From a Life Threatening World to the Land of the Free

The smoke covers the sky and people run and scream for their lives, as Lina watches in horror, wondering if her family is still alive. As she overcomes the shock, she starts running towards her house to find her family. This is one of the many bomb attacks that my mother has witnessed. This memory was an everyday occurrence in her life, during the 1980’s. Lina, born in 1964, has lead a normal life with her parents and two brothers in Iran, but has experienced the horrific war between Iran and Iraq, and a time of great change in a country, where the level of Democracy changed greatly. In spite of a great family, life has gotten harder and harder, to a point where bombs threatened her life every second. After escaping these horrible conditions, Lina resides in Los Angeles now with her family and thanks God every day for being where she is now.

I was born in Iran and I lived there for 37 years. Well…I have a lot of memories from there, because that’s where I have spent most of my life. In general we have had a good time at home most of the time, because, when I was a child my parents have always tried to keep things positive and happy for us children, but outside of the house things weren’t always good. I mean we went through a lot of bad times outside of our home, like the revolution and the war with Iraq which were horrible for us.

Schools were very good and fun for us during the Shah, I mean we didn’t have to study the religion of Islam which we were not part of and boys and girls went to the same school. We had subjects like math, science, Farsi or literature; we also had music, which was not allowed after the Shah. We also had art, and dance. Uh…dance was also not allowed later. But the main thing that was different back then, during the Shah is that we didn’t have to wear all the heavy clothing that we were forced to wear later. We did have    uniforms but they were like normal clothing.

During the Shah we didn’t exactly have freedom of speech and religion but I mean people didn’t have something to complain about, they had their job they had better lifestyles and they could say that the government could do something better, but they just couldn’t say that the Shah was bad or there was something wrong with him. I did vote a few times…well they told us that election were based on our votes, but I don’t think so, I think the government had a lot of influence on it.

My parents were very hard working, my mother always worked at home, she sewed clothes and my father owned a foods store you know, it was like a small restaurant. Well...my family had a normal lifestyle and in general people weren’t worried about their futures and where they would get their money from and most of the families had about the same kind of lifestyle we had, there were some rich families and some lower class but most people were middle class.

I think I was about 12 or 13 years old when the revolution started. Before it actually started, people could feel that something was gonna happen,…because wherever we went we always saw or heard people talking about it…for example in the stores, in lines people would talk about how bad the Shah was and how he wasn’t enforcing religion. Well…after a while some people started passing out papers in street with these kinds of writing on them or they were written on the walls of buildings and we would mostly hear people saying that the Shah sells oil to other countries and doesn’t use the money to improve the county something like that. So when the Shah found out about this they arrested him and sent him to Iraq.

This made it even worse. When Khomeini was sent to Iraq he started recording his speeches on tapes and sending them illegally to Iran and they were uh…distributed among people in mosques and at different places like stores and libraries and schools everywhere. I mean the one that I heard was promising people that if he ruled the country, then people would not have to pay any electric bills or any gas bills because they had a county which was rich with oil.

Yes, this is what caused the big protests and the revolution… when people heard this they liked his promises, so naturally they started to protest and life changed a lot for us. The protests were horrible because they became very violent, especially towards Christians, and that’s why my father quit his job. Um… they started destroying stores and breaking windows and this is one of the worst memories I have of that time because one day my family was sitting at our table and we were eating dinner and we could hear all the noise of the protests that were going on around us. This was in our streets and they were getting louder and louder and suddenly as we were eating my fathers friend who lived right above my fathers store came running in and he was not able to talk because of the big shock that he was in. But he sat down and said that my fathers store was being destroyed because he sold wine and liquors, and without saying anything my father ran outside and went to his store since it was very close to our house and immediately my mother, my 2 brothers and I ran after him and I can never…never forget the impression on my fathers face when he saw his whole store being destroyed… I mean that was all we had.

My mother was trying to keep my father calm because if they knew that it was his store I mean he was the owner of the store they would kill him My father has always been a positive person but after this he went into a depression for a long time. This was very hard for my family was…my mother still worked but it was not enough, and since food stores were being destroyed we had to stand in line for hours to buy things.

The Shah knew that if he didn’t leave the country his family’s life was in danger. So in I think 1979 he left for Egypt. Oh we felt a lot of change in everything, when he left. All the television programs that we had before were very much like here. After the revolution we only had religious programs. They also closed all the printing companies and there was only one that gave the current news on the revolution and there was nothing about the world uh…the name of the newspaper I think was uh… “Kayhan” um something like that. They made it seem like there was nothing else that was going on in the world. A lot of Christians also lost their jobs because they only hired Muslims especially at food stores uh… because they did not want any Christians touching their food. During that time Universities closed and students that graduated from high school had to stay at home. For about two and half years and this was very bad for my older brother you know because he was already going to a University for a year, and then they all closed down.

Well when Khomeini started to rule the country in his own way, people had no freedoms at all. If anyone said anything bad about the current government they would immediately be arrested or if any journalist wrote anything bad about the government they would put him in prison and this was not all we could not have any music playing at our homes and there was none on TV…and all the restaurant were closed but they opened later.

Women’s rights is another thing that became a huge deal because as you know during the Shah women had the same freedoms as we have here…we could do a lot of the things that men did like become judges or lawyers and become educated but uh… then later all of this changed…they started to enforce girls and women to cover themselves when they came out of their homes and this was very hard because nobody was used to this. This was everywhere…the news said it…the police gave tickets at first but then it got worse and if a women did not cover her hair for example they would throw some poisonous powder on the and many young girls got skin problems because of this. Men and women could not walk together in the streets unless there was a big age difference between them. They couldn’t hold hands or even shake hands and this was a very stressful time for people. Schools were separated for girls and boys and well…we still had our Christian schools that we learned our religion but we also had to learn about Islam and there were no more dance classes or music lessons.

People did not really get a chance to get used to this lifestyle because the war began right after the revolution and it was about uh…one year later. The war didn’t change the government as much as it changed thousands of people’s lives you know because a just like any war it killed thousands of people and many people lost their loved ones. This was worse than the revolution, because we were always afraid of the bombs and it was just a horrible feeling. The radios would give alert and we had to run to our basements until they announced that it was safe to come out.

I remember one day I was coming home from work when I was about 19 because the war took eight years, and I remember I saw that our street was closed and that it had been bombed. I was really scared and started to cry because my mother was at home, but when I got closer I saw that it was my neighbor’s house a few doors down, but any moment there could have been a bomb coming our way. After the war it took another couple of years for the country to come to its normal state but it was never like before…like it was during the Shah.

Interviewed by Serly Moosakhanian