Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa

Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa I talked with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa in February 1992 in her office at Columbia College in Chicago where she teaches at the department of Film and Video. After receiving her MFA in Film from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1987, she taught at the school of Television and Cinema in Tehran from 1978 to 1983. Among her many short films screened in several festivals are “The Silent Majority,” “Ruins Within,” “Far from Home,” and her award-winning documentary, “A Tajik Woman.” Currently at work on a book entitled Home in Exile on film director Abbas Kiarostami, she has been artistic consultant of the Iranian film festival at the Film Center in Chicago and has written and lectured extensively on Iranian cinema. She came to the United States in 1983. I started with the usual question about the forces of family, religion, and culture responsible for her early formation. I belong to a generation of confused children. Confused because I was born during the time of the Pahlavi—the last Shah—and because my mother was a professional woman, a doctor. I wasn’t born into what might be considered a traditional family. It was a divided family. On one hand it was traditional in terms of its expectations of female roles. On the other I was encouraged by the family to be educated, to be professional, and to further my studies outside Iran. I received consistently mixed messages. Women, I was told, had to be highly educated, but women also had to be subservient. Women had to be educated, but women had to get married very young so that they could start having children young and get used to being subservient to their husbands. But because I could see the stupidity of many husbands, I couldn’t see why my entire life should be determined by a man whose wisdom was at best unreliable. My confusion started at this point. I was also confused by the rigidity of values dictated by our society—the way women had to look, entertain, and dress. Westernization seemed to be admired, but not Westernized clothing or such Western behavior as mixedsex schools or socializing between the sexes. So, caught in a double standard, 66 there: remembering home I was expected magically to negotiate both standards of values and behavior, and maintain both. That dual standard was both public and private—something I saw first within my own household. My mother experienced my father’s double standards . He didn’t want her to work outside the home, but he enjoyed her income and the lack of responsibility it afforded him. He didn’t see the value in her work—that my mother was needed, wanted, and appreciated by her patients. She worked in a free clinic in the south of Tehran—Naziabad—as a gynecologist. Her patients loved her, not only because they would not go to a male doctor, but also because they couldn’t afford another doctor. Her treatment was free. My mother also educated her patients by showing them films and by training nurses. So the women simply worshiped her. Her conflict was this: Should she conform to my father’s will and wishes, or should she take care of her patients? On the other hand—and here’s the double standard—my father was the kind of man who flirted casually and easily with other women. Not so casually really, because eventually after thirty-four years [of marriage] and four children he divorced my mother and married his secretary, who was thirty years younger than him. This was the pain of the double standard—he was forcing my mother to give up her job to stay home so that he could go and marry someone else. My mother understood that and said to him, “If you want to flirt with other women or get married, go ahead and do that, but I will not leave my job.” Yet he chose to divorce her and did. My understanding of this double standard began then in childhood—I understood that men, my father, worshiped women who were intellectual, educated, and professional; yet at the same time they were afraid of them. My father was a bank accountant, certainly not as satisfying a job as my mother’s, and he was jealous of my mother’s job, of her importance, of her being wanted by her patients. Yet I witnessed and suffered with my mother as she...