Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Soheyl (pseud.)

Soheyl I interviewed Soheyl (pseud.) in the summer of 1990 at my home. My friend Evelyne Accad called me one day in the summer of 1990 and asked if I would pick up a young man flying in from France. His father had been a student of her friend Paul Vieille, the French sociologist who had lived and worked in Iran. Born in 1962, Soheyl lived in Iran until his parents compelled him to leave to avoid being drafted into the Iran-Iraq war. I taped his stories during the few days he stayed with us in 1991 while his dormitory was closed. His story is relevant to understanding the immigrant experience of young men of his age group who left Iran as teenagers. He was a strangely melancholic youth, articulate and passionate in his opinions on social issues. He spoke in Persian. I was born in a small village in central Iran in 1962. My father worked as a high school teacher but also studied for advanced degrees in Tehran, and also studied foreign languages. He married my mother, who had been one of his high school students. She was seventeen years old and very beautiful, but, my father said, a very weak student. When she got married, she quit high school and got pregnant at the age of eighteen with the first of four children. I am the oldest. We moved from house to house and city to city some twenty times. I suppose the most important force that formed me was the relation between my mother and father. Their differences were projected onto me. I saw my father as an emotionally unreliable man—a lack that revealed itself in his relations toward me, my mother, and my sister and brothers. I saw a lack of respect in my father toward my mother and a lack of connection between my parents. But that was not the end. We eventually discussed this problem with him and he has changed. We made him understand that he had to change his behavior toward us and his wife. And he did. But what you need to understand is that we grew up not only in a nuclear family, not only in an extended family, but also as part of a street family. We spent at least four or five hours a day playing outside with all the kids in our neighborhood. And that was important in my formation. But I was also formed by a traditional family. When I say traditional family, I mean the extended family: the father, the mother, the children, the aunts, 120 there: remembering home the uncles, etcetera—something like a tribe. When a tribe is dissolved, the family is dissolved and the individual feels isolated. My family is both modern and traditional. My father was born in a village in northern Iran in a house so primitive that I couldn’t believe my own eyes when I saw it. It was built with a few stones on top of one another. My grandfather supported a family of five collecting and selling wood for fireplaces. The village clergyman served also as the schoolteacher and the village doctor. This is where my father came from. He told me that whenever he saved a few pennies he would go to Tabriz (the nearest large town) and buy a book. He taught himself German, and later on he came to Tehran and became a teacher. And at the time of the Shah’s rule he got a scholarship to study in Europe and became what he is today—a sociologist and writer. In Europe, he witnessed the events of May 1968, the revolution of a class of young semicommunists, semianarchists against the ruling class, and this event had a grave impact on him. He stayed there, studied, and received his doctorate degree in social research, returned to Iran, became a university professor, and joined the Iranian intelligentsia, and if the revolution hadn’t occurred, he would’ve probably accomplished even more. But, in spite of all that education, this man, in the context of his own family, acted like his own father had acted in that northern village; all the events of May 1968 and all the schooling he had in Europe did not change him from the patriarch he was. The books he wrote reflected a modern liberal totally different from the traditional authoritarian he was in his own home. Of course Europe had changed him some; he had...