In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Afsaneh Najmabadi In earlier sections Afsaneh talked of her childhood, her education, her politics and her return for the revolution. Here she describes her arrival at the age of twenty-one in the United States in 1966 and the start of her schooling at Radcliffe and Harvard. Although this section, unlike the others, is not about arrival in the United States after the revolution, it is a revealing story about the evolution of one woman into an activist and a scholar after leaving home for studies in the United States. I had to go to Washington because, though I had scored very high in the sciences, my English was pretty poor. Radcliffe required that I take a summer course in English, which was arranged for me at one of these language schools in Washington, d.c. I left Iran in June 1966 and spent two months in one of those language courses in d.c. I must tell you the bizarre story of my arrival in the United States, because it took a combination of complete naiveté and luck to have survived such an arrival. I didn’t know anyone in the United States. When I had gone to the Ministry of Education in Tehran to get a student passport, I had seen this huge sign on the wall saying, “If you’re going abroad as a student and you don’t have anybody there, inform the local consulate of the details of your arrival and it will meet you and help you.” I believed this sign. So as soon as I got my ticket, I sent a telegram to the student section of the Iranian consulate in Washington, d.c., giving them the details of my arrival at the airport, and I expected somebody to meet me there. And of course, nobody did. My plane arrived in Washington, d.c., on a Friday night—past midnight. The airport was almost shut down. And nobody to meet me. And there I was with these two huge suitcases and very little English because most of my English was scientific English. Although I could write a sophisticated physics paper in English, I couldn’t say something as simple as “Hi, I’m lost.” So there I was stranded at 1:00 a.m. in Dulles Airport looking around, waiting for consulate people to take care of me. I gradually started getting worried. Then a black 230 here: reconstructing migration and exile man, a janitor, walked toward me, very sweet, and said, “You’re lost. What’s wrong?” I told him that nobody was here to pick me up and I needed to go to Washington. He said, “Where is the address in Washington? Can you take a taxi to it?” I said, “I only have this school address.” The only thing I had was the address of a language school at which I was supposed to show up on Monday morning. That’s all I had. I had no notion of what I would do. So he said, “But it’s Friday night. This school is not open till Monday. What are you going to do between now and then?” I said, “I don’t know.” So he said, “I live in Washington. I’ll drive you there and I’ll see what I can do for you.” Suddenly in the middle of the highway I—having no idea how many miles out of Washington the airport was—I panicked. And the man was so sweet—he realized I had panicked. So he kept showing me the highway signs, “Look, it says, ‘To Washington.’ I’m taking you to Washington. I’m not taking you anywhere else.” He was so sweet. Not knowing where to take me, he said, “Look, I have some Egyptian friends. I’ll take you to their house.” So he took me there, thinking that maybe they would understand my language, or they would know people who would understand my language. By that time I was shaking in complete panic. So he took me to this Egyptian family and when the door opened, there right in front of me was this huge picture of Gamal Abdul Nasser. It was the connection with something familiar—Nasser. And I burst into tears. The family knew Arabic and English, but by this time my English had entirely disappeared. Through some friends of friends who knew some Iranians, they contacted the man who was in charge of Student Affairs at the...

Share