July 1, 2007 |
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from Imagining Persia (non fiction)
Geoffrey P Nash
Beyond the borders of the native land the exile is forever shaping and re-shaping an imaginary homeland. Left behind early and never to be returned to, that homeland is less a specific place, more a state or a series of states of mind, an open space in continual process of reconstitution under pressure of present exigency, in absence and alienation from the distant goal.
In a room at the back of the house opening on to the hayat, my grandfather kept the carpets and rugs that had been entrusted to his care by virtue of his other occupation of pawnbroker. He was helped in this by my grandmother, who every six months or so would unroll each carpet and air it outside so that it would be in its original pristine condition when its owner finally turned up with the cash to buy it back. Every morning my grandmother would prepare the samovar, while my grandfather went round the corner to the baker to purchase nan, thick Iranian flat bread. The bedding which my aunt and I had slept on would be folded up and placed on the main bed, and my grandmother would meticulously re-arrange the covers to restore the room to its refined daily order. She kept all the rooms as impeccable as the nishinmand, the guestroom, where we children rarely entered. The house and shop were rented. Grandfather hadn’t always lived in this part of Iran, but had come south following his son-in-law, my father. He never grew to accept his life there. Right up to the time he died he thought himself a foreigner in an alien place, the first of the family to bemoan the diaspora you might say …
As a child I knew little of these things. The oil was being piped from the Abadan refinery, and the British and Americans were in the land. My world was filled by the plastic toys Baba brought us from Teheran or elsewhere on his travels, and episodes of The Flintstones and Lost in Space. Then there were joyful expectations of picnics of salad and chilaw kebab cooked over charcoal and eaten on blankets laid out in my father’s orange grove, with the samovar steaming in the background. I was also busy playing in the road with the local Arab children. The old prejudice Iranians entertain towards Arabs entirely passed me by. Together in the sand the neighbour’s child and I sat making rag dolls that were meant to be Ali and Hussain, Omar and Abubakr. “Omar must wear red and our Lord Hussain green,” my friend told me, so I raided my mother’s sewing box and found some green satin for the Imam’s turban. Had my father not returned home and found us in the dirt we would have consigned Omar and Abubakr to flames in punishment for the ancient infamies the Shi’a believe they perpetrated against God’s holy family. Though now I understand his motives, I cannot entirely approve of Baba’s act of separating us from the ordinary people. If anyone were to disparage me as a typical Iranian, I would reply, “seeing that I know so little of Persian ways, and can barely distinguish the accent and behaviour of the man of Qazvin from the Yazdi, how could I be?” Our community was isolated from virtually everything that went to make up our compatriots and I knew nothing of their ways. For example, not until I returned to the Gulf did I understand the meaning of Eid al-Fitr, the feast that follows the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan….
*
The afternoon call to prayer, adhan al-asr, echoes across the open sand in front of the two adjoining apartment blocks. The room in which I write looks out over bare land, beyond the scattering of white buildings, to the not far distant turquoise sea. The Persian Gulf shimmers like a mirage in the heat of the afternoon. By the long grey sheds that form the outer margins of the port can be made out the rusting hulk of a boat, half-squatting in the sea. It is the ferry that brings the peddlers across the water from the land of confusion to sell their substandard goods in the local market. Cheap tea glasses riddled with bubbles, fourth-rate plastic trays and kitchenware, crudely moulded polymer toy lorries. The bric-a-brac for which their country is justly famed, elegantly presented kalyan waterpipes in Prussian blue stained glass, framed miniatures of Layli and Majnun, along with meticulously hand-woven Kashan and Nain carpets, are to be found in the craft shops in the city centre.
That small stretch of sea - named differently depending on which side you are situated - separates the land where she was born from the place where she now lives. Within its borders the alien community, among which, thanks to her European passport, she is not numbered, goes about its business scarcely noticed among the other alien communities. And yet the relationship is an old one, going back a millennium at least. Some of the tribes here trace their genealogy over that narrow stretch of water. And down the years blood has mixed. Occasionally, by a fountain in one of the air-conditioned, ice-marble souks, a sleekly got up mullah, in turban, black gown and immaculately shined shoes, has come to talk dollars and riyals with the white-robed Arabs. But for the most part her countrymen are to be found in the labyrinthine alleys of the old souks, plying the trades of hardware sellers, fruiterers, or butchers. Was it true the story about the Arab woman who threw the meat back in disgust because the butcher had failed to trim off the fat as she had demanded? “Give that to your blessed Ayatollah!” In a flash he cleft her skull with the meat chopper, and the man ran through the tiny lanes of the market, a ferocious crowd in hot pursuit. That was during the first days of the revolution, and afterwards, so the story goes, his bullet-ridden corpse was left strung up in the souk for five days.
*
The ease with which Dr Daoud and myself conversed together surprised me. In moments of reflection I began to question a whole range of cultural assumptions that had lain dormant within me for so long. These had been infused from earliest childhood. Left to myself, I would have imbibed no prejudice against Arabs, because I used to play with the local Arab children around our house. In fact I can say in all truth that I liked what little I saw of the Arabo-Persian ways of the population I grew up among. But my parents’ attitude was different. Coming as they did from the Persian heartlands of central Iran, their view of the people of the south bordering on Arab lands showed traces of the prejudice my grandfather had nursed for so many years as an exile in the land of uncouth tribesmen far way from the “real” Iran of his birth. This customary bigotry towards Arabs was the response of a proud nation that never relinquished a deep-seated grievance from having been conquered by invading armies from the west. “The man of Isfahan will drink fresh water, but the Arab of the desert will eat locusts”, my father used to laugh, quoting an old piece of Persian doggerel. As with all cultural stereotyping, the butt of your contempt must be denied all the virtues you yourself possess. “But the Arabs are noble and self-respecting,” I told my mother after we had lived there for several years. “They don’t handle you and pinch you when they get the opportunity as Iranian men do.”
“Ah,” was her reply, “but they are the rich, cultivated ones.”
*
Would I wish to go back to Iran now? Once I thought I would like to have gone with you. My father returned last October for the first time in nearly twenty years. He saw Cyrus and Sharokh and their wives. God, if he took me with him all I’d see would be my relatives, and I’d have to listen to the same old speeches. Anyway, why would I want to go back? It would be like a foreign country. I’m better off here with my son where at least I am free, and I can say and believe what I like, and people don’t bother me. Do you know what? I said to Baba, you always told me you wanted to lay your bones in Iran, do you still feel like that now? He shook his head, that’s all. So even my father has changed. He says the cities are more crowded and dirtier than before. I said of course they are, Baba, the population has almost doubled since you were there last. Well I’ve had enough of the heat and the dirt. Wrap me in ice. And the people, I don’t regret leaving them either. This is my home now. |
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Geoffrey P Nash is a university academic specialising in Anglo-Arab/Islamic cultural relations which he looks at for the main part through literature. He has published books with I.B.Tauris, Peter Lang and others. Imagining Persia (Grosvenor House Publishing) is not an academic book as such. Some of the material was researched, some came from personal experience of living in the Middle East and interviews with confidential sources, and there is some fictionalised writing based on real events. You can learn more at www.freewebs.com/georgeshas. |
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