Disoriental by Négar Djavadi

Author:Négar Djavadi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

I borrowed that expression from an article in Le Monde dated February 2, 1989 and written to mark the tenth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution: “[ . . . ] Sadr was the first intellectual to call out the Shah directly. In the open letter he sent to him in 1976 and which quickly circulated among students, many of whom were arrested for having it in their possession, he openly denounced the inconsistencies of the regime, repression and the absence of freedom of expression, and the economic gap between the wealthy and the rest of the population, which was seeing none of the enormous profits brought in by oil money. This letter could be considered the first stone of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.”

I read that article in Brussels one Sunday morning. My mind effervescent and my nostrils clogged with nicotine, I had just come from an event dedicated to the Flemish artistic scene in Beursschouwburg, a huge concert hall and alternative performance venue. Passing a newsstand on Anspach boulevard, I decided not to go back to the furnished studio I was renting on the other end of the city, but to buy the paper and settle down in a café for a while. I wasn’t used to reading the Belgian daily paper Le Soir and had some difficulty with it, so occasionally I indulged myself by buying a French paper, usually Libération, and catching up with the news from “home.” But on that day I chose Le Monde, because there was nothing else to read and I was putting off going home.

First there was the shock of seeing that article, and then the gut-punch of reading my dad’s name in it. I reread the paragraph several times. An emotion somewhere between pride and appreciation flooded through me. For the first time, a Western journalist was talking about that letter and the decisive part it had played in the Revolution. For the first time, Ruhollah Khomeini was no longer considered to be the sole architect of the coup. Even today, if you wade into the thicket of essays and articles dedicated to the 1979 Revolution, you’ll see that no Western observer, none of the pundits who claimed to be experts on the Near and Middle East, made the effort to see this Revolution as a protest movement by intellectuals, a spark lit in the universities and carried forward by the enlightened youth, rather than as an insurrection orchestrated by the Old Man in the Turban who was then in exile in Iraq. Preferring historical facility and the Western-style drama of the one-on-one showdown, these observers focused their journalistic efforts mainly on the last months of 1978—which were only the home stretch, when Khomeini, now a messianic figure, had come to symbolically represent the opposition and Islam was portrayed as a rampart against the unequal society promoted by the royal court.

The first time I saw Khomeini’s face must have been about a year after The First Letter. It was a portrait that had been blown up into a poster, which was brought to our house by Uncle Number Five.

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