Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (47 page)

In the most extreme cases, depression goes far beyond singing sad songs. Nazila’s sister, Golnaz, told me that one day the security guard on duty at her family’s apartment complex called with gruesome news. “A body fell on the roof of your car,” the guard said, as matter-of-factly as if he were announcing that the mailman had delivered a package. Golnaz went down to see for herself. There, atop her car, was the broken body of a thirty-year-old woman. Depressed, troubled, and unemployed, the woman had jumped off the balcony of the tenth-floor apartment she shared with her parents. Her skull was crushed, her limbs shattered.

Golnaz ran back to the apartment, too stunned to cry.

Two weeks later, another young woman leaped to her death, from another balcony in the same building.

Suicide has become part of everyday life in Iran, even though it is forbidden by the Koran and considered an act against the will of God. During Iran’s war with Iraq, conversations were filled with stories about martyrs who had sought out death in battle to reach paradise. They are often referred to as suicide fighters in Western accounts, but in Iran their deaths aren’t considered suicides. Now, however, young people were taking their lives in acts of despair. It is a phenomenon that strikes not just the children of the privileged, but the children of the poor as well.

Newspapers are filled with small items about suicide, and suicide attempts have become so common that young people have begun to talk openly about them. One summer I spent time with a nineteen-year-old young man named Arash. In the midst of our conversation, the story of a suicide attempt when he was sixteen came spilling out. His family had recently moved back to Iran from Sweden, and the adjustment from the freewheeling Scandinavian life to a place where the most mundane social activities were forbidden was too much to bear.

“I was really angry,” he recalled, speaking in fluent English. “I was pissed off that my parents had brought me back to Iran. My girlfriend and all my friends were in Sweden and they kept calling and telling me to come back. In Iran, I had no friends. I couldn’t speak Persian very well. I had really long hair and everyone thought I was gay or something. I locked the door to my room. I found some sleeping pills. You can find sleeping pills in every house in Iran. So I just took some. My mother came and tried to wake me up. I think she broke down the door. Then they took me to the hospital. I woke up in a hospital bed. It wasn’t time for me to die.”

For four years Arash’s life was in limbo. He had failed the entrance exam for university two years in a row. After he refused to perform his two years of compulsory military service, his father bought his way out. But he lived at home with his parents, unable to support himself with the money he earned making pirated copies of music and films on CDs and selling them on a busy black market.

“So what do you want?” I asked him over dinner at a popular restaurant in Tehran one evening.

“I want to do normal things, like go out in shorts on a date,” he said. “But it’s banned. I came here the other night with my parents and they talked about how much they loved coming here before the revolution, having beer and wine to drink as they sat outside and ate a good meal. Why can’t it be like that now?”

When I contacted Arash two years later, he was making plans to leave the country. He had recently married a young Iranian woman and they were moving to Sweden. He and his wife hadn’t voted in the 2000 parliamentary elections. “The weather was too cold and the lines too long,” he said, adding that it really didn’t matter who won or lost.

The sadness of young people shows up in other ways. A young Iranian-American friend of mine who grew up in the United States but returned to Iran for a visit recently prided himself on his ability to blend in with people his age who had grown up in the country. But one day in a barbershop, the barber stated, “You recently came from abroad.”

“How could you tell?” the young man asked.

“You have laughter in your eyes,” the barber said. “No one at your age who has known nothing else but life in Iran has laughter in his eyes.”

*   *   *

Even since Khatami’s election, I have heard stories from young people about how they want more social and educational freedom, better job prospects, and most important, to be taken seriously and treated with respect. “President Khatami comes to our university, and says nice things, but he can’t change anything,” a student at the all-female Al Zahra University told me one day after Khatami had given a speech. “No matter what, he’s still one of them. He’s still a cleric. This revolution has been built wrong, like a wall where the bricks were never laid properly.”

But then, I have met other young people in Iran who have succeeded in creating full lives for themselves despite the constraints of the Islamic system. Maybe it’s that they’ve reshaped their dreams to fit the present. Maybe it’s that they’re old enough to have memories of the sacrifices that came with revolution and war.

I found one such woman living in a small one-room apartment, high in the mountains far away from the traffic and pollution of Tehran. When I met Nargess, who is thirty years old and holds a master’s degree in political science, she was working at a governmental research institute. One roommate is a photographer who also teaches at the university, the other a photographer for state-run television. All three have lived away from home and have supported themselves for years.

Their apartment is in a crumbling building, set in a garden of mulberry trees. There is one small table and one chair, a telephone, and a small television; the only closet is filled with books. The trio share the owner’s bathroom in another part of the building. I see only one mattress in the room. I have no idea what the sleeping arrangements are; I do not ask.

Nargess, a dark-haired, olive-skinned woman whose parents live far away, near Iran’s eastern border, explained that at first her family had objected to her independent lifestyle. But for her, independence had come naturally. “Sure, we have a custom of living with our parents until we are married,” she explained as she put a large platter of watermelon and cucumbers on the floor before us. “But my father was a fervent revolutionary. He taught me to think for myself. And I do.”

Unlike so many other young women I have met, Nargess loves her work and is satisfied with her living arrangement because it affords her control over her private life. “It is as if a wind is blowing through me when I am here,” she said. “Life near the mountains is very peaceful, quiet, not like Tehran. So what that it’s an hour commute to work and it’s a small space. Here no one cares what I do.”

Still, Nargess realizes that she and her roommates are not representative of Iran’s youth. “Sometimes I feel as if my goals and attachments are different from those of other people who feel so alienated from society,” she said. “I really believe it when Khatami tells us that there are no saviors, that we all have to stand up and take responsibility. I do not have a high position or a high income or great expectations. Our problem we have in Iran—and it’s the problem of other societies as well—is that we’ve lost the ability to be satisfied with what we have.”

I contacted Nargess a year and a half later. She had changed jobs and was now working for a conservative newspaper. Her strategy, she explained, was “to destroy the conservative front from inside.”

Indeed, many young people, like Nargess, have no intention of finding a way out of the country. They manage to live, through creativity and wit, alongside an Islamic state that has yet to figure out how to deal with them. The reformists understand the disaster that more than two decades of anti-youth policies have created, yet the conservatives hang on to rhetoric and dogma, moralizing and rejection. And it is within this context that the students’ push for more democracy must be understood. They want a louder voice in their destiny, and they are getting bolder in making their demands. The older generation is also struggling to come to terms with the dreams of its young. As the youth demonstrated in the streets, their parents watched helplessly and hoped for better times, without having much sense of what that means. Sometimes it seems as if the tables have been turned, and that youth is calling the shots.

I saw this tension in the small, sweet hotel where I was staying in the summer of 1999. On the day of the riots I discovered that the hotel had been transformed into a refuge for a dozen students who had been beaten by street thugs. The hotel staff suggested that as the only foreign guest, I seek other lodging. As I was checking out, five housemaids came to say goodbye. They formed a chorus in black, reflecting variations on a theme.

“The students are saying they don’t want the Supreme Leader anymore,” said a small dark-skinned woman.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I don’t want him either,” she said. “Nobody wants him.”

A second woman came running down from the balcony upstairs to tell what she had just seen. “There were two young kids!” she exclaimed. “The vigilantes beat them until they were covered in blood!”

“I’m worried about my kids,” said a third woman whose three children were out on the streets that day. “Especially my twenty-year-old daughter. She’s young and so angry. I can’t stop her.” She began to weep, and then apologized for doing it in front of me.

“I have kids who are like that too,” said a fourth woman. “I don’t know what to do. Yesterday I saw a young man stop a bus. He made the people get off and set it on fire. A brand-new bus!”

“It’s getting just like the Shah,” said the third one. “He killed people. These clergy kill people. My fear is that something’s going to happen and we’ll have to stop working. And I need the money to live.”

Suddenly a fifth woman appeared, a young, thin woman with big gaps in her teeth. “Why do you pretend to be so miserable in front of a foreigner?” she asked. “Keep quiet!”

“This is the truth,” said the mother of three. “Why should we hide it?”

Precisely. These days, the people of Iran have little incentive or desire to keep things hidden any longer. The students know it. Their parents know it. Even the government knows it.

“What do young people want?” I asked Ali-Reza Shiravi from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance one day. I wanted an official government response. I was surprised at how frank he was in his answer. “They want an end to humiliation,” he said. “They want an education. They don’t want others to make decisions in their names. They want social and cultural opportunities. They want modern things. They want fun. Look at what’s happened with videos in this country. In the beginning of the revolution they were banned. But people didn’t care. Videos became widespread. By the time the government lifted the ban it was too late. Suddenly young people feel they have been left behind. They have to catch up to reach others in a hurry. It’s like the Internet. The Internet is very expensive for Iranians. But we have the Internet in our office. We offer it to the staff. So all the people come from other floors to use it. When you know there’s more out there, you want more.”

C H A P T E R   F I F T E E N

A Republic in the Making?

The New Year is coming, and we have to clean house. There are certainthings in our house that have gathered dust. We must clean them off andmake them shine.

— SAEED HAJJARIAN, NEWSPAPER EDITOR, AND AN ARCHITECT OF THE REFORM MOVEMENT, ON THE 2000 PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION CAMPAIGN

If the charges against me are true, then God protect the Islamic Republic ofIran. If, on the other hand, the charges are false, God protect us from ouraccusers.

— ABDOLLAH NOURI, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT AND FORMER MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR, DURING HIS TRIAL

Winners have large families, but losers are orphans.

— PERSIAN PROVERB

L
ESS THAN A WEEK
before Iran’s parliamentary elections in February 2000, former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani took out full-page campaign ads and distributed two million flyers for himself in several newspapers and through the mails. It was a desperate act. Here was one of the country’s leading clerics, a man with golden revolutionary credentials who had served for eight years as Speaker of the Parliament and for eight more as the country’s elected President. But now, he felt he had to sell himself to the voting public.

For months, Rafsanjani had watched helplessly as his power and prestige slipped away. The reformist press had written scathing attacks, accusing him of having done nothing during his years in power to halt the Intelligence Ministry’s reign of terror, of needlessly prolonging the Iran-Iraq war, and of pursuing a hollow economic policy. He responded every chance he had, in Friday prayer sermons and in newspaper interviews. In an angry apologia in the newspaper
Hamshahri,
he listed his achievements, saying it was he who had laid the groundwork for Iran’s new era of openness.

Rafsanjani’s desperation was apparent in the photograph he chose for his ad campaign, a shot of himself, sitting under a tree with a book open on his lap and his young grandson at his side. In the West it would have been conventional. But Rafsanjani had shed his turban for this photo, making it exceptional. He recognized, in other words, that the uniform of the mullahs was no longer an automatic draw. On the contrary, it had become a liability.

When Rafsanjani decided to run at the urging of the conservative clerical establishment, he and his supporters expected him to sweep into first place in the voting in Tehran and once again become Speaker of Parliament. But the traits that served him well in another time—backroom-deal-making, cronyism, and slipperiness—no longer worked. As the campaign progressed, the electorate and the reformist newspapers pressured Rafsanjani to clarify his positions on the issues of the day. He could not remain, as he had insisted, above the fray. In the old days, he had portrayed himself as a force of moderation in a leadership of zealots. Now he suddenly looked old, gray, and behind the times. When the election was held on February 18, he squeaked in to capture the last of Tehran’s thirty seats with 25.58 percent of the vote; he relinquished his seat shortly before the Parliament convened.