If the story of my life were to be written, it should be called “From theKajaveh¹ to the Jet.” I remember all my journeys. Our family goes back twenty-five generations to a man called Kiamarz. That’s where the name Kia comes from. His grave is inNur[light]; hence our family name Kia-Nuri. My grandfather was Nuri. My uncle took the name KiaNuri, but my father crossed out the Nuri; he named us Kia.

Here is the story of our family: Once a father had eight sons and three daughters. They were a wealthy family. But one of the...

The very first memory that I have of my childhood is this: I was put outside the door and I was banging on the door, wanting to get inside and was kept outside. I was sitting on the floor and I must have been about two or three years old. I remember that the ground that I was sitting on was wet. It is customary in Iran to sprinkle water and then sweep the floor, because it is earth, so that the dust will not rise. It was in the morning perhaps before lunch time. I remember I had done...

The story that I am about to tell you is important because it has shaped my views on gender issues and Iranian cultural politics. Between the ages of four and eight, I was subject to sustained molestation, rape, and physical abuse. Growing up male in a phallocratic society, although different, is as painful and oppressive as growing up female. Virgin women are emblems of family honor [abiru], so boys often became the easily accessible objects of adult male desire.

It is not uncommon for young boys to have their first sexual experiences by the age of five. In my own...

I was born into an Iranian family privileged with highly educated men and women. What made my paternal family elite was not wealth but education. My mother was Russian. She came to Iran at the end of the First World War to marry the man she loved, my father. My father, who had finished his higher education in political science at Moscow University, was the third child of a large, traditional Persian family. He was a fervent nationalist and believed that to serve Iran and its people was our most sacred duty. Although we were brought up as Muslims, we...

I think more than anything else what made me was first the culture of the family. I was born in Isfahan. Our family was a large, extended family like most families in Iran but it was also very diversified in terms of class structure and outlook, religious training, Westernization, and professionalism. The immediate family—my parents and their immediate families, my aunts and uncles on both sides and their children and so forth—formed a unit that constituted or produced its own culture that was different from the culture of the country.

Our family culture was essentially oppositional and has...

I belong to a generation of confused children. Confused because I was born during the time of the Pahlavi—the last Shah—and because my mother was a professional woman, a doctor. I wasn’t born into what might be considered a traditional family. It was a divided family. On one hand it was traditional in terms of its expectations of female roles. On the other I was encouraged by the family to be educated, to be professional, and to further my studies outside Iran. I received consistently mixed messages. Women, I was told, had to be highly educated, but women...

We lived in the Sheikh Hadi neighborhood near what used to be the Serah-i-Shah [Crossroads of Shahs] but now it’s Serah-i-Inqelab [Crossroads of the Revolution]. I love that old neighborhood. Its main street (Sheikh Hadi) is named after Sheikh Hadi Najmabadi who is the grandfather of my grandmother. As with many old Tehran families, most of the neighborhood was populated by my large extended family. The neighborhood hospital was built on a trust left to Sheikh Hadi and his male descendants, and in addition to producing religious scholars, our family produced many male and female doctors and engineers.⁵

Many stories...

My father was a high-school teacher. I owe my zeal for learning to him. He taught me my first words, how to read, how to write. Although my mother encouraged us, she had only an elementary school level of literacy. My father tried to influence her to become less religious, to become more open-minded—to even, for example, remove herchadorwhen she could, not to cover her face.

My father was open-minded and rebellious, particularly noteworthy because he was raised to become a mullah. Both my grandfathers in Tabriz were senior mullahs—Hojjatul Islam. My father left Tabriz after...

I was born in Shiraz into an Iranian Jewish family. I am the second child and the first daughter. When I was a year old, the whole family moved to Tehran. My father was a businessman—in export and import. When I was five years old I went to the French school, Institute Maryam, a branch of the Jeanne d’Arc school run by French nuns. I got my diploma in French in the ninth grade; for the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades I went to Rassi in South Tehran.

I got married when I was nineteen. When I graduated from...

In Iran at the age of fourteen, in 1976, I was introduced to political and social issues. I am now twenty-seven years old. We were a family of nine children and I was the favorite daughter in the family. I was never satisfied with the ordinary, which included the usual housewifely roles for girls in our society. Although my father was moderate, open-minded, and democratic, my brothers were not. My father was a landlord with orchards and estates; he was also aHaji[one who makes the pilgrimage to Mecca]. But he never made us wear thechador. One of...

I was born in the village of Arbat in 1935. The most important figure in my early childhood was my grandmother. My grandfather died when I was very young, and my grandmother was really a great woman, a strong woman, an amazing lady. I can never understand Americans who think that women in Iran have no power. Not the women in the villages that I knew. In all my years there, I never saw a woman take orders from her husband. In fact, I saw women work together with men. My grandmother had five sons, all of whom respected her...

I was born in 1947 in a family of physicians; both my grandfathers and my father were physicians. My paternal grandfather was trained in Moscow and was practicing in the region of Iravan/Nakhichevan when Muslim-Armenian conflict in the area drove him, his brother, and their families into Maku, Khoy, Salmas, and Urmieh. My mother’s side of the family is from Tabriz, and as World War II ended my mother’s parents moved back to Tabriz. My parents, who were temporarily in Tehran because of the Soviet occupation of northern Iran, also moved back to Tabriz.

In Tabriz we were part of...

The earliest memory and the first image I have of myself is of a classroom and a school—1949, the first school I attended at the age of six. It was an overcrowded school and I remember the first day, a big class of about eighty students and a teacher who had to teach us Persian. But now I remember that he could barely speak the language. He was a Kurd, someone who had learned some knowledge of Persian and Arabic in traditional schools. This was a school in ————, the town where I was born and lived for...

Ever since I was a child, whenever somebody would ask me, “What’s your last name?” I would say “————.” And they would say, “Oh, you’re a Kurd.” So I knew that I was a Kurd. And we would go to Kurdistan, and I could speak Kurdish.

I had been raised and brought up with Tehrani values. Yet I understand and can relate to a lot of Kurdish values and ways of life. When I was about nine or ten years old, in Kurdistan, I had long hair and a BB gun, and in one of the tiny villages...

One day, when I was about five [1954], living in Tehran in an old house with a garden full of jasmine, honeysuckle, and a pond, my grandmother, who lived with us, decided she was nearing death. She therefore insisted on returning to Yazd, her birthplace, to die. So we all packed up and, in my father’s 1949 Ford, we moved to Yazd, our belongings on the roof of the car.

In Yazd we stayed in this old, old house withbaad gir[medieval cooling towers]; he points to a picture in a large illustrated book,Our Homeland Iran,and says,...

Who am I. Perhaps part of the answer lies somewhere in my divided background. My parents came from two very different families. My father’s grandparents were very religious, very strict; my mother’s family, very relaxed, very open to any kind of discussion.

My mother came from a small town [we’ll call it Kuchek] of about ten thousand in northern Iran. My grandfather was the doctor in the town. He was not a formally trained doctor. He was trained at a religious school as a doctor—Tebb-e Qadim[traditional medicine]. He had a lot of books around the house. Although he...

My adolescence was that of the revolution. My family was typical in many ways. What was not typical was that we were more educated—both my parents were doctors. We had a different kind of life from the other families we knew. My parents resisted the easy way to get money, refused to get involved with politics, and also refused to do abortions. After my mother went to Mecca in ‘72, she decided not to drink or swim or take pleasure in what she had before.

My sense of religion is therefore filled with conflict, and the source was my...

I was born in a small village in central Iran in 1962. My father worked as a high school teacher but also studied for advanced degrees in Tehran, and also studied foreign languages. He married my mother, who had been one of his high school students. She was seventeen years old and very beautiful, but, my father said, a very weak student. When she got married, she quit high school and got pregnant at the age of eighteen with the first of four children. I am the oldest. We moved from house to house and city to city some twenty...

Some of the current contradictions I experience have their genesis elsewhere, in my childhood and in my relationship with my parents.

My mother married my father when she was fourteen and he was nineteen. We lived in Sabzevar, a town in northeastern Iran near the holy town of Mashhad. My mother was from one of the best-known families in Sabzevar—the Oskoowi family. And in fact that’s what my wife refers to as my Oskoowi complex, because in it lies the source of some of my attitudes. They were merchants originally from Oskoo in Azarbaijan who settled in Sabzevar; they...

Although Mohamad Tavakoli and Tahereh were children in 1963, because they lived in South Tehran they remembered the 1963 anti-Shah, pro-Khomeini demonstrations in the bazaars. The symbolic, strategic, and social center of conservative political activity in major cities has historically been the bazaar. Analogous to a medieval Wall Street with control over guilds and craftsmen, it is made up of a concentrated cluster of shops in alleys where artisans produce and merchants sell such goods as copperware, rugs, fabric, and other small-village crafts. Thebazaarisplayed important roles in undermining the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, in the anti-British agitation...

I grew up into social consciousness through my father, a fervent supporter of Mossadeq, and a member ofJebhe Melli[the National Front] whose sadness over the loss of our one chance for democracy was so deep that even when he was dying two weeks ago, he asked to be buried with a copy of Mossadeq’s book. His political sensibility combined with our mother’s social responsibility is what made us political. We also grew up with a generation of activists who were influenced by Samad Behrangi’s allegories of resistance and middle class selfishness—Little Black FishandMr. Goodfortune (Aga....

I was in Tehran in 1978 when the Cinema Rex in Abadan was set on fire. That was a turning point for the revolution. Because we saw the Shah then as a symbol of evil, we fell easily into thinking that he wanted to ruthlessly exterminate any opposition. So we thought that he destroyed the cinema to get at the Fedayeen or Mojahedin collected in the cinema. But now we know that the burning of Cinema Rex was done by the opposition. I say the opposition rather than Khomeini, because it’s no use blaming only Khomeini. That’s playing into the...

We left Iran in 1979. I experienced the Spring of Freedom. It was a very strange feeling. I was not young enough to share that ecstasy with the youth. I could see what was happening and I was not happy. But I was not old enough to lose my faith in the people and say that all our lives depend on the king and that we would be lost without him. I had grown angry with the Shah toward the end and was very much in favor of some sort of radical change.

And that spring, it really was the...

I remember the day martial law was declared. It was the start of the revolution. At that time Sharif Emami was Prime Minister. And I remember that he ordered the people to close the cabarets and the casinos. But at that time there was also a hidden order people didn’t know about, that I didn’t know about myself, but that we found out about later: they wanted all women and minorities out of television and radio. Although I didn’t know that, they called me from the television station and said that my program would not be aired for a few...

The last play I was in was to run for two weeks—this was after the revolution. One day my parents came to see the play. Though the theme of the play was political, we had permission to put it on. The playwright was Mehrdad Jamak. The producer and director was an Armenian. Because the play was about events resulting from the Shah’s departure, it had the Islamic regime’s approval; it followed that I would also have my brother’s approval since he was an ardent supporter of the regime. But that was not to be.

My part required that, in...

Because of my involvement in radical politics, I had not returned to Iran since 1970. My father had warned me against returning because he had found out that SAVAK had files on me. But once the demonstrations started in the summer of ‘78, all I said was, “I’m going.” I arrived the day after Black Friday, September 1978. When I went back again in 1979, the Shah had just left. And I went there to make my revolution. [She laughs.] What else can I say? There were thousands and tens of thousands of us who came back. It was wonderful,...

Maybe in our politics we all grew too optimistic in relying on ourselves and our power. If I could overrule my grandfather, my uncle, and everybody else who was against me—and they represented the older generation, the old-fashioned, fanatical ones—it stood to reason that we as the leftist, as the young generation, as the alternative politics, could also overrule, dominate, and eliminate the power of the old, the Khomeinis, and the mullahs. We relied too much on new ideas, on self-reliance, and on the power of the intelligentsia, which itself became manipulated.

My life was evidence of the...

At the age of twelve I was married to my cousin through an arranged marriage. My husband had lost his father when he was twelve years old and was forced to become the head of the family. My father, a well-respected merchant in the bazaar, took my future husband with him to his chamber in the bazaar and introduced him to other merchants. We started our married life in a two-bedroom house, where, when I was fifteen, my first son was born. My husband was honest and gentle—everybody liked him; he saved factories from bankruptcy and workers from joblessness....

This revolution is not Islamic. This “Islamic” idea of women you quote to me from Khomeini—his “Islam” has been contaminated with many things that didn’t exist at the beginnings of Islam. One of them is the disparity between men and women. This should not be labeled “Islam.” I believe, based on the life of the Prophet and the first leaders of Islam, that Muhammad himself did not discriminate against women. He considered his daughter Fatima superior to men. He made her the beginning; he made it so that all the Imam family histories originated from her. Why? The Prophet...

Politics? No, I was never involved in politics. I took photographs all over Tehran and in other cities, but all the pictures were destroyed as was the archive of magazines and newspapers I had collected, and the films of demonstrations and the interviews. My character is not that of a joiner of groups—I may be sympathetic to a cause, but I don’t join. I was working on a film in a village near Qum when the demonstrations started. Television was the first institution to be closed down after the revolution. We could not work. So, too, the university where...

Who am I? I’m a filmmaker. After some four years in Europe, I returned to Iran in 1969. My first feature film was made in 1970, and by 1971 it had become a hit. I won a couple of inter national awards for my films. I worked till 1979 in Iran. I was a producer, a cameraman, and a director. Before the revolution started I considered myself generally pro-Left but not involved with any political group. I had sympathies for leftists who were actually fighting against the Shah and the system. I was pro- anything-against-Shah. When the revolution started I...

I returned to Iran in March 1979 to join the revolution. The day that the monarchy fell was the happiest day of my life. Although I worried about the clerical leadership of the revolution, I was full of hope. I knew already that in Kurdistan, people were in control, not the central Iranian government. Yes,Bahar-i Azadi, the Spring of Freedom. Happy times. No trace of the monarchy. Nothing was more relaxing than seeing the hated statues of the Shah taken down. Now I could see all the revolutionary literature, everything previously censored printed here. And people were reading it....

Many of my friends who had been anti-Tudeh in our college days were now part of the Tudeh Party. We spent many nights talking about this change in their affiliation: what had happened, and what was it that they saw in the Tudeh Party? They thought that among the many leftist groups, the Tudeh Party was now the most reasonable.

Other than the war against the Kurds, the major event that affected my feelings on the revolution was the demonstration against the closing of the major daily oppositional newspaper,Ayandegan. I wanted to go and see this demonstration and participate...

Why did I come here? The revolution, of course.

While I was away from Iran in India, I believed that our people were maturing into enlightenment, into thinking individuals. But alas, what I saw during the revolution proved that beneath the facade of enlightenment, we had kept our prejudices undisturbed. It was the unexpected eruption of prejudice and the abuse of power that caused my departure from Iran. I saw people using the revolution as an excuse to carry out personal vendettas. Anyone who had a grudge against another found it easy to get him arrested by accusing him of...

I don’t want my name used in any of this. Let me tell you what happened to me. I was born into a lower-middle-class family in which my mother was very religious. My father was a lower-class worker for the government. We always rented and never owned a house. I was twelve when my father was given a subsidized flat by the government. My grandfather had his own business, and his three sons and their new families lived together. But when my father clashed with his father, preferring a white-collar job over his father’s business, we left my grandfather’s care....

I am of the generation of 28 Mordad [the generation that saw the CIA coup of August 1953 that overthrew Mossadeq and brought the Shah back into power].¹⁹Although I was in high school at the time, I was politically active. I went to Alborz high school. I wrote articles against the teachers in the school paper and Dr. Mojtaheddi, the principal, flogged me. I was a good student and was not expelled, but I was forbidden to put out the paper anymore. Yet I was interested in politics and in effecting change and wanted to start my own party...

Between December 1977 and February 1981, I experienced the preparation for a Pinochet-type mass killing of the opposition, the Cinema Rex fire, the September 8 Jaleh Square killings; the nights of shoutingAllah-o-Akbar[God is Great] from rooftops; the street scenes after the Shah’s departure; the chaotic arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini; the dangerous existence of the dual governments of Bazargan and Bakhtiar; the February 9–11 final armed struggle that emptied the armories and delivered the final blow to the Pahlavi monarchy; the bloody killing of Hoveyda and others linked with the old regime; the mood during theBahar-i Azadi...

I was twelve years old when the revolution took place. My happiest memory and the happiest moment of my life happened a few years later at Alborz high school in 1982 on one of those days when we were supposed to burn American flags. School changed for us after the revolution. Now all classes had to stand in the yard every morning and listen to boring speeches, first to the principal, then to the Qur’an, then to something else in Arabic, then to some government sort who would analyze the meaning of what had happened in the war or in...

I left Iran in January of 1979. When I left, the airport was almost closed, had been for several days, and I wasn’t sure whether I could actually leave. And I still didn’t believe what was happening. There was at that time such a sense of instability that one never knew whether something was going to happen or not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the condition of my leaving Iran. The story I usually tell is in fact only half of the story of why and how I left. The story is about that day in September 1978, Black...

I was not a participant in the revolution against the Shah because, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand the meaning and the consequences of people’s acts of revolt. I remember going to this big demonstration and hearing, for the first time, people chanting the slogan, “The only party is Hezbollah [the Party of God], and the only leader is Ruhollah [Khomeini’s first name].” I came home confused. I thought they were making fun of the Shah. I asked my father what the slogan meant.

He was reluctant to respond. Although he favored the revolution against the Shah, I...

The narratives collected in this book—memories fabricated out of the past and woven in the present—suggest the competing and unstable discourses that inform national, exilic, and diasporic identities. Because exile is the space in which we negotiate relationships with imaginary pasts, it becomes the site where new cultural imaginaries, unexpected in-betweens, and group identity formations reproduce some of the fault lines that constitute both the old and new imagined nations. Exilic identity, like all identity, is always mistaken, but it is all we have on which to build a self.¹ The nostalgia provoked by exile is, as Ali...

While I share many frustrations of other refugees and immigrants, and while I really miss my family, friends, relatives, people, and country, I do not feel a stranger in North America. I feel that I belong here, too. For me there are two realities when I look at the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, or other Western countries. To take the example of the United States where we are at the moment, I of course strongly reject the neocolonial domination of the American state, its warmongering, its support of fascist and despotic regimes throughout the world. This is one...

For these four years that I have been forced to be out of Iran, I have traveled many countries, not out of choice but out of necessity. I have proved to myself that it is not only Iran where I can work but wherever I am in the world.

Yet, I miss being home. I miss sensing, feeling, touching that earth, that weather, and that people. I feel I could be more useful there. But I will not go back in the present situation. I will not cooperate with the present government. I will not try to bring them any...

I was on the last plane that left Shiraz for the [Persian] Gulf States and landed at Qattar. After waiting for twelve hours at the airport with my one-year-old son and my wife, we left for Pakistan. I was detained there for ten days. Although my passport identified me as a journalist, they gave me a hard time at the airport. They even tore up my shoulder pads in their body search. This was all in General Zia’s time. But when I arrived in London, my identification as a journalist worked to my advantage, so that I was given a...

Six months after my husband left, I got my passport and the official permit to leave the country. I left our wonderful house with two suitcases of autumn clothing—as if I were to return in three weeks. We were planning to return and work in Iran. Our children were planning to return and work there. Three months after our arrival in the United States, the real persecution of Baha’is started. We were told to stay out and not go back.

Do you consider yourself an emigré or an exile? What do you miss most?Definitely I think of myself...

When the six of us arrived in the United States we joined my mother and my older brother’s family in Los Angeles. My mother had already bought a house here in this area. And she had always wanted, long before the revolution, to come out of the country and stay in the United States. She is the kind of woman who did not like living in Tehran. She is a very liberated woman for her age, and she was not very comfortable in Iran. She’s very outspoken and wants to live freely. She also wanted to get a higher education...

Even if you wish to be honest with yourself, the answers to questions about home aren’t simple. I can easily say, “Iran is my country, my home, my everything.” But the fact is, it isn’t. I don’t belong there. I don’t belong here. Actually I don’t know where I belong and who I am.

My husband was an engineer. Of course, before entering the United States, we’d hired a lawyer who ripped us off. Then we were held up in Turkey forever. When leaving Iran, I told him that as long as we had each other, we shouldn’t worry about...

Exile? During the years I lived in Europe and later in America, I felt I was living a life in transition, in flux between here and there. I had always hoped to return someday to Iran. I had lived in the United States and had studied and taught here briefly in the 1960s, then returned to Iran in 1972. When I came here after the revolution, however, I felt differently from any other time I had been here. The difference was that now I am in exile. The last few times I was here it was only temporary. This time...

Intellectually it’s hard for me to identify myself. I still am wrestling with whether or not to go back. Once I supported and fought for the revolution. To be an Iranian now means a different thing. Now I tend to associate myself with the Iran before Islam, with the civilization that we once had before Islam. When I think of being an Iranian, I try to think of the Iran that has its roots in a pre-Islamic civilization. That’s what I’m trying to teach my eldest son, trying to teach him about what Iran was, what the culture was before...

The days of the hostage crisis—with endless church bells—were among the hardest days of my life. I remember once in a graduate seminar in 1981 I was asked to introduce myself. I had done so many times before and never found it difficult. But now announcing that I was Iranian was beyond me. Not because I was ashamed. But I knew that all these people who were sitting around the table had some sort of anger at Iranians. So when I started talking about me, I said, “I am a graduate student in early childhood education,” and then...

I had to go to Washington because, though I had scored very high in the sciences, my English was pretty poor. Radcliffe required that I take a summer course in English, which was arranged for me at one of these language schools in Washington, d.c. I left Iran in June 1966 and spent two months in one of those language courses in d.c.

I must tell you the bizarre story of my arrival in the United States, because it took a combination of complete naiveté and luck to have survived such an arrival. I didn’t know anyone in the United...

I experienced feelings of exile a long time ago, long before I came to the United States, when I was a teenager in Iran: when I realized that values were so confusing, when I wasn’t sure what being a woman meant, when I wasn’t sure whether womanhood was defined by education, or by wifehood, or by talent, or by seduction, or by sexuality. These questions were made more confusing by the confusion in my own home, so that by the time the revolution happened, I could really understand why women were going to the opposite extreme. It was a way...

And while I was in the States working toward my degree, my brothers and sisters in Tehran were getting arrested. In late 1982 I finally finished my studies. So did my husband. I got my degree, but we had to leave because we didn’t have a green card. I sent my passport to the Iranian embassy to get it renewed, but my request was rejected because they said I was an antirevolutionary. I don’t know why I was identified and others more active were not. Some say because I had talked about women’s issues, because I had given different lectures...

Iranians are sensitive about the term “exile” because most understand it to meanTab’eed, or political exile, which has negative connotations. And I’m not exiled in that sense of the term. But there’s another sense of exile for which the Iranian wordghorbat[the feeling, regardless of circumstance, of estrangement] is perhaps more approximate. If we use that variation of the term, we could say that I am in exile. But I have problems with all that because these meanings of “exile” imply that I was living at some age in an authentic, stable, unified country and that I was...

No,Khanum[lady]. Write my name, because my good name is not something I wish to take to the grave with me or give to themorde-shoor[washer-of-the-corpse]. I come from Iran, and all my life’s effort is to live with that country and its people. And I do. If I have left Iran and am following an unhappy ugly migration, it is only so that someday I can return. I am a gypsy. We have a country that didn’t originate today or yesterday or ten years ago or one hundred or a thousand years ago. In the words of...

When I left Iran during the revolution, I found myself in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I attended a Catholic high school. I don’t know what that tells you about Iranian middle-class choices. In order to come to the United States you have to have admission from a university or high school. There was this institution in Tehran that, back then, if you paid them seven or eight thousand tomans, would get you an admission and the I-20 form. There were a lot of kids who ended up in bizarre universities. So I got into Pious X and didn’t know that “X”...

Now I am in this country.

When I was here in the 1950s I tried to build a little Iran around me, but I don’t do that now. Because now I can’t think of the present Iran. I only think of the old Iran and hope that Iran will return to the way it was—a place where we could all work toward something. The present Iran is not the country I love. I don’t see the present Iran as my own. Yes, I feel in exile from the new Iran, from the old Iran, and from America. We who...

The difference between here and there is the letter “t.” A sign, a floating signifier—that is one place to begin discussing exile. Having lived away from Iran for the last twenty years, I find my imaginary wanderings to “home” and back taking more and more the shape of letters. As missives from home, letters arrive bearing heavy stamps, images with unfamiliar referents. But letters also carry me back to the Persian alphabet—thealeph-ba. I cross from English to Farsi, “t” transforming into the small “teh” and the large “teh.” In elementary school in Tehran, I wrote endless pages...