I am an American who fell in love with Iran in the 1970's when I lived there for 5 years. I have written much about that time in many publications but I wanted to see Iran today for a number of motives. I wanted to see what has changed, what has stayed the same and I did not want to be accused of living in the past as I had not been back in Iran for 30 years.
Because of the huge negative portrayal of Iran in the Western media plus Israeli and US governments almost daily threats of bombing Iran, I was a little nervous about going there. I had no fear at all about Iranians but rather sadly I was afraid of my own country starting an third war of aggression. I asked my friend Jerry Dekker who takes groups of American students and tourists on tours of Iran 7 or 8 times a year if he could help me get a visa and he said he could. He works very closely with a tourist agency in Tehran called Oriental Explorer. He also made it known to the Iranian Interest Section at the Pakistani Embassy in Wash DC that I had been involved in helping to promote the film Bam 6.6, which shows the kindness and generosity of the Iranian people in a very beautiful portrayal. I believe this helped, coupled with the fact that I am a lighting designer and not affiliated with the US government in anyway. I mean think about it, Mr. Bush has made it very public that he has gotten the US Congress to approve $400 million for covert activity in Iran. The IRI government is afraid that Americans are coming to Iran to help sponsor and foment dissidence. Under the circumstances it is amazing that they give any of us visas period.
Jerry also gave me sound advise which was never to ask an Iranian American about Iran today which is like asking a Cuban American about Castro's Cuba. When someone has lost everything and had to start over due to a regime change they cannot really have an unbiased opinion about the current situation.
What I found was the same kindness and generosity towards foreign visitors as I had found before. Everyone tried to speak English with me, everyone wanted peace between the US and Iran. What I found was women were free to work, drive buses and taxis, go to co-ed universities, have lunch at open air restaurants with groups of girl friends unaccompanied by males, go on picnics and have fun. Even the hejabs had turned into fashion statements with brightly colored designer silk scarves, chador's with tailored waistlines or ethnic embroidered tunics and women put blonde streaks in their hair so that the little they could show from under their scarves in front would stand out more. I saw the avenues where boys and girls met and exchanged phone numbers while stuck in traffic. I went to Geylioon cafes where they let women smoke water pipes when the authorities were not around. The fact is that the Western media and all the "new orientalists" as author Fatemeh Keshavarv calls them have pandered to what the West wants to hear and believe that the IRI is a Saudi Wahabi type state and that is just not the case. In private home I went into, I was offered alcoholic beverages, which for the most part I declined because I am not a big drinker.
I mean sometimes the rules get a little cumbersome like when my guide and his wife forgot to bring their marriage license when they accompanied me to Shomal which in theory meant that they could not check into the same room in a hotel. When they explained to the hotel proprietor their predicament, she smiled and laughed and said to just go next door to the police station and get a letter. The policeman on duty didn't even write a letter and said just tell Mrs. so and so that I said it was OK.
There were only two incidents that gave me a moment of discomfort. When I first arrived the custom's officer asked me to wait at the side of his booth. He then explained to me in Persian that because the US government gave Iranian nationals so much grief when they entered America that they felt obliged to retaliate but not to worry, everything was fine and in ten minutes they would let me in after taking my finger prints electronically. An Iranian psycho ananlyst lady who sat next to me on the plane and who lived in Paris insisted on staying with me til she was sure I was alright with the authorities. By the time we left, I had all the soldiers and custom's officers laughing and the lady gave me an open invitation to stay in their family mansion in Kerman or in Paris any time I wanted. It was the same Iran I knew and loved where there was always a way, always the human factor around the rules. In fact by the time I left Iran I had two open invitations to be a guest in Paris from a married woman and a single woman and one invitation to Stockholm from a married woman, all of whom I had just met and I thought how different this was from the USA where the only time something like this would happen is if the woman wanted to take you to bed after meeting you in a singles bar or an line dating service.
There is a rule against taking photos of government buildings in Iran similar to but less hostile than the hostile reception my son got when he tried to take a photo of the US Embassy in Rome last summer, which drew a half dozen bayonetted rifles aimed at him. Thank you Mr. Bush for turning our embassies into armed fortresses rather than welcoming places and for making the world a more dangerous place.
One day on this visit, I naively took a photo of the exterior of the supreme court building in Tehran and a soldier came up behind me and angrily snatched my camera and ran off with it. I kept calm and walked over to his guard house and asked him politely where he had taken my camera and he told me to the security office inside the court house. I went there and in less than two minutes I got my camera back after explaining in Farsi that I did not know that it was forbidden to take pictures of this building and that it was my son's camera and that my father had been a lawyer who had tried cases in the US Supreme Court and that I had only taken one photo and would gladly erase it in front of the security officer, which I did. Let's contrast that with the treatment such an action would have induced in America...
Anyway I do not want to waste any more words on writing about American misconceptions about Iran and Tehran today other than to say that they have planted over 30,000 trees since I had lived there and that it is still a very beautiful city and one of the greenest cities I have ever seen, the old palaces and modern apartment and office towers are both equally impressive, there are still hidden baghs and hidden world within worlds like the Zahir Ol Dowleh cemetery where many of the major contemporary poets, writers and musicians are burried like Forough Farrokhzad and which is amazingly ownd by a private family. There is still the sound of running water in the jubes always in the background washing the city from the mountains in the north all the way down to the desert in the south. Yes the traffic is bad but so is it bad in every major urban area in every place I have been in the world lately including the San Francisco Bay Area which is now worse than L.A.
There are plenty of wonderful outdoor restaurants still with running streams of cold clear mountain water in their midst in Darband like Koohpaye and SPU in Evin. I saw more museums in ten days in Tehran than in the 5 years I lived there including Sa'ad Abad Palaces and Niavaran and Golestan and the Reza Abassi and Ghavam Soltaneh museums and the carpet museum and the grand bazaar and the Natural History Museum and the National Jewels Museum. There is no lack of things to do and see in Tehran. Shomal is still Shomal, I had del and gigar at one of the roadside barbeque places on Chaloos Road, I had the best maast in the world sold along the roadside in dripping cheese clothe from shepards just like 30 years ago and we went for a ride in a telecabin at Namak Abrud and to the beach at the old Hyatt and we had tea in The Ramsar Hotel.
By the way, one of my readers told me to call her family in Tehran when I got there. They had me to a huge dinner at their house, which lasted from 7pm to1 am. They gave me the key to their villa in Shomal and I had the place all to myself. I had never met any of them before nor have I ever met my reader. This would never happen in the USA. I have lived on the same street for 18 years now in San Jose, California and the only family who have invited me into their house are Syrians.
If I had had three months instead of ten days it still would not have been enough time to see all my old and new friends. I stayed in the old Hilton Hotel which is now called the Esteglal and it is where I was taken hostage in 1979 and liberated by my beautiful friend Pouran Nafisi with the help of two gunmen she had hired for the purpose. The story is in my book which is coming out in September, which you can read about on my website: www.zirzameen.com Although she passed away seven years ago from heart failure, two months ago I was able to help reunite her son, whom I didn't know she had, who had been separated from her in a divorce at age 8 months and raised in the USA, who lives in Seattle, to relocate his two half sisters, one of whom he had only heard about but never met and one whom he didn't even know he had and I was able to see the younger one in Tehran while I was there and meet her husband and little boy. The last time I saw her she was two years old, now she is 32. It was just amazing. Up until one half hour before I had to leave for the airport, old friends were still showing up with children I had never met before and in one case I had not seen them in 40 years.
At the request of film maker Jahangir Golestan Parast in Orange County, I brought 5 DVD copies of his film Bam 6.6 to give to the surgeon and the nurses, who had taken extensive care of the protagonist of his film, Bam earthquake victim, Adele Freedman at the Tehran, Kasra Hospital. It was a very moving experience to meet them in person.
Everyone I met asked me whether I liked Iran better under the Shah's regime or now and what I told them was that one thing I liked about Iran today better than 30 years ago was that it seemed that Iranians were in charge of Iran instead of foreigners and that is as it should be.
I also made a special trip to Behesht-e-Zahra to see the thousands of graves of the young marytrs who died in defence of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war which the US government at that time encouraged and armed Saddam Hossein to start. It was called the "Silent War" even then because despite it lasting 8 years and killing over a million Iranian youths, the Western media did not cover it just like they are not covering Afghanistan right now. I wanted to take pictures of the martyres graves and write an article for a mainstream American publication to remind them of this war, to remind them of what the US policies had cost in Iranian lives. I thought such an article would give Americans a better understanding of why there is a lack of trust for the USA in Iran and how amazing it really is that the majority of Iranians are still pro American despite our sordid and duplicitous history there.
The ten action packed days went by so quickly it made my head spin and my local cell phone never stopped ringing. When at last the time came to leave, I found myself crying all the way to the airport just as I had that last night 30 years ago and I found that my love for Iran and for Iranians was not a thing of the past but very much alive. My best friend's father Alia, had said to me in farewell that last night in Tehran 30 years ago, that one day I would return. My only regret was that he was not alive to meet me.
God Bless Everyone,
The Kasra Hospital Nurses
Another goal of my trip was to visit the nurses who took care of Adele Freedman after Dr. Massoud Noroozi did 5 hours of pro bon reconstructive surgery on her crushed feet in the wake of the Bam earthquake as shown in the award winning film Bam 6.6 by Jahangir Golestan Parast about our universal humanity.
I presented each nurse who had been in attendance of Adele with a DVD copy of the film Bam 6.6.
I had a nice talk with nurse Nancy, the Armenian Christian who spoke excellent English and spoke so eloquently in the film and I spoke Persian to the Moslem nurses.
I told them they had all become movie stars in the USA where we had shown the film at Stanford University , UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, The National Cathedral in Wash DC, the World Affairs Council of San Francisco, MIT, The L.A. Noor Festival and the Dubai International Documentary Festival.
They were modest and joking about their stardom and very pleased with the gift of the DVD’s. I also left one for Dr. Noroozi, who was teaching at the medical school at Tehran University that day although I spoke to him on the phone.
