Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Pari (pseud.)

Pari Pari has already described her childhood, her education, her politicization, and her early careers. Although she was in the United States when the Shah left and Khomeini arrived, she was in Iran for some of the crucial events preceding the revolution and felt its impact on the villagers with whom she worked. I was in Tehran in 1978 when the Cinema Rex in Abadan was set on fire. That was a turning point for the revolution. Because we saw the Shah then as a symbol of evil, we fell easily into thinking that he wanted to ruthlessly exterminate any opposition. So we thought that he destroyed the cinema to get at the Fedayeen or Mojahedin collected in the cinema. But now we know that the burning of Cinema Rex was done by the opposition. I say the opposition rather than Khomeini, because it’s no use blaming only Khomeini. That’s playing into the hands of many people who to this day believe that Iran can be saved only by a dictator, by one man, because they believe we as a nation are immature and that someone else has to decide for us. In other words, we prefer to see ourselves in the role of children taken care of by an all-knowing father, children who can then complain about the “lack of freedom.” In those days something was happening, though we didn’t know what. At the time I was working with Iranian women in villages. Just before the revolution, early 1978, I was in a village near Shiraz. We were to hold a workshop, but the group of students who were supposed to help had disappeared. When I got back to Tehran I saw that soldiers and cannons were all over the streets. I asked the taxi driver what was up. He said, “Haven’t you been in Iran?” and explained the trouble between the government and the opposition. Later I understood about the disappearance in the village. The young women in the village would all run off to hear the BBC and knew what was happening.13 Why didn’t they tell me? Simple. They didn’t trust me. I was, in spite of their affection for me, an agent from the government, sent by a ministry of government to run a government program in the village. pari 139 I remember the time around Black Friday, September 1978, the time of the massacre in Jaleh Square. The villages grew agitated. It was dangerous for me to keep going there. I left Iran to attend an International Children’s Congress in Germany in May of 1979, taking a leave of absence from my work. I also needed to attend to my daughter’s problems with her boarding school. But after six months, things got worse in Iran, and eight months after I left Iran, the revolution happened. I was told that my life was in danger. I was told that women who had promoted the status of women or who had worked for women’s progress had committed a “sin.” I could not return. When I returned to Iran in 1980, I wanted to visit the villages in which I had worked. My former assistant told me not to. He thought they might kill me if I did. Why? Well, most of these girls had said, “Khanum Pari has said that we should not be beaten; Khanum Pari has said that men and women are equal.” Now, after the revolution, those men who feel I “spoiled” their women and who have renewed power to return to the old hierarchy might vent their anger on me. Now all these projects I helped to build have been dismantled; all the women I hired were discharged. And all this has remained on my conscience for these ten years. How hard we tried to help and instead what harm we unknowingly did. How we raised hopes that were dashed. How many hopes for independence I created, and how, with the return of fundamentalism, most of those girls were probably ashamed even to admit they were literate—let alone independent. It was now shameful to be literate, because in the villages, and even in towns, it was not uncommon to believe that an illiterate woman makes a better wife and mother than a literate one. She would, after all, be more submissive and obedient. This is, after all, a totally male-ruled society. And one of the effects of this revolution on...