or some other rich, ancient city only a dilapidated and unused iron gate to the forlorn ramp next to the playground? Was that the temple with the high ceilings I would visit each morning before class, that endless field-maze of platforms and tables and podiums and Torahs we played hide-and-seek through? Where was that football field of a playground at the end of which the tastiest, greasy, chocolate donuts we called pirashki, and negrokees—chocolate-covered marshmallow treats—were sold from a low, gated portal in the wall? How far down the street was the stationery store with the puffy stickers, glitter, and designer erasers that smelled of fruits and bubble gum that I would sniff in sustained inhalations and even put in my mouth, they were so enticing.
We pronounced the name for the marshmallow treats as one word, negrokees, like necropolis, not realizing the Latin roots and racist reference of Negro kiss. The only black people I had seen were my African nanny and her husband. I only know this because I saw a photograph of them with my family on the occasion of their daughter’s birthday. I was a newborn. We were still in England. My petite young mother next to the large husband in native garb. I don’t know which country in Africa. In another photograph, my nanny, a nurse in the hospital where my father received his ophthalmology fellowship, is holding me on her lap, and my mother is standing behind her chair gazing at me in adoration with a craned neck. In Iran, I played with Jewish and Christian children in the same apartment complex, in the same school yards. I was exposed.
We peer so deeply into images of lost places and times for a hint of meaning as to who we were. We hope to superimpose our ghosts onto these spaces to make an imaginary film of our days, but the discrepancy between what we think was and what really was as we yearn to bridge in some way to what is lost, evaporated into another dimension of time, is our actual lives.
I once stood in a circle of other ten-year-olds, many of them well-toned Arab boys in tight designer jeans and shiny belts and crisp shirts and turbans, who took my fellow boarding-school mate, a blue-eyed, blond-haired Greek girl with honey skin who looked like our image of a Biblical angel, and passed her around and pummeled her inside the circle.
We were in a secluded part of the grounds near the woods. It was a misty summer by the southern sea of the English Channel. Five or six boys beating one girl. I remember freezing, staring dumbfounded. Before I knew it, the young-man-handling and assault was over.
Even early on I knew this was a Terror of Beauty—
which I later read about in Rilke’s Duino Elegies.
Beauty is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear 2
The violence against me had not started then.
Not yet…
Decades earlier, in 1931, a boy of six, a future poet with the pen name Alef Bamdad, meaning A. Dawn or A. Daybreak, witnessed the bloody public lashing of a lowly soldier. A feeling overcame him, he said, and he knew.
He wrote:
I am Daybreak, in the end
weary
…
I was six the first time I laid eyes
upon grief-stricken Abel receiving
a whipping from himself
public ceremony
in full befitting swing:
there was a row of soldiers, a pageant of cold,
silent chess pawns,
the glory of a dancing colorful flag
trumpets blasting and the life-consuming
rapping of drums
so Abel would not ail from the sound
of his own sobbing. 3
When I was ten, around the disorienting time my body started to exist for me, I also became aware of my country. Iran was having a revolution, shedding its oppressive monarchy.
We left for the United States in 1978 and returned in 1979, a few months after the revolution was declared “victorious” with the Shah of Iran fleeing to Egypt, not knowing, as no one did, what we were returning to.
What unfolded over the following four and only other years I lived in Iran: chaotic arrests and disappearances, martial law, half of the brutal eight-year war with Iraq, violently enforced, compulsory hejab, the denouncement of alcohol, neckties, beardless faces, and anything “Western,” watching what you said in public—anyone could be a spy, even the girl sitting next to you in class. Poor, angry, young men promised their comeuppance by the Ayatollah became the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Pasdaran, armed with machine guns and beige Toyota Land Cruisers—seeing them still makes me double over with nausea—patrolling the streets with carte blanche to stop, arrest, confiscate, imprison, rape, kill. The birth of a religious dictatorship centuries in the making. And a mass exodus of which my family was a part.
And meeting Shamlou.
The poet, Ahmad Shamlou, also known as Alef Bamdad.
Iran underwent two pivotal events in the twentieth century regarding women and their dress.
The first was kashfe-hejab, the forced unveiling of women decreed by Reza Shah in 1935, the founder of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty, a welcome decree by the Westernized upper classes, but traumatic for women whose covering was intimately connected with their religious devotion and identity, leaving them exposed, despondent. This fed the alienation between the clergy and the monarchy, causing clashes at various points throughout the century until the deposition of Reza Shah’s son, the Shah of Iran, in 1979.
The second was the forceful veiling of Iranian women imposed by the clergyman Ayatollah Khomeini’s new, brutal regime, usurped from the hands of the many factions that played a part in overthrowing the Pahlavi dynasty, “winning” the 1979 revolution.
The Ayatollah’s strong-arm men, the Pasdaran, were a motley band, sons of the underclass promised their rightful place in the revolutionary rhetoric. Their families had suffered in the margins of a society dominated by the British and the Americans, in turn priding itself for being modernized, Westernized, leaving behind tribal people, peasants, crafts people, denying them the upward mobility their exploitation provided the modernized and urban bourgeois class. These young men were recruited in the name of Allah, and with blanket power they exercised to take out their decades-long revenge upon the corrupt ruling class. And terrorize they did, breaking any and all rules, for it was the rule of chaos, unaware that they were mere pawns, strong-arms for yet another despotic regime that would soon forget them as well. Their violence included deflowering maidens upon arrest, justified by a self-serving interpretation of some likely falsified Koranic verse that no virgin could be killed. They were to be addressed as brother.
Once, I was dallying on the sidewalk with my mother and brother, waiting for my father to park and join us for our dentist visit, when they closed in, the brothers. Out of nowhere, cars including the domestic car, Paykan—not dissimilar to Soviet-era national cars—sped and screeched at our feet. Young men slinging machine guns leapt out.
The next thing I remember is all three of us on our knees. My ten-year-old brother’s silky prepubescent hair in a cascading bowl cut shimmered under the winter sun. The next snapshot is of my father, his gloves or wallet in both of his hands clasped in front of him as he usually carried things. What a scene to walk into. He argues with the brothers who would not be reasoned with, for they are not in the business of justice for the class that, as far as they are concerned, has thrived on the backs of their parents. Then, my brother, my father, and I are in the back seat