What I Saw at the Revolution

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Hasan Sarbakhshian / AP Photo Thirty years after the Shah left Iran, Tehran-born novelist Porochista Khakpour recalls the Ten Days of Dawn.

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This week the Iranian Revolution turns 30.

I lived through it. But let’s be clear: I was one. While I can say it’s the one historic event that has made me more me than anything, I never really felt comfortable claiming the “child of the Revolution” tag. For the first two and a half decades of my life, my inner life was devoted to rehearsing for American Girl roles—working the mercilessly flat-ironed hair, generic pale-olive skin and “brown-eyed girl” for “passing” glory— while an impossible Po-ro-chis-ta cultivated credible Valley Girlese that would eventually put even Moon-Unit to shame. Like many immigrants, I focused adamantly on looking forward and never back; like many “hyphenates,” I felt the existential confusion of a two-pronged identity.

My father even changed. He tiptoes around the word “Royalist” today, but I grew up with a living room filled with more pictures of the Shah than my own family and relatives.

I focused on all the pretty things of ol’ Persia: Kings, Cyrus and Darius and the Persian Empire; Persepolis (the ruins! the Satrapi graphic novel! ); saffron-and-pistachio Persian ice cream!; rugs!; mystical Avesta chants mashed-up against hokey, hooky Googoosh lyrics back to back and backward even.. . . did I mention Persian cats?!

But the one thing I could not speak was “Iranian Revolution.” It was a name that always sent shivers down my spine; it made up the paragraphs of history books that I always skimmed, cringing.

At quarter life, when my novel made me go there—like a film noir debt-collector, cornered me in a dark alley and grabbed me by the collar—I finally faced it. This is how today I can even tiptoe around this story that is two parts my parents, one part mine .

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As is the annual tradition, at 9:33 a.m. on February 1—the exact date and time Khomeini’s plane landed in Tehran after his 15-year exile—bells tolled and footage of the 76-year-old exiting an Air France plane was played throughout Iran. The next 10 days are called the Ten Days of Dawn, highlighting the week and a half it took for Khomeini to arrive and the 2,500-year-old monarchy to buckle.

Every Iranian in the US—particularly those who go by that purry, zhizzy, Persian—will tell you their family was royalty or linked to the Shah somehow. But the truth is, they probably weren’t and we certainly weren’t. We were, however, well off.

My parents were the youngsters of the '60s, the young adults of '70s Tehran. They were city kids who wore secularity like a status symbol, holding it up to their multiple degrees, their well-traveled worldliness; they were the nouveau riche who felt more in common with American Hollywood icons than their own hired hands and their destitute families just around their corner. In 1978, after my birth, they bought a new Dodge Dart—Dad, now: "Trust me, it was a nice car then!"—and put half the money down on a plush, three-bedroom condo on Gandhi Street, in a still-tony upper-class enclave in northern Tehran. Oil production was booming and the upper echelon could feel it. It was news to them, the lower-case-R Royalists, that their government was managing the economy poorly.

When the Revolution hit, Dad was 35 and Mom 28, and they both worked on different floors of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. It was a company of 5,000 where my mother’s uncle was president (and is now known as “the father of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program” by the international press) on top of being the country’s deputy prime minister. She was an accountant, my father a researcher of theoretical nuclear physics—"Not bombs! Theory!" Dad always had to emphasize to a suspicious teenage me—and they loved their jobs.

All my childhood, they described this period as paradisal—when we got older we were told the one exception: SAVAK, the Iranian secret police of 1957-1979. Ask any Iranian about that era’s “domestic security and intelligence team” and they will laugh at the words security and intelligence. The CIA-trained SAVAK was arguably the most thuggish secret police in history, with almost limitless powers. All around Tehran, the Shah’s “dissidents” disappeared at their hands or else suffered fates their friends and relatives could barely even whisper about.

But hey, aside from pesky SAVAK, the '70s in Iran were a blast, my parents always insisted. Multi-course dinners out every night at the Hilton and Intercontinental! Fancy parents dripping designer garb! Fetching maids in hand-me-down Chanel! My infant goods that consisted of Paris-bought rabbit-fur capes and giant life-size stuffed animals and more dolls than I’ve ever seen outside a store. And parties, constant parties. Even parties made of just the three of us, parties for my sake—parents singing and dancing to disco-fevered Googoosh at full blast... eventually to drown out the new, alien bellows that filled the night air, post-10 p.m. curfew: the old neighbors' Allah Akbar! from the flanking rooftops that... eventually replaced by the air-raid sirens of an impending eight-year war with Iraq.