Book Review: Abbas Milani, "Tale of Two Cities" Iranian Studies (1997)

Copyright (c) 1997 by Darius Rejali, all rights reserved.  This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher

Tales of Two Cities.  Abbas Milani. Washington DC:  Mage, 1996. 263 pages.  24.95

Exile is a condition of mental and emotional suspension.  Abbas Milani is suspended in many ways:  between San Francisco and Tehran, between Iranian and American culture, between political activism and political impotence, between home and shelter, between dreaming and wakefulness, and between having a body and not recognizing it. How to write about the condition of suspension? Milani has chosen to write essays, but what is inbetween these essays is the subject of Milani's book.

Milani's essays can be characterized by seasons: the fall of a nostalgic childhood and youth; the spring of hope only to be burned into dust by a hot summer of post-revolutionary despair; and finally the winter of exile.  The exile always has a mind of winter; it is from these polar regions that he examines his life, wondering what it is that binds it together.

If exilic writing has any defining narrative, it is the story that all that is solid has melted into air.  In Milani's story of childhood, the high walls of home and the solid rhythm of private life give way to the merely personal and sentimental:  one is left with memories of No Ruz, of dreams, of beloved figures, of poetry and art, of Shahr-i Farang, and of the most subjective elements of all, memories of pain and pleasure. These items constitute the cultural core of Irannian-ness in exile, the minimum content that all Iranians can still agree about, enjoy seeing on Iranian TV from Los Angeles, and presenting to non-Iranians.

 Likewise, the boundaries of the public world, like the private world, dissipate. The repressive limits of the Shah's regime and the high walls of Evin Prison give way to what Milani's editorializing on Iranian politics, or what his copy editor called, his "pontifications".Milani writes that a feature of all revolutions is that the private lives of all become the subject of political inspection, but this is true of exiles as well as the revolutionary.  For both, though in different ways, the political is transformed into the merely social. What is discussed now is dowrehs across the continents is who was right and who was wrong, who was part of what plot, how this ayatollah behaved in prison and afterwards, what stories were said and of whom.  This social discourse has many followers, and Iranians who are familiar with Milani's life and the events he discusses will find a great deal to interest them.  And yet this too is exilic writing, a faded substitute for real politics: the old country will not have exilic politics and the new country is simply indifferent.

Exilic writing is also characterized by a schizophrenic uncertainty of which audience to write for and in which language.  What is definitely American is Milani's discussion of his body, of his struggle with sexuality, of masturbation and circumcision, of the homosexuality in schools, of cross-racial sex and of Iranian cultural chauvinism.  All of this is delivered in a distant voice, not always quite willing to commit to a full discussion but also feeling that this is terribly important to discuss if one is to get on with one's post-exilic life. Iranians will find this uncomfortable reading and not exactly polite conversation, but this will be the subject of fascination to Americans who rarely hear Iranian men talk about such things and put them into print.

 Iranian readers are more likely to remember, or want to remember, Milani's account of his political aspirations and how he came to realize that he did not have the courage of his radical convictions. Milani often informs the reader of people he knew who were subsequently killed, implicitly raising the survivor's question:  Why am I still alive?  What he says to the dead who stand so accusingly in the narrative preoccupies him, but the best answer Milani can muster is that history is blind and there is no meaning or reason for why some lived and others did not other than their characters. This comes out especially clearly in discussing university and prison life under the Shah.  When Milani says that many of the leftists he knew were subsequently killed by their Islamic fellow students and comrades-in-prison, he implies that, had things turned out differently, the other side would have been just as dead.  Milani's chapter on prison life in Evin are in this respect more detailed and more human than say Baraheni's Crowned Cannibals.  He recognizes that having suffered teaches no moral lessons and gives one no higher authority over one's fellow human beings:  those who have suffered are just as prepared to hurt others for their ideals as those who imprison them.

Exile ultimately is also about a kind of social death. Exile, says Milani, is when you don't have to read the obituaries for, he implies, they are strangers to you.  On the other hand, the exile is dead to those he leaves behind.  When an Irishman set out to the United States in the nineteenth century, his family would hold a farewell celebration called "an American wake."  When Iranians set out to the United States, this wake is held at Mehrabad Airport.  In Milani's narrative, Mehrabad figures prominently several times, and lends itself ultimately to the frontispiece of the book, a controversial painting of Milani's departure from Iran that led to the closing of the Iranian journal that published it.  The painting shows the author in suspension, hanging from an airplane.  Behind him lies the figure of death in the shape of his mother and ahead of him a shiny modern metropolis.  Arthur Koestler writes in Exile and Departure that exiles are like spider plants: they draw their nourishment from the air rather than through roots in the earth.  This is a difficult life, and it does not become Milani.  In the final essays, he seeks to say "yes" to the new life he has, but it is equally clear that he will be unhappy anywhere but in Iran. This is no doubt how many Iranians in exile feel.

Darius Rejali teaches political science at Reed College and is the author of Torture and Modernity:  Self, Society and State in Modern Iran.