My Maman Bozorg’s Revolution

As a child of five, my parents migrated our small family of four to America. We settled in a mid-size apartment in Tarzana, California–leaving in the ghost of the static past scores of uncles, aunts, and cousins.

I remember my grandmother in particular–her beaded eyes as black as her heart at our departing–wailing incessantly. It was she who would get cancer soon after and live painfully with it for years before finally dying. She was a strong old, woman who hung on for decades, beating stomach cancer and two strokes, before finally dying of unabated grief.

My grandmother, who I now suspect favored my older brother–her favorite grandson–loved me nevertheless. And I don’t blame her for this choice.

My mother had married at the astonishing age of eleven and had her oldest son, my brother, at fourteen, while continuing her schooling. My grandmother had raised my older brother.

We called our grandmother, Maman, and we called my mother by her first name. By the time my mother had me, six years later, she was old enough to play the role of mother.

In those days, my grandmother would take me to an empty room upstairs filled with dozens of family albums and old Persian faberge cushions. I would sit across from her and she would spend countless hours retelling a story with each photo we passed on each old page. These old Persian cushions hold, to this day, a luxuriously heart-warming, but now somewhat foreign memory for me with their busy geometric patterns and dark reds and blues.

* * *

It must have been exciting. Young revolutionaries and ordinary citizens coming together to oust a powerful king who had alienated his people by forging too fast a union between East and West, bringing Western civilization to a country who did not understand. “A puppet of the West”, they chided. A brutal force who had helped promulgate the vast gulf between the dust-ridden destitute and the uber-rich.

The Shah of Iran was considered brutal and repressive to many–but more than that, he had been downplaying not only the importance of Islam–but the sanctity of tradition–to a people who did not understand the fast and loose culture of the West. Their religion stood  second only to the inherent love and pride of their culture, whose deep-seated roots reached as far back as Cyrus the Great, King Darius, and of course, the Zoroastrian religion which was among the first to preach the monotheistic tradition of the One True God, and with it, secured ancient Persia among the first of nations to usher in the harmonious ideals of human rights on a mass scale. From this ancient religion sprang the Festival of Norooz and all its rich and symbolic rituals (a celebration of the onset of Spring).  And from this old religion also was birthed the inherent Persian disregard for rules–a tenacious sense of rebellion (for love of freedom) that marks–to some extent–every Persian.

It was grossly tragic that the very people who helped birth human rights into neighboring civilizations and clung ambitiously to the tenets of unhindered freedom, found themselves voluntarily–albeit ignorantly–ushering in a morbid course of annihilation that would bind them to this formidable act of rebellion which would affect generations now and into the foreseeable future.

The Shah had concerted his force into fighting the secondary or tertiary threat of communism and underestimated the power of the faux-spiritual men in meek, black robes who quietly and calmly promised freedom from repression, liberation from the West’s vastly invasive culture, and the ideal economic climate of fairness and justice for all of Iran’s inhabitants.

* * *

Marg bar Shah. Marg bar Shah. Marg bar Shah. (Death to the Shah).

I hear this strange chant on our 1978 television set and the long, detached face of a gray man in funereal-black robes who incites both fear and anger in my parents.

I hear my young mom with her short feminist hair-style of the late 1970s,  exclaim with anguish and disgust, as if she were watching a tragic movie, “Stupid, stupid people! What are they doing?” And then with a sadder, frigid voice, “Oh the poor Shah–poor Shah. What a good man he was. He was so good.”

Hopeful, angry, elusive olive-skinned men, some smooth-shaven, some with beards, chant to the gray Ayatollah Khomeini whose white conical beard shrieks in stark contrast to his raven-colored and solitary garments.

They think they are chanting liberation for my grandmother, but she knows better. She, again, sees only death.