The walls around the garden

Tara Bahrampour, author of "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America," talks about balancing between two cultures and glimpsing the crumbling boundaries and lush center of Iranian life.

By Fiona Morgan

Mar 8, 1999 | After months of protests and political unrest had rocked the Shah of Iran from his throne, 12-year-old Tara Bahrampour and her family fled their home in the last wave of evacuations before the Tehran airport closed, for a place they only half belonged to. "At that moment, Iran in all its shakiness became more precious to me than any safe country could ever be," she writes in her memoir, "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America."

Thanks to her parents' improbable marriage, Bahrampour lived the first part of her life sampling from the best of two worlds. Her mother, a rock singer from Los Angeles, and her father, the son of an Iranian feudal lord, met at UC-Berkeley. During her childhood in Tehran, Bahrampour traveled daily between a progressive international school and her father's tight-knit, traditional family, where children were adored and played in interior gardens. She absorbed her parents' curiosity about diverse cultures and ideas, as well as the Islamic traditions and intimacy of her extended family. In America following the fall of the Shah, Bahrampour found another life amid a more complicated culture in the suburbs of Northern California and Portland, Ore., where her parents struggled with the loss of their careers. Even though the sense of being foreign sometimes alienated her from her roots, Bahrampour never lost the sense of belonging to Iran.

That sense of belonging took her back to Tehran six years ago, after she began a career in journalism, despite the danger of Islamic rule. Since that first trip to the city of her early childhood, Bahrampour has made several visits to Iran, documenting the changes that continue to take place in the aftermath of the revolution. Last month, suspects were arrested for the murder of five dissidents; a progressive new intelligence minister, Ali Yunesi, was appointed; and Iranians turned out in record numbers to vote for supporters of reformist President Mohammed Khatami. The hard-line rule in Iran is beginning to give way to a freer, independent country.

In "To See and See Again," Bahrampour views the country and its culture, as well as the culture of Iranians living in America, through the filter of personal experience, family stories and sharp observation. Tied both to the West and the Middle East, her point of view achieves a balanced view of a culture often misunderstood as simply repressive, and recovers the intoxicating, often sensuous details of Iranian life. Bahrampour's book tour recently brought her to San Francisco and Salon's offices.

I was struck by the image of your house, the quintessential image of Iranian houses, with these high walls around them and gardens inside.

In Iran, there's this huge separation between public and private. And so from the outside the houses just look like these bare, dilapidated walls, but inside it's really another world. The doors are always closed, but if you can slip inside ... People love their gardens and they grow all kinds of fruit. They usually have a little pool or a pond with goldfish.

Our childhood was a little different from that of "normal" Iranian children just because our parents were more free with us. You mention the wall as a symbol of the barrier, and my brother and I used to climb the wall and sit on it and just watch what was going on outside -- which was fine with our parents, but our uncle, who was more conservative, would come and yell at us and tell us to get down, because what if people saw us.

Do you feel like you were more free when you lived in America? It was about the same. I was very sheltered from the restrictiveness of Iran, so I think probably someone who had grown up in a more traditional household would have felt that difference more.

One of my favorite episodes in your book is when you played Barbies, and you and your friend found some black cloth and decided to make a chador for Barbie so she could make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

A lot of little girls were playing Barbies and I think the government wanted to have a more Iranian role model, so they created dolls that were based on characters in the school book all elementary school kids read. They were brother and sister instead of being romantic partners, and they dressed in traditional Islamic clothing. One was dressed in kind of a chador and the other one was in colorful tribal clothes. I'd read about the dolls on CNN and when I was there a few months ago, I went to all these different toy stores and no one had them. Finally this one guy said they've been outlawed. Someone told me that there had been all this debate about what they should look like and what their names should be and there had been so much argument over it that it had been pulled -- and yet Barbies were still on the shelves.

Next Page: "This other life I didn't live"

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