Minoui Delphine - Im writing you from Tehran: a granddaughters search for her familys past and their countrys future

I LEFT YOUR country without looking back. How could I say good-bye to a rediscovered part of myself? It was the beginning of summer 2009, Tehran was mourning its martyrs, and the prison cells were overflowing. Over the course of a sham election, we had passed from the green of hope to the red of blood. The dream of change had shattered against the wall of repression. I was reluctantly putting the finishing touches on a long report whose secret you still guarded. Back in Paris, I could not write a single line. Words waged war on my page. Emotions battled facts. A journalist by trade, I had returned to being a simple citizen. I had lost the necessary distance for telling this story. So I surrendered my pen. For a long time, a very long timeand then I remembered the lines from Hafez you had bequeathed to me.

He who binds himself to darkness fears the wave.

The whirlpool frightens him.

And if he wants to share our journey,

He has to venture well beyond the comforting sand of the shore.

You had offered these to me in Paris, one November morning in 1997. I didnt know it yet, but this poem would become my profession of faith. You had just arrived from Iran for heart surgery that day. A routine operation, the doctors had said. I was twenty-three years old. You were at least three times older, and I believed you were immortal. No doubt because of the distance, which had always kept us apart. During your rare trips to France, you had a way of always expressing yourself through poems that you neglected to translate. You, who had represented Iran in UNESCO at the end of the 50s, you knew Hafez like the back of your hand. You claimed that the illustrious fourteenth-century poet had an answer for everything, that his writings were more valuable than any crystal ball, that all one had to do was dip into them at random in order to glimpse the near future. There was something magical about listening to you recite what was, to my ear, gibberish. That day, in your hospital bed, you had taken the time to explain. You expressed an unexpected desire to initiate me into your native tongue. An astonishing whim. Like a fundamental need. No one at home had ever bothered to teach me about my origins. From right to left, your pen began to dance, dressing the consonants in tiny colorful accents. On each line, a short French translation followed on the heels of your calligraphy. This poem, my first lesson in Persian. One of your last breaths.

Your sudden disappearance from the world knocked me flat. I knew so little about you. And even less about your country. As a child, I would send you letters, my way of challenging the unknown. I would always embellish them with colorful drawings of unchanging characters. Papa. Maman. My sister, Nasrine, and me. A little sample of your family spread across the planet by way of miniature chronicles written in French. They were my first dispatches. They say that writing is liberating. At the time, I thought of it as a game of hide-and-seek with your shadow. Or else an intriguing puzzle, for whose missing pieces I obstinately kept searching.

So many years have passed since your death. What an unsettling feeling, to reach once again for my pen, knowing everything about you. To dedicate this long letter to you when you are no longer with us. As a little girl, when I would write to you from Paris with my chubby hands, Id imagine you leafing through my missives, sitting on your pretty Tehran patio where I had spent the summer when I was four. The Iran of my childhood memory was that and nothing else: a patio adorned with forsythias, rosewater ice cream, an inflatable pool to wade around in, and Persian laments reverberating in the background. Papa had sent the three of us there for vacation. It was August 1978. In the middle of the garden, Maman was bronzing her fair skin, her face framed by a homemade aluminum reflector to capture the reflection of the UV rays, to the great distress of Grandmother, who said she looked like a toaster. In the East, whiteness is sacred. At the foot of a persimmon tree, cousins were playing backgammon as they sipped pomegranate juice. The crackling of the radio was accompanying their laughter when, suddenly, a terrible piece of news rattled that little corner of Paradise. I remember a crash of voices, and that indecipherable language abruptly losing its musicality. Then my panicked mother, glued to the telephone, murmuring in French to Papa, who was still in Paris, Things are heating up in Iran The Cinema Rex in Abadan was torched Hundreds of people are dead No one knows whos behind it The protests against the shah have multiplied. These events, which seemed to me like fables for adults, announced the seeds of the revolution against the sitting monarchy. But, at the time, I saw them only as the unjust trigger of our hasty return to France.