Roya Hakakian is unhappy with American news coverage of Iran. Instead of treating Iranian civil society as a subject worthy of regular attention, the Iranian Jewish writer argues, U.S. media outlets focus obsessively on the smokescreen of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Ignoring the complex relationship between the country’s citizens and rulers, journalists are left ill-prepared to interpret news like the last two weeks’. Hakakian’s own writing may prove an antidote—a journalist for CBS, a memoirist, and a poet, she has written searingly but lovingly about her homeland since she left Tehran for the United States in 1985. Hakakian spoke with Tablet from her home in California about the future of the Ahmadinejad regime, the reaction of Iran’s 30,000-strong Jewish community, and how the whole thing reminds her of 1979.

Are you in close contact with friends in Iran these days?

I am, primarily through Facebook. It’s much faster, many more people can weigh in. It’s a lot less intrusive, no one has to wake up anyone in the middle of the night, no one has to worry about a bad connection. And it lends itself to the kind of visuals that letters or phone or even emails wouldn’t.

And are you hearing anything that hasn’t been reported?

There’s certainly a lag between what I hear and what airs. For instance, protesters were going up to the rooftops to chant “Alu Akbar.” For the first few days, I heard the host of a CNN program say, “Because Facebook is down, people have to go up to the rooftops to communicate.” Well, that’s not it at all. It’s because people are trying to go back to the roots of the revolution in ’79, to say that this is the same face-off. What the opposition is really doing is appropriating all the revolutionary 1979 slogans and images that Ahmadinejad feels are his legacy. But it took four or five days before they brought people on the air who said that.

An article on the Israeli news site Ynet said last week that the Jewish community of Iran had “denounced the riots” and expressed its “aversion to any kind of undignified behavior.” What do you make of that?

That’s the stuff they have to say. No member of a religious minority, if he is good at what he does and is responsibly representing his community, would talk to you at this moment. It would jeopardize the security of people in his community. People in religious minorities in Iran have historically not taken a stance. They wait to see who wins and then they issue a statement of support.

How deeply rooted is Iran’s animosity toward Israel?

There are two lines of rhetoric going on. One is the Ahmadinejad, Holocaust-denying, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah line. That will be gone completely. One of the things coming out of these protests is people saying, “We don’t want the bomb.” There’s also this historical anti-Semitism that’s existed as long as there have been Jews on earth, although the excuse that people in Iran have is limited access to correct information. But whoever comes to power has to break with the past.

This is where a healthy relationship between the Muslim Middle East and Israel can begin. Israel has never intervened or meddled in the lives of Iranians themselves. If anything, because Iran and Iraq had such a lasting and damaging war, Iranians were very happy to see Israel bomb Iraq in the early ’90s. Israel has never conducted a coup in Iran; the only legitimate grievance is the Palestinian issue. And now people are saying, “Whenever we see Palestinians bleed on the streets we are asked to take to the streets and protest for them. Now we are bleeding on the streets, where are they now?”

You sound optimistic.

Regardless of what happens, this regime has lost moral credibility among the public, including its own supporters. The fact that they were shooting bullets at protesters chanting “God is Great”—it’s all extremely reminiscent of the revolution in ’79. People were waiting for something else to happen all these years, they were thinking there might be a military invasion by the U.S., or that Israel might strike, and none of those things happened, so they’ve taken to the streets. In some sense the regime change has already happened. It’s a question of how long it will actually take for the infrastructure to change, for the leaders to step down.

And the protests you’re going to here in the States—what’s the religious makeup?

Everybody’s in. I heard of a protest in front of the U.N. yesterday, and there were a few women who had the Islamic dress code, and a couple characters among the protesters said they shouldn’t be there. Immediately the crowd began to chant, “We are all together, we are all together.” What’s really inspiring about this moment is it’s not about Jew vs. Muslim, black vs. white, man vs. woman, it’s about a movement of national unity.

photo by Marion Ettlinger

You describe the Iranian Revolution as the most significant love affair of your life. Why was it so compelling?

Westerners saw something about Iran that Iranians didn’t see themselves. As far as I can tell from what you observed on TV and the radio, the revolution was seen as religious. From inside Iran, it was really a revolution with all its traditionally historical mandates for freedom, civil liberties, and equality—which in the 1970s wasn’t an outdated notion, as it has become today. To have been moved by a common aspiration as a society all together was to experience a great love. It is rare to experience that along with many millions of people and when it does happen, it is such an enormous experience that it eclipses anything else. We cast off our selfishness even though we were teenagers. We surrendered our personal wants, desires, and demands. 1979 convinced us all to be in service of something bigger than ourselves. We bought into it, and it was beautiful.

Knowing the outcome of the revolution, did Western reporters get the story right after all?

They happened to have done a bad job of reporting, and that bad job turned out to have elements of truth. So much of what was reported was a reaction to the hostage crisis; thereafter everyone had formed an opinion about what was going on that was shaped by justifiable feelings of hostility. That doesn’t mean it was true.

As a Jew, were you ever apprehensive about joining the revolution?

I had trepidation about belonging to a particular group—many political groups were trying to recruit in those years and I never took membership, because I worried that I’d make the wrong choice. But about the revolution, I had no trepidation. That’s what Jews do: We follow our hearts into idealistic promises! We are suckers for revolutionary ideas and ideals, and I was no different.

Did your parents feel the same way?

The elders never bought into it, while the younger generation was bolder and more willing to take chances. People under 30 were sold, people over 30 felt more ambivalent.

Your excitement before the revolution coincided with adolescent sexual experimentation with a neighborhood friend, Zaynab. Do you make a connection between those events?

Iran and I, as a girl, were coming of age together. I believe there was a parallel happening. A natural part of coming of age as a young girl is the desire to have sexual experiences and all of that was entwined with the intensity the revolution had brought into our lives.

In Journey From the Land of No, your freedoms as a woman and as a Jew erode at a similar rate. Were those things bound up together?

Whenever I try to describe how things began to deteriorate in Iran, I resort to that old saying that “First they came….” The revolution unraveled in the same fashion. First they came, certainly, for the women, and at least half of the country—men and women—didn’t say anything. That was the harbinger of a lot of things that began to go, including minority rights and political parties’ right to exist and freedom of expression.

It’s always important to me to remind people that even though life deteriorated for Jews in Iran and the quality of our experience began to diminish, it was not a result of anti-Semitic policies towards Jews alone. It was part of a broader attack on the entire society that was unwilling to fall in line with the new regime of Islamic fundamentalism. We became victims in many ways just as secular Muslim Iranians became victims. We suffered along with ordinary Iranian Christians who wanted to continue their practices and couldn’t support a theocratic regime. We suffered far less than the Baha’i community did, and it’s important to keep that in perspective.

How did Muslim fundamentalism affect your life?

The Jewish school where I was a student was shut down because it was first taken over by a Muslim fundamentalist woman who tried to convert us all. After that failed, we all went to other schools, and I went into a non-Jewish school for the first time in my life. Also, in 1983 or 84, an unofficial order came for bathrooms and shared facilities, like water fountains, to be segregated.

As a woman, life really changed after 1981, when the Islamic dress code was imposed.

What was the dress code?

A scarf that had to be a dark color—dark brown, navy blue, or black. Then you had to wear a kind of long raincoat of the same color and, underneath that, a pair of pants and closed-toed shoes. I was 14 when I had to start wearing it. I grew up dressed the way we dress ourselves here, so the dress code was a significant difference. Many things weren’t available to us because of the way we were dressed—bike riding, for example, and other athletic activities.

One theme of Journey is the power of literature: people are killed for it, books are confiscated; your own writing was burned. How did this influence your decision to become a writer?

I feel very old-fashioned saying this, but I still believe in the idea that was introduced to me in 1979 that literature is the equivalent of religion for secular people. If you are someone who doesn’t want to go and actively pray, what you do is read literature and poetry. This is really in some ways the basis of my conversion. I always remain a Jew, but since adolescence I haven’t been a very religious Jew. My explanation is that I instead do literature.

You’ve published a few books of poetry in Persian. Why did you write the memoir in English?

There are many answers for that. English lends itself better to prose writing than Persian does. I’ve gotten flak from Persian scholars after having said that, but especially after having written this book, I think Persian is better when it comes to writing poetry and English is more available to writing in prose.

In terms of emotional and philosophical reasons, I thought it would be easier in English. I was worried I’d be wrapped in my feelings from my teenage years if I were to use the language in which I experienced them. If I wrote it in Persian, I would have been Iranian again. It would have been turning my back on the past 18 years I have lived in America. To use English was a sign of loyalty to this new life and new place.

Courtesy of Roya Hakakian

Two decades passed before you wrote about your life in Iran.

Ever since I left, there had always been two stories about Iran. The broader story about Iranian politics was always easy for me to talk about. What I had witnessed, that was the story I had never told and thought in some ways that I must not tell. Having left Iran had been such a, for lack of a better word, devastating, traumatic experience that I thought that talking about it was betraying it. In the opening chapter, I say I was proved wrong; one can go back to memories of the past and show commitment to them by publicly talking about them. After the book was finished, I thought it was a very Jewish thing to do. To show such a devout commitment to the notion of memory and history was one way in which I could exercise what I understand about what it is to be a Jew. When it was done, it occurred to me that my intention was to keep a memory and a narrative alive and keep them from dying away and that lies at the heart of Judaism the way I understand it to be.

How is writing your own story different from journalism?

I went about writing my own story with as much diligence and attention to details as I did with other people. Friends were laughing at me, saying, “It’s your story, you don’t really need to research it.” But I took weeks to interview family members to see what they remembered about something we had all experienced together. I spent days in libraries poring over magazines. I could have said that what I remembered was just as valid, but having been a reporter, I was trained to feel respect for facts and data and information, and went over facts several times. I had a history professor go over historical facts when I was done; I had a language professor go over Persian translations. Even though it was a creative project, I went about creating it, in some ways, like a reporter because I wanted it to be valid as a historical document, too.

Have you been back to Iran?

I cannot go back there for legal reasons. I came here on political asylum, which means unless the government in Iran changes I cannot go back.

Do you dream about it?

I think about Iran. I would like to be able to travel there, but I don’t dream about going back and living there anymore because the place I knew doesn’t exist.