BY JEFFREY BERMAN
Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian author and economist living in New York City, last visited Iran in 1998. Unlike previous trips home, this time Yaghmaian knew this time that returning to Iran again would be difficult, perhaps impossible. However, his transition over the last twelve years into a life of exile inspires his current work researching the lives and experiences of migrant workers and exiles.
Like many middle class Iranians during the time of the Shah, Yaghmaian originally came to the United States to study in 1975. At the time, remembers Yaghmaian, “seeing poverty bothered me,” but he was otherwise apolitical. He remained largely indifferent to the corruption of the Shah’s regime.
This changed in 1978, as Iranian oil workers went on strike. Watching the events unfold halfway around the globe, Yaghmaian understood that this strike was different than previous demonstrations. “This strike was the end of the Shah. Instinctively I knew.”
It is hard for him to describe exactly why, said Yaghmaian, but this strike catalyzed his transition into a political being that cared deeply for the course that Iranian politics took. He could no longer ignore the Iran’s political structure under the Shah. He now needed to change the system.
He wanted to return to Iran permanently, but his family forced him to stay in America to finish his studies. He channeled his frustrations into reading Karl Marx. He joined an Iranian-Marxist student group in New York.
Waiting for an October Revolution in Iran that would never come, Yaghmaian bided his time by taking up (and eventually finishing) his PhD in political economy at Fordham University.
He never lost hope that an opportunity to return to Iran would come. Throughout the 1980s, Yaghmaian refused to furnish or decorate his apartment in New York, in anticipation of his impending departure. Why buy pots and pans when you will be moving back to Iran any day now?
His chance came in 1995. Having heard stories of authorities throwing people in jail as soon as they returned home, Yaghmaian went along with a United Nations-sponsored program, figuring this gave him a decent level of protection. Over the next few years he successfully entered Iran several times and in 1997 decided to spend a full year there. He spent his days visiting the relatives that he had seldom seen over the previous twenty years, and his nights writing articles for leftist newspapers and teaching Marx to students in an underground classroom.
He was even arrested once. He spent the night in jail after giving a copy of The Communist Manifesto to one of his female students in the park. The whole night, Yaghmaian recalled, the inmates and jail guards sat together in a circle discussing politics and literature. One guard even read love poems that he wrote to his wife. Today, Yaghmaian remembers it as one of the best nights of his life.
In July of 1998, as the student protests that took place that year raged on, the government began to use gangs of thugs to subdue dissent. Yaghmaian received a phone call from a female journalist with whom he had worked at a newspaper in Tehran. She called to make sure Yaghmaian was unhurt, that he had not been arrested. Taking this as a sign, Yaghmaian burned his writings and photos and left his parents’ house where he had been staying, seeking refuge his brother’s home. He left instructions with his mother that she was to tell anyone who called that he was on vacation on the Caspian Sea.
After a week, he received another phone call at his parent’s home. Ignoring her son’s instructions, Yaghmaian’s mother dutifully told the caller where Yaghmaian could be found. The caller was not the police, but rather a friend of Yaghmaian, who asked him if he still had an exit visa. Yaghmaian answered that his did, and his friend responded with a simple message: the police were coming to arrest Yaghmaian, and he should leave Iran immediately.
Yaghmaian later learned an Iranian Member of Parliament had become of fan of the many articles and columns that he wrote over the course of that year. This politician found the police file on Yaghmaian, saw that his life was in danger, and passed along the information that would later save Yaghmaian’s life.
Yaghmaian’s brother immediately drove him to the airport, where Yaghmaian told him that if he did not receive a phone call in three hours it meant he had been arrested. As his plane to Dubai idled on the runway for over an hour, Yaghmaian sat, wondering if his escape was to be deterred at the last minute. But the plane finally left, and Yaghmaian, covered in sweat, had escaped to freedom.
When he landed in Dubai, Yaghmaian was unable to reach his brother to tell him that he was not arrested. First his credit card was denied, then the payphone broke, then his brother’s line was busy.
Yaghmaian sighed, knowing what needed to be done. He called his mother and explained to her that he left Tehran. She followed instructions this time. With a deadpan voice, she said how she already knew he was on vacation at the Caspian. He explained that no, he was not at the Caspian, that he left Iran. She took a moment to comprehend what happened, and finally answered, “I’m just happy you’re safe.”
Yaghmaian hung up the phone and sat down at a café in the middle of the bustling Dubai airport. The weight of the escape and the fear of arrest finally gone, he began to cry. A life in exile was no longer theoretical. The possibility of returning to Iran was gone, and Yaghmaian realized for the first time that he had no home.
By now he has lived in the West longer than he lived in Iran, and in many ways is as much a product of the United States as he is of his home country. Nevertheless, the feelings of displacement and the lack of belonging remain. “I’m a child of the third world,” said Yaghmaian, and as such, he can only feel at ease in the third world. The connection he feels with the detached and impoverished, explains why Yaghmaian spends so much of his traveling through the far corners of the world, most recently in China, meeting people that too have an experience if displacement. He finds that if he shares his personal story of migration, people detect a common bond and share theirs. Yaghmaian finds solace in this activity, in documenting the stories of people that cannot return home.