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 of the Paykan, my father in the middle. The young man in charge is in the passenger seat addressing the windshield. My mother is standing outside probably with a gun pointing at her. Other guards are loitering around their own cars. The brother in charge has been to the front to fight in the Iran-Iraq war. My father, too, as a medical doctor serving for two months each year. The brother has had an injury that still looms. My father is able to give brother the medical advice he so needs. Brother lets us go with a warning.
Apparently a few wisps of my hair were hanging loose out of the new contraption in my life, my headscarf. This was Tehran in 1983.
AHMAD SHAMLOU WAS BORN on December 12, 1925, by his own account on a bleak and cold snowy day in a spiritless house at 134 Safi Alishah road in Tehran, Iran. What is believed to have been his birth home seems to be standing abandoned in a country that barely allows gatherings of fans making a pilgrimage to his graveside on the anniversary of his passing on Sunday, July 23, 2000.
I was awaited in a bleak house
by the sacred mirrored fountain
near the mystic’s temple.
(Perhaps why
I found the shadow of Satan
staking me out
from the outset).
At age five
I was still despondent from the unthinkable blow of my own birth
and grew up rootless
on salty sand
to the grunting of a drunk camel and the ghostly presence
of poisonous reptiles in a dust-bowl more remote
than the dusty memory of the last row of date palms
on the fringes of the last dry river. 4
Shamlou’s father was an itinerant military officer whose assignments took his family to far-flung corners of Iran—then still called Persia—exposing the young Shamlou to the peoples, tribes, languages, folklore and customs, and the harsh realities of a nation teetering at the edge of modernity and ravaged by feudalist class warfare at the hands of weak monarchs. First, of the Qajar dynasty who ruled from 1789 to 1925, and later, the Pahlavi dynasty who ruled from 1925–1979, gradually diminishing Iran in size and power as they gave away land and assets to foreign states.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the increasing exchange between the Persian intelligentsia and the rapidly shifting European states had resulted in cultural and political shifts. Persia underwent a Consti-tutional Revolution between 1905 and 1911, which led to the establishment of a parliament, Majles.
Shamlou’s
