Children of Paradise (2 page)

Anxiety was a way of life in Iran, and you couldn’t report on the country without sharing in it. Iran was not a place where one undertook any kind of opposition, even loyal opposition, lightly. And yet, to my never-ending amazement, this was also a country with a civic spirit that refused to die. The engagement of the Iranian citizenry, against all odds and in the face of pervasive surveillance and often violent repression, suggested lessons for the complacent democracy from which I came.

By the time I started going to Iran, the reformist experiment was apparently over. Many Iranians I met spoke of people like the hostage takers turned reformers and the outgoing President Khatami with bitter disappointment, as vehicles for little more than dashed hopes. I would spend the next ten years and five visits trying to piece together the story of how reform had coalesced, fallen apart, and surged forth as the Green Movement in 2009—what it stood for, where it fit into the stream of the country’s consciousness, and what Iran was left with in its wake. This was a story that spanned the revolution itself as well as the three convulsive decades that followed. What Iranians lived in that time—what they channeled through their intellectual salons and prison letters, their dreams and childhood memories—felt to me like an epic novel, replete with calamities and reversals, crescendos and epiphanies, and a sweeping arc of history that cut through its core.

In Tehran in June 2005, I met a young blogger who had recently been released from a harrowing stint in prison. I wrote about Roozbeh Mirebrahimi’s ordeal with the Iranian justice system in
The
New Yorker
that fall. When he arrived on American shores a year later, speaking not a word of English, he came to live with my husband and me until he got settled and his wife, Solmaz Sharif, also a journalist, could join him.

We had strange days, sitting at my kitchen counter of a morning and comparing the Persian and English words for objects we could point to: garlic, banana, pepper. How easy, but inadvisable, it might be to say “chicken” when you meant “kitchen,” and vice versa. We stayed up late at night with a dictionary between us, talking about Iranian politics, the one subject that could pull Roozbeh so far out of his shell that he became determined to communicate. The more fluent he became, the more I yearned for another fluency—in the history of Iran’s revolution and its aftermath—that would allow me to truly absorb his life’s story.

Roozbeh seemed to share an originary trauma with nearly every Iranian I got to know inside or outside the country. He spoke of a forbidden graveyard in his home city and of his childhood fascination with its provenance, which no adult would explain. The revolutionary decade had been a violent one: street battles, bomb blasts, political executions, the brutal war with Iraq, and, finally, a seemingly senseless state-sponsored massacre of political prisoners. The country ostensibly moved on. But for Iranians who were children then as much as for those who were old enough to fear for their lives or question their own complicity, the 1980s were a repressed memory that gave the country no peace. This book is in part an effort to explain that graveyard and Roozbeh’s troubled presence on its periphery.

• • •

I
N THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
, we tend to greet the swings of Iranian electoral politics as definitive pronouncements on the country’s character, and to allow our own foreign policy debates to color the Islamic Republic as fundamentally fearsome or benign. We risk overlooking the soul of the matter, the experience of politics as it is lived, by those who hold the highest stakes in its outcome. Iran is not a happy place, but it is a supremely dignified one—a country that has wrested its destiny from the designs of great powers, experimented with a form of government never before seen on earth, and kept that experiment alive with a spirit of constant questioning that has threatened dissidents’ very lives. Wherever Iran goes, it will get there first, and get there on its own terms.

What follows is not the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. That would be presumptuous if not impossible for a foreign reporter to write. This is a book about real people, some more famous or more admirable than others, but people whose complex and imperfect lives illuminate the passages through which they’ve traveled. There are no American protagonists and no American policy prescriptions. It is a book about Iranians, and it is
a
history—a hidden history, for the most part, of a powerful and protean current in the political and intellectual life of a nation. How many Iranians’ aspirations this current carries we can’t know for sure. Ten years ago reformists were fond of saying that 80 percent of the country thought as they did and only 20 percent supported the regime. When I last visited Iran in 2012, I heard hard-liners quote exactly the reverse proportion. Public opinion is unmeasurable under conditions of fear. But what is clear is that deep schisms rend Iranian society just as they do its political class. The more I’ve gotten to know Iran, the more I believe this inner conflict all but defines it and serves as the engine of its fate.

  I  

R
EVOLUTION

    ONE

L
ITTLE
B
LACK
F
ISH

O
N A COLD WINTER NIGHT,
at the bottom of the sea, a wise old fish gathered twelve thousand of her children and grandchildren and told them a story.

Once upon a time, she began, a little black fish lived in a mountain stream with its mother. From dawn until dusk, mother and child swam in circles, in and out of crevices, following each other until night fell and they went to sleep in their home under a mossy rock.

One morning before sunrise, the little fish woke its mother and announced that it was leaving. A single thought had come to possess its mind: Where,
the little black fish wanted to know, did the stream end?

The mother laughed. “My dear,” she said, “a stream has no beginning and no end. That’s the way it is. The stream just flows and never goes anywhere.”

The little black fish was certain that this could not be true. Despite threats from its elders, and to the awe of its peers, off it went, down the waterfall and into a pond, where the only creatures in sight were tadpoles.

The tadpoles told the little black fish that they came from nobility and that they were the most beautiful creatures in the world. The world, they said with confidence, was the pond where they swam. Their mother, a frog,
chided the black fish, calling it a “worthless creature” for leading her young astray.

Undaunted, the little black fish swam on, outwitting predators and overcoming many obstacles on its way to the open sea.

There the fish found a school of brave, indomitable fish like itself. So powerful was this school of fish that it foiled fishermen by dragging their nets to the bottom of the sea.

At last the little black fish had found its true place in the world. Before joining its brethren, it went for a swim along the water’s surface, where it could feel the sun on its back. The fish knew that it was vulnerable to predators there, but by now it also understood that its own mortality was a trifle. “What does matter,” the fish told itself, “is the influence that my life or death will have on the lives of others.”

Just then, a heron swooped and swallowed the fish. Inside the heron’s stomach, the little black fish heard someone crying. It was another fish, tiny and young, who missed his mother. The little black fish thought quickly. It would swim around to tickle the heron’s stomach, the black fish told its tiny companion. When the heron laughed, the tiny fish should leap out of her mouth. The little black fish would stay behind and kill the heron with a dagger made from a blade of grass.

And so the little black fish tickled, and so the tiny fish leapt. From the safety of the water, the tiny fish watched the heron writhe and shout, beating her wings as she fell to her death. But the little black fish never emerged.

The grandmother fish had finished her story. She and eleven thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of her spawn went off to sleep. One little red fish lay awake. She could not stop thinking about the sea.

• • •

S
O GOES THE CHILDREN’S STORY
that inspired a generation of Iranian revolutionaries.
The Little Black Fish
, by Samad Behrangi, was published in 1968, the year its twenty-nine-year-old author spent a hot week at the end of August touring villages near the Aras River in the north of Iran. He was collecting folklore with a friend, something he had done often in
the remote rural villages of his homeland. One day he waded by the shore of the river to cool himself while his friend swam. The young writer was not aware of it, but the Aras was known locally for its fierce current, which easily lashed him from the spot where he stood. Behrangi could not swim. He cried out, but by the time his friend reached him, he had vanished into the river’s depths. The author of
The Little Black Fish
drowned, his body pulled five kilometers downstream, where it was found three days later.

Behrangi had spent a decade traveling to poor villages, distributing books he’d purchased himself to needy children. He was not a religious man but a man of the left, moved by the depth of rural poverty. He noticed something on these trips: Iran was not only an unequal country, but a country alienated from itself. Iranian elites were steeped in the ideas, the culture, the mores of Europe and America. But the country’s interior was nothing like those places.

Iranian teacher-training texts,
Behrangi noted in an early essay, came overwhelmingly from America, and they focused on concerns, including childhood obesity and school lunch programs, that were laughably inapplicable to Iranian village life. When Iranian children were taught English—a language Behrangi also studied—their textbooks referenced hot dogs and baseball, cultural markers that were meaningless to the children of rural Iran. Iranian teachers ought to focus on the pressing needs and cultural realities of Iranian children, to come up with their own pedagogy to fit their real context.

Behrangi wrote short stories in the form of folktales in order to avoid censorship, but within them he embedded revolutionary exhortations, even to the violent overthrow of the ruling class with its American affectations. If
The Little Black Fish
strikes today’s Western reader as dark for a children’s book, that was not Behrangi’s concern. “
I don’t desire that aware children read my stories only for pleasure,” he wrote. “We must lead our children away from building hopes on false and empty visions, toward creating hopes based on a correct understanding and interpretation of the harsh realities of society and on how to struggle to eliminate those harsh realities.”

Eleven years after his death, when Behrangi’s countrymen dragged the fisherman’s net to the floor of the open sea, many of them cited his story as their inspiration. It was a parable of courage and sacrifice, and of the refusal to be blinded by convention or confined by fate. At the time of Behrangi’s writing, in 1968, Iran seemed, to some, like a plebeian mountain stream that just flowed and never went anywhere; to others, like a haughty, noble frog pond that did not even know the stream that fed it. The germ of revolution was to refuse to be bounded by the accidents of birth, the fear of predators, or the riverbanks of fate.