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Waiting for a telephone line to be connected in Tehran means entering a strange world of bizarre excuses and broken promises. If you don’t know someone in the telecom office and then if you don’t grease his palm, you are guaranteed horrific service. If you do know someone that you can appropriately “tip” then you just get bad service.
After several broken promises, we were told: “The guy who can connect your phone had a death in the family.”
I found that I could not be sympathetic. “Iranians always have a death in the family,” I responded. “It seems to be a favorite excuse.”
Everyone laughed.
Later that day, we ordered pizza to be delivered. It arrived an hour late and cold. When we called to complain, the manager told us that his delivery person had just died.
Again we laughed.
Last summer I stumbled across this breathtaking graphic on View from Iran, a blog written by an American woman living and traveling with her husband in a land many of us will never know, never see. I loved reading Esther's posts about weddings, about casual taxi cab conversations, about daily life in Iran. We traded a little bit of mail and I'd hope to recruit Esther to participate in an audio project I was working on. Hamstrung by bandwidth issues, she wasn't able to participate, but I continued to follow her blog. For a while, she was gone and then, it turned out, oh, she's back stateside under her real identity, Tori Egherman. She was kind enough to answer questions about her life in a country that we hear lots of rhetoric and little truth about.
Let's get this done right out of the gate. A Jewish American woman in Iran?! What the hell? Are you crazy?
I think crazy is a fair term. You have to remember, however, that we arrived in Iran when Khatami was president and there was not quite as much anti-Semitic rhetoric coming out of Iran's official mouthpieces.
Did you ever out yourself as Jewish while you were in Iran? What happened?
I outed myself all the time. I admit that there were times when I let people, particularly Armenians (who are mainly Christian), assume that was Christian. No one ever assumed that I was a Muslim.” What religion are you?" is considered small talk in Iran. Everyone is assumed to have a religion. It would have been much worse for me to say that I was an atheist than to say that I was a Jew. Having no God is unimaginable for most Iranians that I met. When I did out myself, I was almost always met with a story of a childhood Jewish friend or general curiosity. Being Jewish is acceptable in Iran where we are considered "people of the book."
Why were you blogging anonymously? Did you talk blogging with any of the Iranians you met? What did they have to say about blogging in Iran?
I was blogging anonymously mainly to allow everyone to pretend that I was indeed anonymous. After a few weeks in Iran, my husband was in a meeting with some provincial bureaucrats. At the end of the meeting one of them quoted from a blog post that he had written. This made it obvious that we were being read and watched and identified ands the reason that Kamran stopped blogging for a long while. Remaining anonymous, however, allowed the charade of anonymity to continue for all parties concerned. I did write about this issue for Reconstruction, in an essay entitled: My Life in the Panopticon: Blogging from Iran. I never spoke to Iranians about blogging. Ever. Most Iranians I knew read blogs: particularly those about soccer and Harry Potter. There were also a couple of political news sites that were widely read by the Iranians I knew.
You were in Iran for three years - is that right? What did you miss from the US? What do you miss from Iran now that you're back? How’s the culture shock for you back here in the US?
I was therefore almost four years... wow... While I was there I missed free speech and clean air the most. Now that I am back, I miss my friends, Kamran's family, and the mountains. And, yes, I am experiencing culture shock. I don't want to sound like a prude or anti-consumerist, but I am shocked at the marketing to children. I watched an animated episode of Batman and heard Batgirl comment on "Corinthian leather." I
