My life and the life of every Iranian I know, is bookended by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It doesn't matter that I was barely old enough to remember this historic event or that I spent the decades that followed it, far far away from Iran, the Revolution of 1979 is a heavy, tacky, cruel bookend that defines who we used to be, who we are and the recurring nightmares and dreams we’ve had for 43 years.
I can pinpoint with certainty the exact month after which a general feeling of displacement settled like sticky dust all over me, my family, my classroom, my teachers, our closest friends, our home, our city…
In the years and decades that followed, I never experienced another event that brought such a magnitude of change to the nucleus of life. Not in Iran, and definitely not after a whole life lived outside of Iran. Perhaps only recently, the experience of the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic, the significant fear, change and frustration that both events brought to our collective lives, had tints of the same experience as the Iranian Revolution and its Dark and Deadly aftermath. But not wholly the same magnitude:
11,961 days long till today, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost, and EIGHTY MILLION people in daily agony, in loss, in fear, in shackles, in anxiety, taken hostage… I have felt the enormity of this in my heart as long as I can remember, ticking like a giant red LED digital display of an exponentially compounding figure accumulating each millisecond…
At first it was 2 years, then 10, then 20 and then so many many years.
At first it was one or two family friends, friends of friends, and friends of distant relatives that were killed, with a black blindfold covering their eyes, along a cold gray cement wall. And then, friends, relatives and neighbors were taken in droves.
At first it was the exile of a few we knew, and then each year, one by one my closest classmates left for another far off place.
At first it was our mothers being told to cover their hair, remove their makeup, stay home from their jobs and just go ahead and lock up their individuality in the closet, and then our fathers and brothers were told grand stories of winning the Big Martyrdom lottery.
At first us kids were told all will be well, that we were the future, that everything was for us, but then they tried to systematically brainwash us, indoctrinate us, line us up perfectly for our daily dose of mantras and visualization techniques to become good little soldiers for the evil machine.
At first we had beautiful streets lined with the most gorgeous Sycamore trees, and gutters flowing with water, neighborhoods with kids running around and elders with pockets always full of raisins and dried chickpeas to give us in handfuls as we ran by them to hide for the game of hide and seek, and then our neighborhoods became a clutter of poorly built high rises and super highways that ended in cul de sacs.
At first we still had the best tasting fruits, good chocolate and the best darn freshly made breads at our corner bakeries, and then eating strawberries, chocolate, or bananas, became a dream and even later we dreamt back to our days when our breads were made with good wheat and eaten with a good appetite… because you see after all this, even our appetite was lost.
I am reminded these days of when my dad had brought a large poster of Ayatollah Khomeini home from work, a gift from the ideology police and thumb tacked it to the wall of the upstairs hallway, right about the time that the Regime's paramilitary forces were raiding the homes in our neighborhood… one day looking for the Opulent Taghutis, next day looking for neighborhood Mojahed kids in hiding, and the next day to break up a coed engagement party.
“Incase they raid us” my dad had said as I watched him pin the huge picture to the wall. The poster was of Khomeini's head and shoulders. His thick turban, extra large forehead and angry dark eyes, looking to the left and casted slightly upwards, taking up most of the poster, leaving his white, wirey, coarse beard at just my eye level.
Each time I crossed the hallway to go in and out of my bedroom I felt intimidated by the large looming Imam watching my every move. The poster wasn’t up long when on one of my trips, stomping my way to my room in protest for having been banished to do my dreaded homework, I felt a rage taking over me as I stared at the Ayatollah's glare.
I stomped to my desk, grabbed one of my sharpened Hb pencils, and in complete disbelief watched myself defiantly draw a fine curved line on the poster, adding one more hair to that ghastly beard of Khomeini’s. As soon as I did it I was overtaken by fear, ran to my room and did not leave my room again until my mother came to get me for dinner. For a few days I couldn't stop thinking about the crime I had committed, whether I should erase it, or come clean to my mother about it. But I knew enough by then, at the great old age of 8, that I should not make my family complicit in my crime. Instead I made a promise to myself never to do such a thing again. It was simply too dangerous.
The week had not ended before my worrying had given way to a much stronger feeling, which I didn’t quite know what to call at the time. I started carrying a capped black BIC pen in my pocket, and each time I found myself alone with the looming Ayatollah in the hallway, I would half joyously and half in disgust, add one more curly stringy black hair to his thick mound of beard. The joy was from my small act of bravery, and the disgust was from having sullied my hands with his dirty beard.
The thing about bravery is that more you do it, the more you feel it.
On the day we were leaving Iran, my mother ceremoniously took off the poster and before hatefully tearing it up, she looked closely at it, perhaps for the first time since the poster was pinned to the wall. She quietly noticed all the lines drawn on the Ayatollah's beard, which over the years had evolved from black to blue and red lines, and even tiny writings of the word Khar, which means Donkey and implies Stupidity. In Farsi khar is written with 2 letters the latter being a downward indented line, hiding nicely among his facial fuzz.
None of what we did compares remotely to the courage of this new generation of Iranians who are fighting for their freedom from this oppressive regime with their lives. These days when being placed in solitary confinement for your thoughts or even killed with one shot, while a blindfold covers your eyes, seems like such a luxury compared to being repeatedly raped and beaten by security forces, before being killed.
But the past 40 days despite the savage violence, gut-wrenching losses, rape and torture of so many Iranians, I feel a renewed sense of hope, like one you feel when you have been lost in a dark and windy forest and suddenly notice small specs of light peeking through the thick brush, signaling that you are nearing safety.
It's the Hope you feel when you see true Bravery...
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