Iran: My Grandfather

Notes

I

Ihave no home. I know this very well – have known it and lived with it for almost two decades – but in times of fear, in times of paranoia and persecution, nothing comforts like the fantasy of a familiar refuge. A zone decorated with signs of family and memory, a place where we may elude the enemy: native land, motherland.

My only image of this place is a tattered black-and-white photo from 1946. It is not only a representation of my grandfather Salman in his Second World War military uniform, but the icon of his very reality in my mind. My sombre grandfather – his eyes behind black glasses, his chin pushing into his neck in a posture of resignation – is not merely something depicted in the rectangular frame of the withered picture; he is the picture itself, its grey tones of faded black and tainted white, wrinkled, opaque and unfathomable.

As for the reason behind this recounting of an image of an image, my verbal description of a visual depiction of a reality that ended years before I was born: my life has been growing more transient and meaningless by the year. I can’t hide it any more. I yearn for a home, a concrete space to house the abstractions of belonging and identity. I should, of course, be thinking of myself as a citizen of my new country, the island where I’ve been marooned since my mid-teens. But life in Australia has reduced me to a ghost, a fickle phantom who can neither beguile nor terrify; an illusive, diminishing mirage not unlike the effaced image of the once-proud Iranian patriarch, my maternal grandfather, Salman Fuladvand.

I am no longer an Iranian, and have not been one since my family’s migration to Australia all those years ago. My Iranian ego was terminated in the course of a flight from Tehran to Melbourne with a stopover in Kuala Lumpur. Whatever survived of my Iranian essence dissolved in the mires of assimilation, resentment, puberty and ‘education’ in Australia. As for my substance, my skin remains obstinately olive, my name unflinchingly Arabic/Islamic. Hence questions and inspections at airports, hence suspicion and hesitation at job interviews, hence the nocturnal fear of being attacked by gangs of drunken racists anywhere in the West.

But what of individualism and art? Could they transcend nationality? As a young, pretentious boy I used to dream about fighting the bayonets and missiles of war with the might of the pen, of becoming a revolutionary writer. But as a detested ‘Muslim immigrant’ in Australia my words have often been rejected and ignored, and my hopes for changing the world have been cut down by the chores of day-to-day survival. My adolescent’s love of justice and humanity has succumbed to the pressures of alienation and racism, and become a litany of complaints by an ‘ungrateful immigrant’.

So I turn to the memory of an old photograph of a famous grandparent I never met, to excavate whatever can be salvaged from the crypts of the past. I am turning to history to make sense of the present. And the present needs to be made sense of, if new catastrophes are to be avoided, if further horrors are to be prevented; if I am to understand why I’m homeless.

A little about the catastrophes. Two years after my birth, Iran – touted at the time as the Japan of the Middle East enjoying unprecedented material prosperity and cultural and societal progress – fell under the yoke of Islamic fundamentalism. The monarchy collapsed, the economy crashed, intellectuals were imprisoned and murdered, women lost their freedoms and rights, and our new leaders, turbaned priests, took Iran to an eight-year war with her belligerent secularist neighbour, Saddam Hussein of Iraq. By the end of the war over a million were dead, tens of thousands killed by our own sadistic regime, with many cities and towns wiped off the map.

More than fifteen years after the end of the War and my family’s migration to the West, I watched New York’s emblematic skyscrapers on TV as they were felled by extremists not so unlike the tyrants of my birthplace. I shivered and continued to tremble as the West reacted with self-righteous anger and unapologetic brutality. Tens of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis died as the War on Terror levelled cities and towns; intellectuals were cowed and silenced; and Middle Eastern immigrants were harassed and, at times, persecuted and lynched. I saw the pictures of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured by their US captors, read the stories of consternation and despair penned by suicidal illegal immigrants in the gruesome detention centres of the West, and browsed through the online images of ‘Middle Eastern–looking’ youths being set upon by angry ‘white’ mobs on a sunny Sydney beach.

Was it inevitable that I and other Iranians should have been terrorised by our own regime, forced into exile, and demonised as terrorists by our unsympathetic surrogate compatriots? What were the causes of the disaster that ruined my native land and deprived me of a home? How shall I survive the future horrors? What is Islam, and what is the West? Why are they at war? What hope, if any, can humanity entertain in the badlands of today? Religious fundamentalisms of all kinds are emerging in the First World as well as in the developing nations. Democratically elected politicians increasingly speak from the pulpit, and their offices resemble churches and temples. This unnerves me.

And yet, I’m drawn to the recollection of my grandfather Salman’s face, his austere grimace and his thinning hair.

I have been told by my mother that I resemble him, if not physically then spiritually. I am not sure what the spirit is, and how it differs from the body, but I am seduced by this biased comparison, by the possibilities of looking at myself in the murky mirrors of the past.

But all I have are the facts of Salman’s life and his vicissitudes: his date and place of birth, his successes, his great failures and his death. And facts are never enough. Scientists might believe in their truth, and believers may put their faith in the truths of religion, but I am not helped by their approaches. My dilemma of non-being, the perpetual anguish of separation and exile, is neither factual nor sacred. Alienation and disenchantment, cruelties of the past and the barbarities of the future, cannot be explained by the catalogues of numbers and events, and cannot be reduced to the mythic formulae of the salvation-and-damnation narratives of scriptures.

Let me be more direct. I have read many accounts of what went wrong in Iran, the trouble with Islam, and the like, and yet I am left bored, unsatisfied and disembodied. None of the explanations of the roots and results of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, an event that precipitated modern Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, helps me reorganise my malformed mind and recreate my shattered identity. I remain a vampire; a body whose life has ended and who insists on living, freed from the tyranny of tradition, religion and obligation, you might say, but also forever haunted by homelessness, obscurity and solitude.

Worse still are the treatises of the believers. I am utterly suspicious of those in the West who see Islam as a perverse anti-democratic heresy, the Muslims who see the West as the source of greed and corruption, and all others who blame their Others for the catastrophes. I am no longer fascinated by the clash of barbaric civilisations. I let the faithful fight the religious wars, for I have no faith in, and no attachment to, their lands and their reality. I am, as I said, an undead. I have no home and wander the realms as a ghost.

I need to conjure the spectre of my grandfather.

I want his story to provide an explanation for the triumphs and errors of the past, and a blueprint for my rebirth. I want his life to be a compass for sailing through the storms of the world, and an abacus for measuring the pros and cons of being human.

He was a strong man, my mother has always said, an important man. He was involved in reconstructing and modernising Iran before the ferocious religious reaction that engulfed and annihilated Iran’s progress and modernisation in the second half of the century.

As a police chief and lieutenant in the civil military of Iran’s second-last king, Salman supervised the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway, spread the rule of law to the provinces beyond the capital, fought against tribal leaders and their arcane feudalism, sent his daughters to university and, in short, devoted his life to the putative advancement of an impoverished nation. Or so his children – my mother, my aunts and uncles – have told me.

He became enormously successful. I still remember the quasi-mansion in Tehran where his wife and remaining progeny lived with their own families during my childhood. The once-glamorous house was already dilapidated by the time of my birth, and would soon after be submerged in the floods of hovels and tenements that spread throughout the city during the years of urban development before the Revolution, and during the influx of war refugees afterwards.

This mansion closely resembled Salman’s life. After its auspicious beginning, it was pummelled by the storms of history. Salman’s fall could not have been more dramatic, with its cruelty, defamation, punishment and seclusion. His life reached its conclusion as the Westernised secular kingdom he had served passionately and loyally sank into the quicksand of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War.

Yes, my grandfather Salman’s life echoes the story of modern Iran. The events of his life that I’ll narrate not only parallel and symbolise but indicate and signify the tragedy of Iran, and perhaps the disaster of the Middle East. The failure of Iran as a modern secular state under her last kings, her shift towards religious radicalism, and the eventual and ghastly confrontation with brutally truculent Western imperialism are not only images of the past but also of the present and, more likely than not, those of the future.

But why be prophetic and gloomy. The purpose of my imagining and telling the tale of my grandfather Salman Fuladvand’s life is not divinatory. His life is not a crystal ball but a mirror. I’d like to see myself, and also you, reader – you and humans like us, in this mirror. I’d like to find our own volitions and shortcomings, our prejudices and loves, in the reflection of his passions and mistakes. His narrative shall be a torch to illumine our inclement world, a shield to protect us from the monsters, and a thread to show the path out of the labyrinths of today.

Or at least it may explain why it is that I’m here. Restless, sleepless, homeless.

II

The period in Iran’s history known as the Qajar era – named after the reigning dynasty – was a dismal age of royal autocracy, colonialism and religious fanaticism. The Qajar kings, who had supplanted the benevolent Zand shahs in the late eighteenth century, were known for their avarice, their apathy, and their inability to halt the rapacious British imperialists and Russian expansionists. During this period Iran lost most of her northern territories to the Tsar, and much of her eastern provinces to the Queen.

Iran’s kings fell under the sway of foreign powers, and unfair industrial contracts and trade concessions granted to the European companies damaged local industries and obliterated the country’s farming sector. The majority of Iranians, most of them rural farmers, descended into poverty and despair. The royalty and the aristocracy continued to enjoy the high life in their new capital city of Tehran as the clergy exploited the people’s dissatisfaction. The mullahs began to preach to their impoverished congregations about the evils of Western culture and the elites, and the indigent masses listened to the impassioned preachers with renewed attention.

My native land, known internationally as the Kingdom of Persia, entered the twentieth century.

A young provincial government officer and part-time poet, Mirza Habibollah, is scheduled to meet the local gentry of Shahmirzad at the mayor’s residence, a manor house overlooking the village orchards.

Habibollah, his dark-brown moustache thick and pointy in the style of the Shah in Tehran, sweats as he paces the sunlit guest hall of the manor. According to his American pocket watch, he has been waiting for the representatives of the village’s walnut and apple growers for twenty-eight minutes. The sherbet, brought out by a surly male servant, is too warm and too sweet to compensate for the representatives’ tardiness.

He murmurs while glancing out of the open balcony adjoining the guest hall, Respected Gentlemen of the Town of Shahmirzad. It is my honour to meet you on behalf of the Provincial Government of His Majesty Muzaffar-o-Din Shah of Qajar, King of Iran. I am here on behalf of the Governor of the City of Semnan and have the privilege and the duty to enquire about the conditions and quotas of the production of your various …

He stops revising his speech as his eyes pick the sudden movement of a bird landing on the branch of a birch tree. He smiles, walks and leans out over the balcony’s wooden balustrade. A line of spontaneous verse flashes across his mind: ‘Amid the babble of politics a swallow perched upon my brow’. But the bird is not a beautiful and heavenly agent of inspiration; it is a brown, very ordinary and rather emaciated sparrow. He frowns and steps back inside, finding a rickety armchair in which to wait.

Why won’t they come and get this charade over and done with? Why should the dehaati peasants be receiving an officer of the provincial administration instead of a telegram informing them of tax increases? And, more to the point, how did he end up a glorified tax collector for the gluttonous despots of the royal court? Why did he not have the courage to defy his father by becoming a happily starving poet?

‘Mirza Habibollah, from Semnan? Welcome to our town.’

The sharpness and clarity of the speaker’s voice startles Habibollah. He looks up at the young woman who seems to have materialised out of nowhere. His eyes widen as he takes in her unusual image. She stands with the haughty demeanor of a cavalry officer, her shiny leather knee-high boots the sort worn by the Shah’s Cossack horsemen. The petite woman’s most intriguing – in fact shocking – aspect is her shiny black locks, only half covered by a silk scarf. Her veil is precariously held together by a small safety pin and parted as to expose her pale neck. Who is this incredible woman, renouncing the vociferous mullahs’ commandments in broad daylight? Is she a messenger, a maid, the village mayor’s daughter or perhaps one of his wives?

She stares into his eyes.

‘Did you not hear us, Mirza? Welcome to our town.’

He stands up.

‘I’m sorry, lady. I heard you. I was not sure … who … Are you a herald? The kadkhodah’s daughter?’

‘No, Mirza. We are Leila, daughter of Agha Abdollahi, garden-owner. We are the village’s spokesperson. We apologise for being late. A bridge we had to cross near the spring needed repairing. It’s an old wooden bridge, and we hope you can send us an engineer from the city to build a new one.’

‘You, khanoom … are the spokesperson?!’

‘Indeed we are, Mirza. Why, you didn’t think women could speak?’

Leila extends her right hand. Habibollah smiles nervously and shakes it. He notices that in her other hand she holds a small whip.

He decides to delay his speech, and once they’ve exchanged the necessary formalities they ride out of the manor’s grounds to, as Leila has suggested, see the village’s needs first-hand prior to formal discussions. Habibollah tries not to stare at the young woman and her ease at riding the black mare. They trot onto a dusty track beneath a canopy of leafy branches.

‘Please, Mirza. Take note of the fact that this road gets muddy and unusable when it rains and when snow melts.’

He looks away from her and pretends to be doing as she has asked. Overripe fruits dangle not far from the top of his fez.

‘Yes … much work needs to be done. I shall make a note of this in my report to the Governor. I must inform you, however, that building projects are very costly. To raise the necessary funds it has been decided that …’

‘You need to raise taxes?’

Leila finishes his sentence in a curt, scabrous voice. She pulls the reins and brings her steed to a halt beneath a shelter of entangled twigs and curving branches. Her large black eyes sparkle.

‘We are perhaps an ignorant country girl. So please inform us, Mirza. How will our taxes be spent by the Shah in Tehran? Will our money go toward his ordering an English automobile? Or will his troopers buy German cannons with the fruits of our peasants’ labour, cannons they will use for bombarding the peasants? Or will our taxes go to a fat mullah who will sermonise about women’s wickedness?’

Habibollah flinches in his saddle.

‘I can assure you, lady, that our King would never mistreat his subjects. His Royal Highness cares deeply about our …’

Leila spurs her brawny horse. She gallops out of the woods towards a flat clearing where farmers’ cottages clutch the narrowing dirt track.

My great-grandmother is too furious to endure the regime’s propaganda. Only four nights ago she watched another malnourished would-be mother bleed