It's Not the Bombing
by Noushin (Darya-Bandari) Framke, an Iranian-American Presbyterian
This Fourth of July was the 20th anniversary of my U.S. citizenship. We could have had a great party, as we have a perfect view of our town’s fireworks from our patio. But with the drumbeat to war with Iran reaching a crescendo, and being an Iranian-American, I had little to celebrate.
Last week, I heard a quote that Condeleeza Rice had said Iran should stop its saber rattling. This took my breath away. The country of my birth, where most of my family still lives, has been morphed into the aggressor. Most Americans don’t realize that the constant call to “bomb bomb Iran” has been just what the conservatives pray for in Iran. All the various factions there who are normally at each other’s throats are united against a common enemy now. This anti-Iran fervor in the U.S. is what has kept the Islamic Revolution alive there. And not just alive; we are caught in a perfect Hegelian dialectic with one side keeping the other going in an escalating way. The result is today’s Iran, thirty years on, still acting like the revolution was yesterday. The frenzy of revolution is alive and well because we are feeding it everyday.
When I arrived in Washington, DC as a college freshman in 1978, I had no idea that my first year here would be a year of revolution back home. When revolution broke out in the winter, my father told me to take a semester off and come home and witness history. My mother told me, “Don’t you dare! You stay put.” I stayed, finished school, got married and watched the Iran/Iraq war on television. It was five years before I saw any family and seventeen years before I went home with my American husband and children. My girls could not go with Iranian passports as citizenship is bestowed through the father, so we went with 3 blue passports and one red one. (Iran won’t recognize my US passport). Iranian immigration was kind and welcoming to my American family but not to me. And that set the tone for my first trip home after all those years. Seven weeks in Iran showed me that it was not the country I left; it finally sunk in that I had lost my home. When we came back to America, I was finally able to call New Jersey home and say “I’m from New Jersey,” albeit with a lump in my throat.
In slow motion, I watched the Soviet Union shed its label of “evil empire” and eventually, sitting in my den watching the State of the Union Address - now as an American - heard my president put Iran in the “Axis of Evil.” It’s been downhill from there. Slowly but surely, Iran has become America’s biggest enemy and today is the only member left of “the axis.” I still remember the euphoria of stepping foot on American soil for the first time in August of 1978. In the cab ride on my way to my college dorm from National Airport, I marveled at the pristine neo-classical buildings and monuments in Washington. I had just spent a week in Rome and the juxtaposition was jarring - it felt like I had landed in a cleaner surreal version of Rome. “How odd,” I thought, as an eighteen-year-old, “Why would America want to emulate Rome?”
Flash forward thirty years. My eighty-year-old father visited from Iran this year. We were in Pier-1 looking for placemats and he was wandering the store in amazement, surprised that so many products were imported from Vietnam. With melancholy, he said, “Look! Even the Vietnamese are back in good graces.” In an odd way, that gives me hope. Maybe one day I will shop on Route 10 and find beautiful handblown Iranian glassware on the shelves. Until then though, I will have to keep telling my story of how hard it’s been to live here while torturously being turned into the enemy. My maternal family are Armenian-Iranians, and I am Christian. Even as a Christian, with a vast church support system, life has been hard and getting harder emotionally. My kids just roll their eyes when I get security checks at airports; I can only imagine what it’s like for Muslim Iranians these days. And men have it worse, of course, as they are perceived as more of a threat.
Knowing the Persian Spirit as I do, all this saber rattling by the hawks in Washington gives the Iranians more pride. They take it as an honor to be standing against a massive superpower's hegemony over Middle-East oil. A naval blockade, if approved by our Democratic Congress, will only be seen as a declaration of war. In 1979, after a short Prague Spring in Iran, the Muslim clerics seized power and consolidated it quickly when Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. All Iranians, religious and secular, put their differences aside under Khomeini to protect the country. We now know that the U.S. helped Hussein thinking that would kill the revolution and eliminate Khomeini. Ironic; that eight-year war is what made Khomeini.
Iran is at a similar crossroads now but with a bigger attacker lurking. Iranians, no matter how ethnically diverse (Iran is a melting pot too), will be united against an outside attack, even if it’s not bombs but a naval blockade. Do we mean to help Iran’s hard-liners? Because that is what a naval blockade would do. Who will be “made” in Iran this go-around?
In 1980, my father said “It will be fifty years before Iran can recover from this revolution.” Last week, there seems to have been the fluttering of some doves and a sign of hope that the US might open an “Interests Section” office in Tehran. Dare I raise my hopes? Or do I keep living in limbo, alienated from both countries and waiting for an October surprise?
