Caught Between Two Worlds
By Pardis Mahdavi
Art by Turner G. Davis
It was June 28, 2007. I was nervous, as nervous as I had ever been. As dozens of people streamed into the University of Tehran lecture hall, I consciously slowed my breathing to calm myself. Then, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It took me a moment to realize it was Raya, cloaked in black. She usually wore vibrant colors and a broad, mischievous smile. Today her expression was muted; the only color I saw was from one lock of red highlighted hair, deliberately pulled out from her black head scarf. “I just wanted to wish you good luck,” she said with a wink and a hint of a smile that belied our shared nervousness. Raya moved silently to find a seat at the back of the room, close to the doors, always ready for an escape.
I was there to talk about sexual politics in Iran, which I had been studying for the previous seven years. Eight years before that, I abandoned journalism school to pursue a PhD in anthropology. In my life in academia, I focused on the study of gender and sexual revolutions in the Muslim world, moving back and forth between the US and the Middle East, where I spent more than a quarter of each year. Raya was one of the inspiring women who not only were compelling research subjects, but also rekindled my own belief in an Iranian feminist identity; they helped strengthen my sense of belonging when I felt lost back “home” in the US.
I knew presenting at the University of Tehran was risky, but Raya and her friends had convinced me it was important for the integrity of my work that I reveal the results publicly in Iran before the book was published in the US. I knew this was a high-stakes endeavor: Any possible critique of the regime could be genuinely life threatening. I had already seen too many women carted off to Evin—Iran’s most notorious prison. But I also knew it was time to stand behind the research and writing I had gathered about Iran’s sexual revolution, and behind the women whose movement I was documenting.
The waiting felt interminable. My stomach churning, I could barely hear the head of the social sciences department finally introduce me. But then, applause. I headed to the front, up five stairs to the stage.
I gripped the podium with one hand to steady myself and opened the navy-blue folder that held my lecture notes. Deep breath. I started, as I often do, by describing a gathering of young women talking about their sexualities as politics. I began laying out my theory that sexual revolutions give birth to social movements. As I looked up and scanned the audience, I spotted Raya again, seated on the left side of the center section, about 20 rows back.
I kept talking, feeling my nerves calm, my voice more steady. And then, exactly 14 minutes after I began, all six sets of the auditorium doors banged open at once. I stopped mid-sentence.
I cannot remember if I first saw, smelled or heard them. Boots stomped and men rushed in, reeking of cigarettes. They had no reverence for the place or any care for the people gathered there. Chains clanked and weapons bumped the armrests of chairs as they stormed past. The professor who had introduced me stood and ran to one of them, but he was shoved aside. A few audience members tried to intervene, but most people were running for the exits.
It was chaos, and I was frozen, gripping the podium and my lecture notes—which I should have been shredding. I watched what was happening as if it were in slow motion, all the while desperately searching for Raya, until I found her near the back of the room.
“They yanked me by the arms and pulled me off the stage. I knew better than to fight back.”
One of the guards was grabbing her by her neck. I knew they would be taking her to Evin, where she would likely be held in solitary confinement for days, months, possibly even years. I wanted to scream, but I knew to keep it inside. Then I heard only a ringing in my ears as the auditorium erupted with everyone screaming, while still no sound came from my throat.
Chaos turned to pandemonium, yet four guards made their way through the crowd and jumped onto the stage—no need for stairs. They yanked me by the arms and pulled me off the stage. I knew better than to fight back. One of them kicked my shins, causing me to buckle to the floor. That’s when I heard a whoosh and turned my head to look up.
Everything went black.
It turned out that I was one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t taken to Evin; I hadn’t warranted a spot there, one of the Revolutionary Guards told me. I was taken back to my apartment which by then had been ransacked and emptied of most of my belongings. I was told to remain there, indefinitely.
Each day I wondered if I would be taken to Evin or if I would be disposed of, taken out to the hills outside Tehran, my body left for dead. I was accused of being a spy for the US, while also combatting accusations of running a prostitution ring and trying to foment a velvet revolution.
I’m a scholar, I told them repeatedly. I’m on a quest to understand where I fit into this world, I confessed to myself. My journey toward self-discovery, my newly re-found love affair with feminism, and my desire to do something for my home country had come at a high price.
But I have just started fitting somewhere, I sobbed one day to my interrogator, broken by the emotional torture. I have finally found home, I gulped. “This is not your country, khawhar,” my interrogator barked. “You are a traitor to this country and you will never call Iran home.”
Thirty-three days later, I was kicked out of my ancestral home country, stripped of my Iranian citizenship, told never to return. Never again could I belong where my search for myself had settled me. I wondered whether I could ever truly belong somewhere else.
It was November 8, 2016. The crackle of shattering glass reverberated through my bones, jolting me awake. I rubbed my swollen eyes, sore from too much crying. I had forced myself to sleep as soon as the election had been called for Donald Trump. But I had been restless most of the night, worried about what the coming months and years could yield.
I stumbled toward the back of my apartment and out the door that led into the residence hall. The florescent hallway lights pulsated against the darkness of early dawn.
“What is it?” someone called from the other end of the hall. Students in various states of dress poured out of their dorm rooms stumbling toward the same sound I had heard. I looked to my right and saw it first. As the students ran toward it, I spread my arms wide in a halting motion.
Shards of glass surrounded it. I commanded the mostly barefoot students not to come too close. I was wearing my usual plastic slippers and crouched down as I waded through the glass. My hands trembled as I carefully picked up the heavy brick, my fingers slipping as I struggled to get a grip.
The students huddled closer in to me, their fear filling the hallway. I turned the brick in my hands to reveal the four letters that had been spray-painted in an angry red on one side: MAGA.
“‘Now where are we supposed to go, Mommy?’ she squeaked. What could I tell her?”
Through the hole in the broken window I heard the thunder of voices drawing closer. The brick had been like a lightning rod, thrown in to announce the arrival of the group.
“Build a wall…kill them all,” boomed the voices. The chant was punctuated by an occasional joyful scream of “MAGA.”
My students looked from me, to the brick, to the window. I watched the faces of the young people who lived in my residence hall—DACA students, Black students, Latinx students, Asian students, Muslim students—all wore the same expression that I felt swelling up inside of me. The chanting voices grew louder, the celebration outside contrasting with the fear and panic inside.
As I fumbled with the brick, I felt a gentle tug on the back of my shirt. I turned to see the anxious face of my then six-year-old daughter.
“Now where are we supposed to go, Mommy?” she squeaked. Her voice trembled with the emotions we were all feeling as we stared at the brick. What could I tell her? Did any of us belong here anymore? And if we didn’t belong in Trump’s America, where would we go?
The cold night air and deep booming voices rushed in through the window again. I could now see them, a crowd of mostly college-age men, carrying signs and pumping their fists in cruel, victory-induced jubilation. I drew a sharp inhale to steady myself for the change that was coming.
The battle over who belongs in America and who represents America continues, of course. And as much as the months and years since this troubled night have triggered new thoughts and doubts about where I belong, the reality of being Iranian-American has come into focus. I don’t have to belong in one place or the other—I can belong in the space of the hyphen between Iranian and American. In the search for belonging, this hyphenated space may be the place many of us can find home—the in-between.
Pardis Mahdavi is the dean of social sciences in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University and a professor in the School of Social Transformation.