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Professor Ali A librarian at a large American state university, Professor Ali (pseud.) was born in 1936 and left Iran for the United States in 1983. He and Pari belong to the same generation of activists for whom reading and activism were part of growing up politicized. Pari spoke to him in 1990, and I interviewed him again in 1992. I am of the generation of 28 Mordad [the generation that saw the CIA coup of August 1953 that overthrew Mossadeq and brought the Shah back into power].19 Although I was in high school at the time, I was politically active. I went to Alborz high school. I wrote articles against the teachers in the school paper and Dr. Mojtaheddi, the principal, flogged me. I was a good student and was not expelled, but I was forbidden to put out the paper anymore. Yet I was interested in politics and in effecting change and wanted to start my own party with two other persons. We even went so far as making up our own manifesto. When I was in the tenth grade, street fights and demonstrations began. I played the role of mediator. The people from the Tudeh Party would beat up the Pan-Iranists. There were riots and strikes in the school. Dr. Mojtaheddi couldn’t get anywhere simply by beating students. Once, he took me to his office and wept. I could write well. I wrote political material that could easily incite the students. The teachers liked it, too. I graduated from high school just as the coup d’etat of 1953 occurred and all the relative freedoms that we had suddenly disappeared. It was a time of futility and suffocation. I took the university entrance exams in literature hoping that I wouldn’t pass, but I did, and so I entered the faculty of letters. I was the youngest in my class. That same year I became classmates with people like Iraj Gorgin [a radio journalist] and Bijan Mofeed [playwright], and also with M. Azad [reporter and essayist] and Sadreddin Elahi and Badrolzaman Ghareeb [other writers]. The second year I was in courses with Mehrdad Bahar [scholar and teacher], who had been recently freed from prison. In that period of intense oppression, I engaged in dialogue and artistic activities with these professor ali 187 poets and artists. After completing my studies at the university, I went to England to the School of Oriental Studies. I have to say that I was never part of the Tudeh Party, but I was a leftist. From the beginning I worked with Jebhe Melli [National Front] and then I was with Khalil Malekki [a reformer and Socialist who broke away from the hardline communist Tudeh Party]. After that first year in England, friends contacted me and the political activities of my student days began. I was one of the founders of the Iranian Students Confederation and I was its first secretary. But the next year, because of the Tudeh Party’s intervention , students in the confederation became divided. The following year, the intervention led to a crisis in the confederation. We were the first group of students to establish an Iranian socialist group in Europe, and we published the newspaper Niroo [Power]. I shared a house with a friend, Hamid Enayat [a translator and university professor]. Among us there was an agent [savak] from the government of the time, and my fate depended to some extent on what that agent reported back to the state. This agent seldom bathed. He always stank. And they’d throw us out of establishments wherever we went with him, but he didn’t seem to understand. He is now a much-quoted and well-respected writer in Europe and the United States. What forces in childhood made me politically active? Many different elements , I suppose. As a child I was aware that people should defend and have their rights. When I was in the third grade, at night I’d write “night letters” about the injustice among teachers and other problems in school, and during the day I’d secretly post them on the school walls. From childhood I liked reading newspapers. My favorite was Marde Emrooz [Contemporary Man], which was considered too advanced for my age. My uncle would buy it, and though he never talked to me about the paper, he’d read it, so I became interested. By the time I was twelve, I’d read the works of Mohammad...

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