TEHRAN, October, 2006—I step into a store to ask a question. There are, as usual, half a dozen friends and relatives of the proprietor sitting around chatting away the day instead of—God forbid—actually being productive.
I could be wearing my underwear on my head and they wouldn’t notice me, tangled so deep in some argument.
Then suddenly the room quiets and every eye is pinned on me.
I just said something that gave away my being a foreigner. I don’t even know what it was; too busy trying to act Iranian, trying to use hip terms to compensate for my nervousness.
I grin sheepishly and silently slip away.
My father says if I stayed eventually I would be able to fool people, “but right now”—he chuckles, then pauses, like he’s trying to think of words least apt to hurt my feelings—“you’re a foreigner. It’s obvious.
“I told you this before. Forget about having been born here. That doesn’t mean anything anymore.
“The country you were born in is long gone. The people whom you knew are long gone. And you’re a different person.
“Just think you’re visiting some other country as a tourist and you just happen to know the language. It will be easier on you.”
It’s good advice and this was exactly what I told myself repeatedly as I stepped off the plane a few days ago.
The good thing is that my frustration fuels my appetite to write. I write and write and then I'm sitting in someone's home, being the good boy visiting from America, politely nodding and smiling at now-total strangers I last met when I was still mad at Santa Claus for not delivering to Moslem homes—and suddenly I'm pining to find a quiet corner and pull out the laptop. [I can't though; way way too insulting to those present! I might as well bend over and moon them too.]
Search for meaning is what's on my mind, something that requires courage and intimacy, not college degrees and cognitive prowess, I now realize.
You have to get to know the people over time, prod and get prodded, humiliate and be humiliated, maybe even get chased down the street by a club-wielding jealous father who probably imagines I'm a photographer for Playboy magazine—before you can begin to make out shapes and ideas beyond the self-reflecting bubble CNN and the White House peddle as reality.
What is it that we really accomplish with the words we use? Do we even understand a fraction of each other's meaning?
My old employer, The AP, and other keepers of our Matrix are in the business of transmitting beautiful images and precise-sounding words.
But words, as conscientiously as they might be reported, are inefficient, vague and vulnerable to misuse because words are useless without context.
Everyday we swim in comedy and tragedy wrought by context-less words.
We rage at one man questioning the number of Holocaust victims and relish another's empty, made-to-order words like "compassionate conservatism" and "axis of evil".
It's the latter's lies and manipulations that trigger unimaginable butchery in Iraq, but camera-ready bunkum once again gets him elected.
My attempt in the following articles is to create some context and perhaps humanize a bit the latest category of people we are urged to demonize.
It's not altruistic; I'm my own best customer. Being in Iran has so sensitized me to my own ignorance. I was born here, lived here until I was 15, studied it in graduate school, and thought I knew the place.
In fact, I hardly know anything about these people, I am finding out 28 years after I left, shortly before the Islamic revolution.
And then it hits me. My God, if I'm so clueless, what about the fools huddled in underground war rooms on the other side of planet dreaming of post-invasion flowers and sweets?