As I was growing up, I was familiar with the brightly coloured images of Imam Ali hanging everywhere, depicted as a handsome man with a thick black beard, a bright green headdress (green being the colour of Islam and worn also by seyyeds – those who can claim direct descent from the Prophet Mohammad), radiating the light of aql, the light of God which Shias believe was transferred directly to the prophets and saints. At the time of Ashura these would be joined by portraits of Imam Hossein, also poster art in style, the colours bold, almost naïve, another handsome, black-bearded man, though often depicted with grey or green eyes.
Although the shah was keen to secularise society and in fact his own portraits hung everywhere, ubiquitous, looking down on all Iranians as they went about their business, in offices, in government buildings, classrooms, university buildings, nonetheless, the faith of the Shia Iranians was too deep-rooted, and as I was growing up, even as I moved through our mainly secular world, I came to be as enamoured of Imam Ali’s image as I was with the shah’s, whose pictorial omnipresence made sure his image was burnt into our brains.
I survived my six months in Iran, even thrived, but mostly by accident. As a journalist I went on a government trip to a remote province. I was ill-prepared, taking with me a selection of brightly coloured, patterned silk headscarves as was the fashion in Tehran, while all the other women on the trip were wearing maghna’ehs to all the official functions the trip turned out to involve. I went to visit government offices in high summer wearing high-heeled sandals and cropped trousers, only realising my gaffe after the eyes of every man I talked to travelled silently to my painted toenails and bare ankles. Nonetheless, no one ever said anything, always treating me with deference and respect, and often with good humour. I felt immense freedom in navigating this society myself, at home in Iran finally, as an individual as well as tied to my great family.
When I finally left Iran, Mehry’s younger brother Amoo Parviz drove me to the airport. As we sat and had a final tea together, he started to talk to me about life in the Islamic Republic. This man, now a grandfather, for me will always be the handsome youth at whose wedding I was a bridesmaid in the late seventies. He had a thick moustache then and wore a white suit like John Travolta’s in Saturday Night Fever, his bride had cascading honey-coloured hair, their wedding reception was held in the glitziest disco in Tehran. She died during the Iran–Iraq war, leaving him with three small children and, after a decade alone, he married again and seemed happy in his life. He had come to Europe the year before for business and had managed to take a few extra days to come to London to see us. It had been his first trip west since the revolution and the first time in as long that my father had seen his nephew, but it had been short.
Now, as we sipped our teas at Mehrabad airport, he started to confide in me, much to my embarrassment and no doubt his too, proud man that he is. But confide he did, in that way I have become accustomed to Iranians doing with me; to them I was trusted family or old friend and yet also an outsider who would take their secrets home with me rather than sit and gossip in Tehran. No one really wants to do this but their hearts are so full they must spill out some of the worries lodged there in order to go on. He told me that on his visit to Europe, he had felt like an alien. Looking, walking and talking just like all the other people but, after thirty years of Islamic rule, after all the daily compromises he had had to make with his soul, his conscience, his very being in order to survive the regime and even prosper, he felt so different to all the people living as people should – in freedom – that he had felt locked up inside himself, unable to break the mask, unable to relate to anyone or allow himself to be understood.
‘Kamin-jan,’ he said to me as I tried to contain his confidences, ‘we are not like other people. I realised this in Europe. There is a gulf because they simply cannot understand what we go through every single day of our lives in order to survive this regime.’
Back in London I was no longer heartbroken. Unlike every other time that I had left Iran, when I relived some of the buried grief of that first most sudden of partings, this time, I felt contained. I was sad but also happy to be home – in my other home, the country that gave me free air to breathe and where, after so many months in Iran, I saw everything through two sets of eyes, noticing for the first time the shapes and sizes and colours of all the people here and how little attention they attract, the casual individuality we take for granted in the West. When, in the streaming crowds of West End workers, lovers paused to fall into each other’s eyes and steal a kiss, I wanted to cheer for love and for freedom.
Soon after my return, and throughout Ahmadinejad’s presidency, my flat in London became a refuge for Iranian friends on the move. My rickety sofa was pulled out time after time to provide a bed for those hyphenated Iranians like me who were seeing the hopes engendered by Khatami’s presidency souring, who were fleeing the pressure of being always under scrutiny. As American–Iranian academics were jailed in Iran, more friends bowed to the inevitable and left before they too became inmates of Evin prison. When the last of these friends left my flat, bound for yet another new life in the US or Dubai, I went and sat at my mother’s kitchen table. My heart was heavy and we sat and drank tea, Bagher, Sedi and I, while I talked and tried to ease the aching sense of déjà vu. I told them of the despair I had seen in my friends, of how we had sat up into early hours, talking and listening to Persian music, sometimes dancing, sometimes crying.
‘I mean,’ I said, carried away by my own emotion, ‘can you imagine, they have left everything behind – their houses, businesses, families.’
Silence fell as my parents both looked at me, blinking. Of course they could imagine. We have been here once before. We are here again.
Now in London, during the holy month of Ramadan, I help my mother cook shole zard and halva. We take the vast trays of food to the Shia mosque in Kilburn, an Iranian place built with money provided by the Supreme Leader. London’s population of Iranians has also exploded since we arrived and they are no longer just those who escaped the revolution like us, but also those who left during the war, and have been leaving ever since, people looking for better opportunities, for freer air to breathe, many former revolutionaries among them, their own lives a testament to the curdling of the dream. The Shia mosque caters to the most recent arrivals and going there is like entering a little bubble of Tehran. Coloured lights are strung outside and in the courtyard mill the young butterflies I had most recently seen in Tehran, their colourful scarves falling off the back of elaborate hairstyles, the boys gelled and clean-shaven, all standing about in groups, throwing loaded glances at each other, giggling.
Inside we enter the women’s section and, when prayers are over and we have all wept as much as we need, everyone bringing their own private griefs to spill out in the ritual mourning that so lightens our hearts, long sofras are thrown down in rows from one end of the room to the other, and everyone sits down cross-legged to break their fast together, the mosque handing out food provided by an Iranian restaurant nearby, girls taking round vast pots of tea from which they charge our glasses. Sedi and I work our way down the rows, offering the trays of food to the assembled women who help themselves to mouthfuls for themselves, for their children, even to take home for their men, muttering blessings as they do so. The faces in front of me are an anthropological study of Iranian ethnicity – we have the broad cheekbones of the Turkoman, the dark tattooed skin of the ethnic Arabs, the heavily accented Farsi of the Azerbaijanis who speak their own Turkish dialect. My mother and I return to our places, in turn accepting food being offered by others, joining the women of my country as we chat and pray and laugh and eat the blessed food that everyone has cooked with such love.
My mother anchors me to my culture. Visiting her house I am returned to the Abbasian bosom, and her kitchen with its smells of saffron, rice and freshly washed herbs, the table groaning under a large basket filled with a cornucopia of fruit, is my haven. Sedi goes on supporting us with her indo
mitable strength, her ability to be flexible as circumstances require and to stand upright in the face of adversity. She sings to us and fills us with her love and her wicked humour and her food into which she pours all that is in her huge heart. After all these years of living in exile, Sedi is so much more to me than my mother – she is my mother tongue, my motherland, and to me, she is also my beloved Iran.
Iran itself will go on, of this I am sure. The rule of the mullahs will one day be wiped from the pages of history as have the eras of the Achaemenids, the Arabs, the Safavids, the Qajar and the Pahlavi shahs before them. But Iran, with her refined Persian culture and her strong women and poetic men is, I am sure, a survivor. She will survive the post-modern era as she has survived the terror of the Greeks, Mongols, even the machinations of the farangis. And, if needs be, she will even survive the weapons of the Israelis and the Americans, no matter how much devastation is wreaked on our beautiful land and on our innocent people. Our culture and our history continue to enrich the souls of new Iranians born to families far from home, and from Los Angeles to Perth, a new generation of Iranians are growing up with a longing they can hardly understand, a heart beating with the yearning to visit the land of our ancestors, to lie under a tree in the soft sunlight and become intoxicated by the fragrance of jasmine and orange blossom – to repossess our own personal paradise.
Epilogue
When Ahmadinejad was first elected, I asked Bagher what he thought. I may have berated him for not returning to Iran, but I know that he follows all the news from Iran on the Internet and I rely on him to have the sort of in-depth knowledge and insight that I, in my dilettante fashion, lack. In trying to form an opinion or understand some peculiar aspect of Iranian culture or literature, I always turn to my father, and together we attend Persian classical concerts and lectures about art and conferences on modern Iranian identity. My sister and mother sometimes join us for the concerts, but mostly my father and I go alone. One such conference was filmed and televised in Iran, and I only found out when one day in Tehran, Guity called me into the sitting room where, there on the television, was my father. Sitting in the audience of a lecture at the British Museum, the camera had caught him in passing, and his niece thrilled to see him. Mehry had been to visit once or twice over the last decades when her work had brought her to Europe, but Guity, fixed always inside the house, has not seen her uncle in three decades. I watched her as she stared at the television intently, standing in the middle of the room, the remote control poised in her right hand, hoping for another glimpse of him. She turned to me and said, almost pleading, ‘But Kamin-joon, why don’t you bring him back?’
Mehry understood my father’s stubborn nature better but Guity seemed to think that my mother or I could influence him in some way, talk him round, change his mind. But we had no effect on him. Our entreaties would be met with a muttered, ‘Inshallah, next year’ and so every time I went back to Iran I failed my cousins in not bringing them their uncle.
When I heard that Ahmadinejad won the election again in 2009, the first person I called was my father. He had predicted four years ago that Ahmadinejad’s ascent would mean a tightening of the power of the Revolutionary Guard, a step towards a military dictatorship. Now, given all that has happened, he seems to have been right all along.
What followed Ahmadinejad’s victory – the demonstrations, the chants of Allah-o-akbar from rooftops at night-time, the beatings, killings and arrests – hit me like a recurring nightmare. Current affairs enthusiasts were excited but I couldn’t share their exhilaration, the sight of the violence on the streets blinded me to any historical perspective, and all I was concerned about was my family and my country once again. In the first few days after the election, when demonstrations seemed vast and unrelenting, I was phoned by a British newspaper that wanted to put me on a plane bound for Tehran so I could report from the demonstrations. I demurred, saying that given the number of my friends and acquaintances already in jail, I didn’t think it would be safe for me to go. The prospect of being imprisoned or even questioned does not attract me and I am certainly not brave. But the newspaper insisted and, exasperated, asked me outright: ‘But aren’t you interested? Don’t you want to help?’
I laughed out loud at the irony. Was I not interested? Well, I was interested in more than the news story, more than the fact that Iran had become the latest hot snippet and more than trying to report the anguish of the Iranian people. What I was – am – more interested in is that Mehry should not have to find herself frequenting government buildings looking for news of me, that her and Guity’s well-earned sleep should not be disturbed by the arrival of Basij in the middle of the night, that Khaleh Mina’s little flat not be forcibly mortgaged against my release from jail and promise of good behaviour in the future. The regime ruthlessly strikes at the heart of what Iranians hold dear – their family ties – in order to control them. Often activists, journalists and other political prisoners are not released until the deeds of the family house have been taken as guarantee against ‘good behaviour’ in the future. I may be bold enough not to mind what happens to me, but I would never want to risk the peace and anonymity of those I hold dear in Iran. The web of love that ties us all together is what is used even to control those of us living outside the country.
In these days that Iran has changed her image a little, now that the world has finally seen something of the true face of Iran, of all those ordinary people who are unsatisfied and unhappy with the regime, there is slightly less to explain. Now we are all cyber warriors protesting by posting online, disseminating information, gathering in our cyber communities as if on the street corner as I had as a child in Ahvaz, spreading video clips that have reached us on wave after wave of technology across the globe. And we are there waiting, us Iranians in the outside world, in the diaspora, waiting, praying, and ready to do so much more than pray. Our distress, guilt and frustration for not being there, the helplessness that those of us who lived through the revolution have become used to feeling in regards to Iran, the pain of it all repeating again, an endless repetition of history in different costumes, we can at least offset, or hold at bay, by being there, at the end of the cyber cord, waiting. We are ready to receive the images, to set up portals and websites and post codes to break locks on banned sites, any way to help the countrymen that suddenly we are linked to in this faceless but totally united way. There is exhilaration to it, and it undercuts the sadness. Because there is an elation to finally being seen, to finally being recognised. But the sadness remains when the elation wears off.
Just as the shabnamehs appeared on the streets overnight during the Constitutional Revolution, leaflets that informed and mobilised the masses, and the revolution of 1979 was the first of the media age, so the protests that have made green the coolest colour utilise the latest in modern media and communications. It seems that we are destined to always be at the forefront of the latest technology in our bid for freedom and democracy.
I call my daiey Pardis in America on the computer, both of us putting on our video cameras so we can chat face to face. He is babysitting his daughter Nazanin’s two small children while she works – the two latest additions to the Abbasian clan are the apples of Daiey Pardis and Shirin’s eyes – and he tells me, while jiggling a toddler on his lap, ‘There is no ideology here in this Green Movement, Kamin-joon, and that’s better, it’s about much simpler things. We had our bellies full, so we had time for ideology, but look where it got us.’
My country, having reeled from one form of tyranny to another throughout its history, is not well. Brought up by neglectful, deceitful and selfish fathers, it is a child that has learnt to cope but its survival strategies are neurotic to say the least. These neuroses will take many generations to unravel.
My dearest wish is for my country to be free. I don’t know what freedom will look like under the Iranian sun, whether it will wear a short skirt or have pink hair or hold peaceful demonstrations where no one chants death to anyone and
no flags or effigies are burnt and no one is shot or beaten or intimidated. I don’t know if it will hold hands in the street with a handsome dark-haired boy with eyes the colour of honey or whether it will cast its eyes modestly to the ground, but I know it will swing its hair in the breeze (if it so chooses) and wear its strength lightly. I hope it will mean female wisdom steps out of the home and into public office and I hope it will mean a ceaseless growth of our peculiarly Iranian charm. I know it will still hand out shole zard on the street as blessings and get misty-eyed at the recital of Persian love poetry. I know it will still be in love with Islam and laughter and want nothing more than to lounge on elaborate carpets in the embrace of a walnut tree watching the butterflies dance in the dappled sunlight, drinking hot black tea and eating fruit filled with sunshine.
We clamber uphill in the summer heat. The wind whips up clouds of dust and throws them in our eyes as we struggle up the sheer hillside, our faces scrunched against the day. The strangely rounded shapes we are climbing over were once houses, made of mud, houses that after heavy rains were abandoned and allowed to dissolve into the hill, where in years to come, more houses were built of mud, and so on and so on until the melted village became a hill with sheer sides and the villagers moved their houses into the valley and started to use materials that withstood the rains when they came.
At the top, standing on hundreds of years of housing, on kitchens, bedrooms and on homes filled with love and dreams and struggles, I lean into the wind. Below me stretch fields of gold, heads of wheat nodding in the breeze, patches of ploughed land glow rich brown against rows of green crops. A stream winds through the valley, edged by bamboo, the fields a patchwork of cypress and cedar trees, copses of fruit trees all the way to the khaki peaks engraved on the Kurdish horizon, layer upon layer, separating this land from its neighbours, enclosing it, untouched and remote from the world in a state of grace, like the Garden of Eden.
The Cypress Tree Page 24