I understood that I had struck a raw nerve: that of cultural diversity and the many prejudices it engenders in Iran. The driver, who refused to accept the fact that only half of Iranians were Persian, had nothing but contempt for the small black community that made up part of the population of Bandar Abbas. “Concerned,” he said, for my security, he made a point of accompanying me to the door and waiting there, “just in case.”
That night, another Iran revealed itself to me. The Iran at the edge of Iran. The Iran of the Persian Gulf. The Iran that Mamani, barricaded in her “gilded cage,” would probably never know. We spent a good half hour weaving around modest adobe houses before arriving at the edge of an abandoned beach. Suddenly: the odor of fish, then the noise of the waves and the caress of a melody. When I stepped out of the taxi, a small light welcomed me: it came from a simple oil lamp, hung on a limestone wall. Moussa was there, waiting for me in front of the small window that acted as a door. “Salam,” he said, signaling for me to follow him. In the central courtyard, a colony of shoes had been meticulously arranged along the wall. Once I had taken mine off, I let myself be carried by the rhythm of the music. A voyage outside time: in one of the rooms accessed through the courtyard, a chorus of men and women, dressed in white tunics, tan pants, and colorful scarves, lent an air of enchantment to the space. Above the fray, a cloud of incense made it hard to breathe. These “black” Iranians, untrustworthy characters to my taxi driver, were incredibly elegant. They were beautiful: singing, dancing, drumming on jugs, reciting poems from another shore.
I had shown up in the middle of a zar ceremony, the exorcism ritual that Moussa had briefly told me about, which in 1969 had inspired the Iranian filmmaker Naser Taghvai to make his very poetic documentary Bad-e Jenn (Wind of Jinn). In this little “ghetto” at the edge of the water, it was a woman, “Mama Zar,” who set the rhythm. She was wearing a pearl-colored dress embroidered with violet flowers. Square shoulders, a round face—she brightened the atmosphere with a warm, sulfurous voice. Standing in the middle of the room, she moved her arms in waves above the head of a child covered in a long sheet. At the same time, the other participants banged sticks red with the blood of sheep, sacrificed for the occasion. “This is our way of warding off the evil eye,” Moussa whispered to me, putting two wooden sticks in my hands so I could participate in this spell-lifting ritual. The child, they would explain later, was suffering from migraines. In their eyes, he had been “bewitched.”
Fascinated by this small community made up of a few hundred souls, I decided to share in their daily life for a few days. These people lived off almost nothing. During the day, the women would smoke hookahs in the shade of trees while the men went fishing in the sea aboard small wooden rowboats. The most resourceful of them risked trafficking contraband TVs with Dubai, on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz, a dicey enterprise that allowed them to earn a little extra money, and to feed their families. Isolated from the rest of the city, they were light-years away from the debates about Islam and democracy that were igniting Tehran’s intellectual circles. They lived, they survived daily, by re-creating rituals passed down through generations. They didn’t know a lot about their origins, except that their ancestors had arrived from Africa more than four centuries earlier. Immersed in a unique syncretism of Persian Gulf traditions and ancient, esoteric African customs, they were the distant descendants of slaves who had arrived in Iran at the time when Portuguese traders established their trading posts in this strategic region.
Moussa wasn’t black. A musician in the making, he had an incredible fascination for these hidden customs. He even wanted to promote them. For years, he had fought to organize small, semi-secret concerts, mixing pop and traditional music, at the Dolphin Youth club, one of the rare places for young people in Bandar Abbas to meet up in this town where the only entertainment was drinking Zamzam, the Iranian Coke, and watching the sun set over the mostly abandoned beach. In an unexpected windfall, his band, made up of local prodigies, had just landed official authorization from the famous Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to perform in public—which was probably one of the reasons he had invited, without fear of reprisal, a foreign journalist to this private ceremony: to shine a true spotlight on the cultural diversity of his country, of which he was so proud.
“Iran for all Iranians,” Khatami had said. Here, in the heart of the country, I truly understood the significance of that slogan. Two years after his victory, the expression had transformed into a leitmotif, not only for the youth and for women, but for all minorities—ethnic, cultural, social—who had, until now, been resigned to live in the shadows of others. A rapid survey of the surrounding villages allowed me to measure the importance of the municipal elections. For friends of Moussa, but also for the forgotten populations of the Hormozgan and Bushehr Provinces, a page was turning: excessive centralization, in the guise of both Islam and authoritarianism, was suddenly giving way to real local concerns. In this remote south, the electors didn’t vote for or against constitutional reform, nor for or against a few additional locks of hair being allowed to escape the headscarf. For them, what was important was an acknowledgment of their differences, access to running water, more recreational activities for the youth, cleanup of the roads …
From village to village, I saw this same desire to be heard on the national level. In Bandar Dayyer, a small, lost village of twenty thousand inhabitants west of Bandar Abbas, where I followed Moussa and his friends, the local elections were provoking an unprecedented frenzy. Throughout the campaign, the main road was overrun with a kitschy decor of garlands, bright paper lanterns, and mini-flags sporting the national colors. From morning to night, the fifty-five candidates, of whom four were women, distributed leaflets and stuffed their potential electors with pistachio and rosewater candies. Between two meet-and-greets, the most organized candidates presided behind the counter of a local bakery transformed into a campaign headquarters. There was something for everyone: from the bearded Basij militiaman who brandished his boombox disseminating the praises of war martyrs; to the champion of reforms, in a flannel jacket, extolling the virtues of dating before marriage; to the thirty-year-old teacher proudly supported by her husband.
On election day, I went around to polling stations. Joyous crowds jostled in front of schools and mosques requisitioned for the occasion. The next day, upon the announcement of the initial returns, waves of ululations broke out throughout the south. They confirmed that unbridled desire for change: across the country, the independent and reformist candidates had won in a landslide, with 80 percent of the votes. Even better, women attained an unprecedented political breakthrough. In certain towns, they were even the winning candidates. Moussa was ecstatic. His enthusiasm contrasted with the doom and gloom that had contaminated Tehran since the Chain Murders. Thanks to him and his friends, I had rediscovered hope for your country, Babai. But I had no idea how fleeting this respite would be.
BLOOD, BLOOD EVERYWHERE. And all those shouts of anger escaping from chadors. “Down with despotism!” a protester screamed. “Liberty or death!” a student continued, forehead encircled by a headband. Your city was unrecognizable. July 14, 1999, Tehran was plunged into chaos. On Enghelab Street, around the university, tires were on fire, garbage was spilled across the pavement. All that was left of the red flowers of the previous year was a muddled memory, smothered in a thick cloud of black smoke. Hidden behind dumpsters, the protesters clung to their slingshots. Huddled beneath a porte cochere, I watched them defy those in power, carried along by a spirit that had awakened them. The capital had been shaking with anger for five days straight. Twenty years after their elders, the youth had had enough. The first spasm since the revolution. The Basijis came pouring in from a street corner. I recognized them immediately by their black beards and Honda motorcycles. They drove in a tight formation, zigzagging between the barricades. On edge, they had taken out their chains. They lashed them against the university gates. Alarmed by this metallic noise, the pro
testers rapidly dispersed. Then, once the raging pack of Basijis had taken off, they reappeared—in even larger numbers.
On July 14, 1999, the unimaginable was unfolding before my eyes. In the middle of a swarm of protesters, a fist pierced the sky. Then a scream shot up from amid the chaos. “Death to Khamenei!” Had I heard correctly? In the tear gas fumes, I searched for the face of the person who had just signed his own death sentence by cursing the Supreme Leader. In Iran, insulting him was blasphemy. Guaranteed capital punishment. No one, to this day, had dared to rise to the challenge in public. In the crowd, the call rang out once more, even clearer. “Marg bar Khamenei!” Death to Khamenei! This time, there were more than a dozen challengers to the untouchable guardian of theocratic and revolutionary legitimacy, the successor to Khomeini, Ali Khamenei himself.
With that one rallying cry, the lid had been blown off. But at what price? I didn’t know it at the time, but this was only the beginning of a long history written in blood. That of a jeopardized autocrat who would do anything to regain his power. A man faced with a society that sought, if not to overthrow him, then at least to change him. That of a dangerous decade when, torn between democratic and Islamic values, the heirs of the revolution would wage a merciless battle. My eyes stung and my head was spinning. Drowning in the crowd of protesters, I witnessed, mesmerized, the igniting of the University of Tehran campus, the first act in a violent shadow play of which I was to become an inveterate spectator. “Death to Khamenei! Death to Khamenei!” Your country was faltering. And I felt as if I were faltering right along with it.
* * *
It all started with a common newspaper story. On July 7, Salam received an order to close its doors. The liberal newspaper had been accused of publishing a top-secret letter in which an intelligence agent urged a toughening of Iran’s Press Law, amendments that had just been voted on that same day in Parliament. This wasn’t the first time the intelligentsia had faced crackdowns. In one year, the conservative Ministry of Justice had already shut down dozens of new papers, including Tous, where Baghi, the ex-revolutionary, worked. With each closing, new, smaller papers immediately took up the torch. But with Salam, the hardliners of the regime had struck hard: they were attacking one of the most popular news sources among intellectuals, one of the pillars of Khatami’s reformist project.
Like a shockwave, the news of Salam’s silencing immediately made its way around the universities. The following night, a sit-in took place at Amir Abad, Tehran’s main student dormitory. After the rally, the students calmly went back to their rooms. A few hours later, they had a brutal awakening. Armed with iron bars, the Basijis barged in during the night. The day after the assault, Mehdi, a nineteen-year-old student whom I met near campus, told me all, right down to the smallest detail. He had seen everything, lived everything. He wanted to bear witness. That night, he had been in a deep sleep when the regime’s thugs broke into his room. Without a word of warning, they yanked open drawers, tore down posters of Khatami, smashed windows that looked out onto the courtyard. Then, like vultures swooping down on their prey, they pummeled the students until they bled. Mehdi lost consciousness. When he came to, the assailants had fled. His body covered in bruises, he crawled into the hallway to see the extent of the damage. Scattered on the floor were ripped-up mattresses, demolished walls, smashed chairs. Mehdi was a survivor. In a trembling voice, he confided in me that a few feet from his bedroom, a young resident had been thrown out a window. For no reason. The body of the murdered student had swiftly been carried away by the Basijis, and his friends didn’t know what had happened to it.
The dorm raid had stirred up a hornet’s nest. Wound up by this savage act, thousands of students like Mehdi flooded the streets of Tehran. A spontaneous movement, apolitical, propelled by a feeling of injustice and above all disgust for a system that was renewing its appetite for violent repression.
First confined to Tehran, the protest rapidly bled out into other cities: Shiraz, Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad. Each day, new protesters filled the ranks of the rebellion, a helium balloon ready to pop. At night, ambulance sirens reverberated through the city as clashes broke out between protesters and militia. For the first time since the rise of the Islamic Republic, passions were being unleashed in public. The pact between biroon and andaroon had been broken.
That July 14, more than a thousand protesters had poured into the area between Valiasr Square and the university campus. In response to cries of “Death to Khamenei!” the barrage of gunshots resumed with greater intensity. “Hide! They’re coming,” shouted a student on the run. In a fraction of a second, a group of militiamen appeared from within a cloud of black smoke. The protesters vanished immediately. Pressed against a pharmacy’s security gate, two students signaled for me to join them, to protect myself. I crossed the street as quickly as possible, stepping on shards of glass. On the wall adjacent to the shop, someone had scrawled FREEDOM in blood red. The blood of someone wounded, maybe. Or someone dead.
“Delphine! Delphine!”
At the sound of my name, I turned around. I immediately recognized Sepideh, the young student from Café Shouka. She was gasping for air. Temples soaked with sweat, she started yelling:
“They’re killing students! They’re killing students!”
Her eyes were filled with tears. Her mouth contorted with panic. I brought her into a neighboring back alley, where we took shelter beneath a porch.
“Why? Why?” she repeated, bursting into sobs.
Sepideh was lost. She had put all her hopes into the reforms; she couldn’t accept such a brutal backlash. I was helpless. I couldn’t find the words to console her. This battle wasn’t mine. “You can’t understand,” she had said to me before. Instinctively, I took her in my arms. Nestled against each other, we waited for the gunshots to stop before taking a breath. Students approached us, signaling to us that the Basijis had set off down another road. It was time to leave, before the pack returned. I glanced at Sepideh. Before leaving her, I asked awkwardly:
“Do you think we’re headed for another revolution?”
“Definitely not!” she exclaimed right away. “We can’t repeat the mistakes of our elders. Look at this country. It went back a century in less than twenty years! Back then, our parents were blinded by their revolutionary utopias. When they climbed on the roofs, at nightfall, they thought they saw Khomeini’s face in the moon! We’re more realistic. God can’t do anything for us. It’s up to us to take our destiny into our own hands.”
“How?”
“I don’t know … I don’t know. The most important thing, right now, is not to give in to violence. Maybe I’m wrong, but I still want to believe in the possibility of reform.”
* * *
That night, I walked home. Going down Valiasr Street, a long road bordered with plane trees that runs perpendicular to Enghelab Street, I didn’t recognize a thing. The front window of a bank lay smashed to pieces on the sidewalk. A bus shelter was in embers. Farther on, a Wrong Way sign was lying in the charred asphalt. Abandoned wreckage. Behind the carcasses of cars, dogs were howling like wolves. Where had the red roses of the Iranian Spring gone? Into what abyss was your country sinking? For the first time, I questioned my enthusiasm. Maybe Papa was right: What if the Iran that I had come looking for was only an illusion? How could I have been so naïve? How could I have sung the praises of a country in the throes of change, as if we were living in a new era, irreversible? Carried by the wave, I had been hooked by the charm of headscarves that looked like handkerchiefs, by the boom of Internet cafés, by the extravagance of ski slopes where golden youth strutted around, sheltered from the gaze of the morality police. Each weekend, the threat of a police raid had spiced up rather than poisoned my nightly outings. Fascinated by the very Persian art of transgression, and filled with optimism, I hadn’t seen any of this coming.
With aching feet, I crossed the Seyyed Khandan intersection. Walking through it, I felt the silence enveloping the north of Tehran. Reality
had a different face there. An entire population was living far from the tremors of the city center. Behind the doors of posh villas where the Westernized bourgeois gorged themselves on Britney Spears videos on MTV, the capital smelled like Chanel perfume and vodka.
When I pushed open the door of the house, my grandmother’s voice wrested me from my thoughts.
“Someone called for you!”
Obsessed by the student riots, I had almost forgotten about her. Eyes still irritated by the tear gas, I walked toward the bathroom. Agitated that she had not commanded my attention, Mamani followed on my heels.
“Someone called for you!” she repeated.
I let the tap water run so I could cool down my face. Used to the familiar noise of her babbling, I didn’t react to her comment. I was mad at her for caring more about me than about her country. For refusing to see beyond the limited scope of her house. Of her street. Of her life. Shut up inside her protective bubble, as thick as an armored door, she didn’t suspect for a second that her city was boiling over.
Unflappable, Mamani continued:
“And he wasn’t even polite. He didn’t even leave his telephone number, or his name!”
I lifted my head toward the mirror. Her hair curlers invaded my field of vision. She was sulking because some guy hadn’t deigned to respond to all her questions, while next door, her city was sinking into chaos.
“There’s no need to make such a big deal out of it! If it’s important, he’ll call back!” I replied, irritated.
Then I gathered my things to shut myself up in my space on the second floor. I needed to breathe, to recover from the storm. I had no more patience for her complaining. As for the unknown male caller who hadn’t deigned to reveal his identity, he was the least of my concerns. Except that, a few days later, the mysterious, anonymous man did call back. And that time, when the telephone rang, I was the one who picked up.
I'm Writing You from Tehran Page 6