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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2025
Tehran, 1978
A fall day in 1978 forever altered my life. A day that started like any other tore asunder the life I had worked years to build for myself and my country. For the past forty years, the ghost of that fateful day has trailed my shadow. Today, March 5 2020, as I write these words in the early morning light, sitting in a café on Bleecker Street in Manhattan, the shock of that day still thrums in my mind like a buzzing broken record, while the corresponding images, dark and painful to behold, flash uncontrollably before my eyes.
I have only recently disclosed the details of that day to my family and friends, the people who know me best. It has taken me decades to expose the nefarious underbelly of my political biography to them. Spurring me on has been the realization that burying the ugly face of politics smothers with it hope for change. Neither goodness nor peace can dwell in my mind so long as this darkness remains undisturbed by the light of revelation. It is time to let the “unthought”—those memories I have tried so long to cast into oblivion—speak.
I never intended to hide what happened that day, but the fear that it would overtake and distort memories of my precious, if turbulent, youth led me to push it out of my mind. After all, this event transpired just as I and countless other Iranians were on the cusp of realizing the impossible: toppling a police state indifferent to our wills, hopes, and ambitions. I could see the freedom we had so long been denied materializing as protestors poured daily into Tehran's city streets. Everything I had hoped for, social change on an unimaginable scale directed by and for Iranians, lay within our reach, and all that remained was for us to seize it. Only as we were turning the corner into a future free of the Pahlavi state's modern autocracy did I learn, tragically and violently, that our hopes were fodder for a power struggle that would once again sideline and silence us. When people nurture dreams manipulated by the powerful, any one of them might fall victim to their political caprices.
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