My Life as a Traitor: An Iranian Memoir by Ghahramani Zarah

Author:Ghahramani, Zarah [Ghahramani, Zarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2009-01-05T18:30:00+00:00

What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?

And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!

Oh, many a cup of this forbidden wine

Must drown the memory of that insolence!

The “insolence” of Heaven, the indifference to our curiosity and disdain for our questioning and demands, is a far more profound issue than the insolence of the mullahs toward my natural curiosity and questioning. But lines like these make the reader impatient with powers that ally themselves with Heaven and lay down laws designed in part to thwart intelligent inquiry. The God whom Khayyám satirizes is the Father of All Despots; the mullahs of the Iranian regime were, to me, minor versions of Him. Poetry that is critical of God, His plans, and His very character prepared me, prepares us, to be critical of pettier versions of God.

Almost every quatrain of Omar Khayyám’s subverts the dogma of the mullahs, because his poetry is the work of an inquiring mind. You can’t have an inquiring mind and talk about it publicly in Iran. You can’t have an inquiring mind in two-thirds of the countries of the world. Mrs. Mohammadi’s gift to me and my friends was to show us what our beautiful Farsi had produced when an inquiring mind went to work with it. She didn’t have to make any other point. Her point was made by itself when we left the classroom with our hair (if we were female) carefully concealed.

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