The Persistence of Memory

On the eve of the 31st anniversary of the 1979 revolution, Tehran is facing the Marxian destiny: History has repeated itself in Iran, indeed with a farcical twist, and the clerics aren’t the ones laughing.  

For 30 years, February had always arrived, ringing in the 10-day commemorative period the authorities call the “Decade of Fajr,” meaning “dawning,” or as ordinary Iranians secretly dubbed from the start, the Decade of Zajr, meaning “torture.” Every year, a Christmas-like effort went into decorating the cities—hanging Ayatollah Khomeini banners from street lamps, plastering the walls with bygone slogans, playing the old reels of the 1978 uprising with the relentless frequency of canned holiday music in American malls. To live in Tehran in early February untouched by the Fajr spectacle was as impossible as it is to live in Athens unaware of the Acropolis. Marches were on. In schools and universities across the country, math, physics, chemistry, even medicine, yielded to history, albeit that of a single year, as students and government employees were rounded up to attend the celebrations—which, in a theocracy, never amounts to much more than demonstrations.

The further the nation got from 1979, the greater grew the hyperbole of the official narratives—the evil of Uncle Sam and its bastard child, Israel, the bloody appetite of the former Shah for power, the wisdom of Ayatollah Khomeini—who was soon elevated to an imam, the valor of people struggling against monarchy.    

For 30 years, Milan Kundera’s elegant formulation had been upended in Iran. Those in power insisted on remembering the past; ordinary men and women insisted on forgetting it. To remember was “revolutionary.” Not to remember was not simply counter-revolutionary, it was even blasphemous. But as this particular kind of blasphemy was hard to define or detect and, thus, did not come with prison time, people readily exercised it. The tension was so palpable that even foreign reporters—clueless to language and cultural subtexts—sensed it. Report after report appeared in the English-language press about the youth’s disregard for the old totems, and their penchant for all things western, as they understood western to be—like going blonde, wearing Nikes, being sexually promiscuous, and saving money for plastic surgery. This generation that clandestinely swung its hips to the cool tunes of American pop would not be caught chanting a passé like Allahu akbar.

Since denying an enemy can only provoke but not defeat him, Iran’s memory game was bound to come to an end.   

In the aftermath of the June presidential elections, the national dementia lifted. What was buried in the collective consciousness took hold of young and old. Everyone suddenly remembered. They climbed to the rooftops and chanted Allahu akbar just as they had in the weeks before the fall of the Shah. They took to the streets by the millions, and the image of their throngs uncannily resembled its precursor. They remembered how to build barricades, mix a Molotov cocktail, kiss the cheek of a riot policeman to pacify him, or set a tire on fire to neutralize tear gas. The regime finally got its wish. The nation proved to have been an assiduous student of history all along—and of all the detailed instructions it now regrets having passed on.

Stripping the clerical throne of its crown jewels by appropriating the revolutionary icons and symbolism is the second smartest move Iran’s Green Movement ever made. The first was to choose to conduct itself peacefully.

Could three decades prove to be a charm for Iran? It very well could. Whatever the next few months bring, Tehran certainly is bracing itself for February. Had they already built the nuclear bomb, and were it possible to wipe a month off the calendar the way Ahmadinejad wishes to wipe Israel off the map, February 2010 would have been the regime’s first target. In the meantime, the promotion of forgetting is a governmental priority. Last week, the broadcast and distribution of several images from 1978 was declared banned: http://www.ayandenews.com/news/17413/.

The Green Movement, however, has already vowed to fight the ban by remembering.