Book Review: Tara Bahrampour,"To See and See Again" Iranian Studies (1999)

Copyright (c) 1999 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

Tara Bahrampour, To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America. New York:  Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1999. 361 pages. $24.00

For a brief time, roughly from 1960 to 1979, there flourished in Tehran an international community.  It was a thriving community of West European businessmen, Soviet bloc engineers, East Asian diplomats, recently exiled Iraqi Jews, Indian doctors, Americans of every sort, and Western educated Iranians.  The main languages were Farsi, English, and, often, Farslish. English came with an accent from everywhere and nowhere. The culture was Americana. Commodities were made and exchanged based on an image of an America perceived from afar.  At its worst, this community was a neo-colonial outpost. Its institutions were expensive, exclusive and often racist. At its best, participating in this society meant developing perception, tolerance, understanding, risktaking, and empathy.

Tara/Taraneh Bahrampour grew up in this society.  She was born in an American-Iranian marriage.  As an Iranian, Bahrampour belonged to what might be called her father's nuclear extended family.  Aunts, uncles and cousins had all recently moved to Tehran from their ancestral provincial lands. At school and with her parents, she belonged to the international community. As a child, she and her friend take pieces of cloth, wrap them like chadors, and play at being Iranian (p. 354) . She is surprised when her relative tells her that she is a Muslim (pp. 39, 46), and years later, when interrogated by pasdars for hanging out with foreigners, she protests  " I'm half  American"  (p. 302 ) Not, it turns out, in Iran, not then, not now. When Bahrampour shows her American passport at the border, it is immediately confiscated (p. 216). This would have happened (and indeed did happen) under the Shah's government.  It too did not trust people with Janus-faced names.

Children like Bahrampour received double-edged names so that they would never feel strange East or West (p. 30). Often they were strangers in both.  There were no easy substitutes for the loss of a cosmopolitan universe.  Some became quite American. Bahrampour's school, "Community", can count among its own, Representative Bob Barr (Rep-GA) and General Norman Schwartzkopf. Others found solace in New York, Paris, Toronto, or London.  Bahrampour found herself in Beaverton, Oregon, even today, an unremitting suburb among evergreens.  The contrast  was especially sharp. In To See and See Again, Bahrampour asks a question that haunts all children born to a unique milieu.  What does Iran still hold for us, the Western-educated, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic individuals who grew up as children there? Why should any of us go back? These questions deserve our attention because they now press upon a new generation, the children of the post-1979 Iranian diaspora. In retrospect it seems that Bahrampour's playmates were the leading edge of a historical process that now goes on far from Iran.

Bahrampour's official answer lies in the book's title, Deed o Bazdeed.  In Iran, relatives travel long distances to visit each other every day.  The pleasure does not lie in any new information one may learn, but in confirming the old information one knew.  And when one leaves, one's seat is kept at the table till one returns (pp. 252, 308). These are interesting, but unsatisfactory metaphors. They do not appreciate the real passage of time and the loss of meaning.  Bahrampour was not merely on vacation. There is rather a gap in her life and in the meangingfulness of things Iranian (p. 266). Whatever she achieves in knowing,  it is as much artifice based on observation as it is natural. She engages in an endless game of motion where the object is to grasp something solid, however briefly, with all one's energy (p. 357). She stands in the middle of a stream, lacking the safety of either bank (p. 264 ).    Deed o bazdeed is an answer an Iranian might give to an Iranian-American: if one only pretended to believe perhaps one might be saved. It isn't an answer that an Iranian-American can give to herself; Bahrampour moves on.

Bahrampour captures her innocent childhood world without nostalgia.   She tells us just enough to understand but not so much as to bore us if we already knew the things and places well enough.  She is even better at capturing the innocence of adults: her nannies who tell her of jinn who abduct village women, her relatives who think that tofu is pigmeat, the naive enthusiasm of her uncle for the revolution, her father's acting up in a Portland restaraunt, her aunt haggling with a clerk at a Seven-Eleven, and the pasdars who think that foreigners are blond jinn who assault women.   But there is nothing innocent about Bahrampour's choice of incidents.  They are always encounters that touch a deep cultural imaginary, and soon one feels like chiming in with  similar stories.  Scenes are  crafted so that  one feels the inevitable coming on. "No!" says the reader, "don't show your American passport. No, don't chooneh at the Seven-Eleven.  No, don't show a picture of your mother in a bathing suit to the neighbors.  Turn to Page 1 of the Cultural Survival Manual for This Country!" And when the inevitable happens, Bahrampour does not spare us her bewilderment, anger, frustration, surprising submissiveness,  and embarassment.  

Bahrampour doesn't hesitate tangling up her relatives in their own contradictions. Her male cousins sleep with American women then marry "good" Iranian women. They encounter themselves through her eyes in short, pithy barbs as the opportunists that they are, and wince.  Packed inside a car, her relatives debate whether or not to tell the Iranian police a dead man lies in the road. "No, don't stop" says one. "But shouldn't we?" says another.  In these and similar  incidents, Bahrampour poses the moral dilemma starkly: how should one behave? Iranian or American standards? Or choose as it pleases one?  Is Iran better or America? Are you Iranian or American? Will you marry an Iranian or an American?

Bahrampour's answers are politely evasive. To ask her to choose is to ask her to choose between her parents, and that is impossible.  Bahrampour's parents aren't perfect. Her mother exchanges her American superstitions for Iranian ones, and her father engages in poor business deals. But Bahrampour's parents are like the sun.   All things that came afterwards, strange, difficult, and wonderful, grew under the light of their love. Her parent's marriage is the arc that frames the entire book.  Anyone who asks one to choose between Iran and America does not know the light under which Bahrampour grew. To ask her to choose is to imply that the universe she lives in might as well have not existed. Like the sun, Bahrampour cannot look at her parent's marriage directly. We encounter it refracted in events which her parents candidly share with her. There is no kitman here.

If one cannot split the difference, what does Iran hold for people like Bahrampour today? She tries different answers. She visits the suburb where she might have lived seeking the teenage years she might have had, but she realizes it is not for her. She goes to the home her father was building in 1979. It is solid enough, but it is not home (pp. 271-276 ). She returns to the ancestral village, but she knows her porsche-driving LA cousins could not last a week there. She can last a little longer ironically because she isn't so Iranian; her mother taught her how to love things Iranian (pp. 322-323). She falls in with two bohemian film-makers. In the Shah's day, such bohemians were rarities; today they scarcely represent a future(pp. 386-295). She visits Isfahan's monuments only to be detained by pasdars (pp. 300-304).

People with frozen memories of a lost Iran have a hard time closing accounts. What finally closes the issue is the writing of the book itself. Bahrampour has written a book so Iranian that no Iranian could have written it. And it is a book so accessible to ordinary Americans that no American could have written it. It reminds one of  Mottahedeh's Mantle of the Prophet and O'Donnell's The Garden of the Brave in War.  But the book it most closely resembles is one Bahrampour finds in a forlorn box in Iran (p. 245). It is Thurber's Thirteen Clocks. There, a princess with a warm hand must start all the frozen clocks of the castle. She cannot start them by touching them. She reasons "if you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them." The princess stands not too far and not too close.  Clocks begins to whir. Something dark lifts up from the castle and flies away.

Darius Rejali teaches political philosophy and comparative politics at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.