultural community into deep mourning. But Asghar Farhadi thrust Iranian cinema into Western consciousness with A Separation. Perhaps most significant from a sociopolitical viewpoint, it shows that Iranian society grapples with the same commonplace problems that afflict the rest of the world—marital strife, the care of aging parents, class divisions. He followed it with The Salesman a year later, about the strains put on a marriage due to a suspected sexual assault, becoming the only director in the history of the Academy Awards to win back-to-back Oscars for Best Foreign Film. But he declined to appear at the ceremony to collect his second statue in protest over U.S. president Donald Trump’s proposed immigration ban on several Muslim-majority countries, which only earned Farhadi greater global favor.

  International accolades aside, many filmmakers besides Farhadi have used the screen to serve as a window into Iranian society. In Leila, by Darius Mehrjui, an otherwise happy marriage is destroyed when in-laws persuade the husband, Reza, to take a second wife because Leila cannot produce a child. Jafar Panahi’s Tehran Taxi follows the rounds of a nighttime taxi driver, in classic Scorsese fashion, as he encounters drug addiction, suicide, and other social ills. One of my favorites, I told the group, has always been Majidi’s The Color of Paradise, in which a widower living in the northwest countryside has an opportunity to remarry but worries that his blind son may jeopardize his chances, so he lends him out to a blind carpenter. That a film with the theme of blindness would be filled with images of the lush landscape adds a dark irony. Of course the story ends tragically, as is the case in most great films, but for critics, this gives it the thematic heft that pushes the film into the category of art.

  In such a politically charged society like Iran, governed by a theocratic regime, it might seem surprising that overt statements regarding religion or politics are largely absent from Iranian films. But one must remember that this is Iran, where all artistic production is overseen by watchful government censors, and any challenge to the legitimacy of the ruling regime, no matter how sleight-of-hand, may lead to a jail sentence. So the situation of artists in Iran mirrors those in Eastern Europe under communist rule—metaphor, symbolism, and subtext become the means of subversive expression. A recent example is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour, a black-and-white allegorical tale about a female vampire who seeks victims in the industrial neighborhood near her apartment. The metaphor of bloodsucking, and the image of the black cloak being equated to the chador, would fail to resonate with only the most obtuse filmgoers.

  A question was biting at me: I wondered to what extent Iranian movies, which must clear the rigorous eyes of censors before they can be released in Iran, truly represented Iranian society. The same could be asked of American films, without the censor factor: Do American films present an honest representation of American life? I knew it wasn’t a fair comparison. Saturation coverage of news events beamed around the world reinforce, balance, or counter whatever impressions are gleaned from American movies. But there is no in-depth coverage of daily events in Iran in most of the world’s media. The movies are our only window, and few people see them.

  For example, I asked these cinemagoers how we were to take most of the scenes in About Elly, in which a group of young Iranians rent a beach house for a weekend. All of the women retain their headscarves within the house, even though they are far beyond the ubiquitous eyes of any dress police. Also, no alcohol consumption is shown, when in real life it would be quite conceivable that someone in the group would have brought along a bottle of contraband—or two. Was this “social realism,” Iranian style?

  “Oh, no,” Nassim jumped in. “The directors make these decisions in order to have their films shown in Iran, and to get permission to film in the first place. Whatever is shown in movies, everyone knows that real life is different.”

  Often one also had to be Iranian, or well versed in Iranian social and political life, to read the subtext that permeates Iranian films. Neda commented on The Salesman: “There are scenes where the couples who don’t know each other very well are in the same apartment, and the women don’t take off their headscarves. That’s possible, but it’s a delicate matter when meeting anyone. How well do you know them? Are they religious? Would they feel uncomfortable if one of the women removes her scarf? When all the women keep their scarves on there’s a tension in the scene that only Iranians would understand.”

  All of this led to another question: For movies shot in Iran, how difficult was it to get the government’s approval? This time the answer had been provided by Asghar Farhadi himself. He appeared at a screening of A Separation I attended shortly after it was released, and the question was asked by a member of the audience in the question-and-answer session that followed.

  “A shooting script must be submitted to the government before approval to film can be granted,” he explained. “But once you get the okay you go ahead and shoot whatever you want.”

  I felt mischievous and pushed a provocative point: I told them that for the health of the Iranian film industry it w
ould be better that the regime stayed in power. Looks of disbelief swept across previously tired faces. I told them of a statement I once heard by a Czech filmmaker, that the countries of Eastern Europe made far better films when the communists were in control because subversive messages could not be conveyed directly. Good filmmakers became masters of symbolism and metaphor, and audiences became more sophisticated viewers because they had to watch movies more closely and think about their meanings more deeply. Discussions of films were more interesting, since there were greater ranges of interpretation. Conclusion: Creative oppression created a more vibrant creative culture.

  “If the choice is between great movies and a better life, I know which one I would take,” said Neda.

  The hour was late, and any argument for continued artistic repression could hardly receive an honest hearing. One by one, the other takhts around us had emptied, as the rest of the hotel guests trudged off to their rooms, where some would undoubtedly finish the night with a few sips from a bottle of bootlegged hooch.

  Navid and Shapur, and Neda and Nassim bade me goodnight, but I stayed for a while after the entire patio had cleared and even the lights inside the hotel had gone dark. Now I was alone with the stars, and the darkened sky shimmered with brilliant specks. For the first time I truly felt the cool of the night air, quietly stirred by the breezes that drifted down from the high ridges that encircled the town and the valley below. Talk of politics was swept away by the night breeze, and even the movie screen lost its glimmer and faded into the darkness. All was quiet, and I could imagine myself sitting on the roof of Mohammad and Sorour’s grandmother’s house on a similar night not so long ago, when national politics was as remote as the stars and the movies were still a distant dream. The village would have been abuzz from daybreak till sunset, with children playing in the lanes and household noises passing through windows habitually left unshuttered. The arrival of dusk meant the dissipation of the day’s cares, and one could find sufficient entertainment in the sensations of the night.