A Man of the Theater

Survival as an Artist in Iran

Nasser Rahmaninejad

• Publisher: New Village Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781613321102
• eBook ISBN: 9781613321126
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

Life in Iran as an artist under the Shah and during the Iranian Revolution A Man of the Theater tells the personal story of a theater artist caught between the two great upheavals of Iranian history in the 20th century. One is the White Revolution of the 1960s, the incomplete and uneven modernization imposed from the top by the dictatorial regime of the Shah, coming in the wake of the overthrow of the popular Mosaddegh government with the help of the CIA. The other one is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a great rising of Iranian society against the rule of the Shah in which Khomeini's Islamist faction ends up taking power. Written in a simple direct style, Rahmaninejad's memoir describes his fraught creative life in Tehran during these decades, founding a theater company and directing plays under the increasing pressure of the censorship authorities and the Shah's secret police. After being arrested and tortured by the SAVAK and after spending years in Tehran's infamous Evin prison and being a cause célèbre of Amnesty International, Rahmaninejad is freed by the Revolution of 1979. But his new-found freedom is short-lived; the progressive intellectuals and artists find themselves overpowered and outmaneuvered by the better organized Islamists, leading to renewed terror and to exile. In Western perception, the Iranian Revolution, which this year has its 40th anniversary, often overshadows the decades of Iran's modern history that preceded it. A Man of the Theater fills this gap. The title derives from a time of torture in prison when interrogators ordered him to write everything about his activities. To avoid revealing anything incriminating he took pen in hand and wrote and wrote about all his artistic passions, beginning, "Here it is—this is my life! I am an artist! A man of the theater!"

1

WATER (Aab)

We did not have tap water. Most residents of Tehran, the capital of a major oil-producing country, lacked tap water. Probably somewhere in the wealthy north end of the city, water flowed pure and clean, right into the kitchen sinks, but not where we lived, downstream, in the southern neighborhood of Ferdows Garden.

Most of Tehran’s water flows down from the Alborz Mountains, about fifteen kilometers north of the city. At the source, Tehran’s water was clean, pure, and cold. Large channels along Pahlavi Avenue and Old Shemiran Road carried water from Tajrish, in the foothills, down to Tehran. These channels were about two meters wide and lined with concrete at the sides and stones on the bottom. After reaching Tehran, the channels narrowed to less than a meter, branched into innumerable streets, and finally reached the poor southern neighborhoods, like ours. By the time they reached us, the channels had dwindled to open gutters that were not even concrete-lined. Little bridges crossed these channels, but sometimes car or bicycle wheels and even children fell into them.

Each house had a clay duct leading its share of water into a courtyard pool or to a subterranean reservoir. People used the water from the gutters for washing dishes, clothes, and baby diapers, and for watering plants and washing sidewalks. In most parts of southern Tehran, the streets and sidewalks were not paved. On summer afternoons every shop owner would send an aide to spray the sidewalks and sweep them with a broom to keep the dust down. Of course some portion of dust from the unpaved streets, along with any runoff from the struggle to subdue it, inevitably landed back in the gutter-supplied water.

In the 1940s, when I was growing up, even rich neighborhoods lacked a modern sewage system. The houses had sewage pits—just holes in the ground—not lined septic tanks. The pits were about ten to fifteen meters deep. At the bottom was a space to contain the sewage—larger or smaller depending on the number of residents in the house. If people washed clothes in the courtyard pool, the water would drain into the sewage pit, but many people washed clothes in a separate tub so they could throw the wash water out into the street. People did not want their sewage pits to fill up. A full pit meant that workers had to be hired to dig out the sewage, load it into wagons, and drive to the south end of town to dump it—or sometimes they would drive the wagons out to farms and dump the sewage into the fields as manure. To avoid this household expense, residents would empty their wash water into the alleys, where it would flow back into the gutters—and back into the city’s water supply.

The city arranged to distribute water into the houses each month, on a different night for each neighborhood. At night, when few people used water, there was little visible dirt in it. Night by night, city workers would release the water into the gutters of each neighborhood so that the residents could refill their courtyard pools as well as the little subterranean reservoirs in their cellars or beneath their yards. Sometimes there would be fights. Neighbors would disagree over who would be allowed to fill their reservoir first, each wanting to finish the process earlier and be able to go to bed. There was supposed to be a city worker in the neighborhood to manage the distribution of the water, but often he failed to show up, so people had to take care of it on their own. Sometimes, aggravated citizens bribed the city workers to come to do them a favor.

In addition to household reservoirs, most old neighborhoods had a large public reservoir, which was built not by the government but by neighborhood benefactors who had enough money to underwrite the expenses. Usually these reservoirs were named after the people who funded them—all around old Tehran were reservoirs named for wealthy men. The steps down to the big neighborhood reservoirs were usually dark and scary, and some had no kind of lighting at all. As a child I would test my courage by walking down the steps whistling. People were constantly afraid that their children would drown in these reservoirs, deep underground, where no one could hear them scream.

Besides the gutters, we had one other source of water. Most people bought drinking water from big yellow barrels loaded onto two-wheeled wagons pulled by yabu, a kind of draft horse. The source of this water was the Nasseri Qanat, one of Tehran’s underground irrigation channels, also called Aab-e Shah, “Water of the King,” which conveyed water from the Alborz Mountains. The pumping station where the barrels were filled was also called Aab-e Shah. The wagons would arrive at Aab-e Shah before dawn, and the station would begin pumping at four o’clock in the morning. Large pipes were fixed to two short concrete walls along both sides of the street. Each pipe had a row of faucets. The water would run from the faucets through rubber pipes and into hatches on top of the wagon barrels. Each morning, long lines of yabu-drawn wagons parked on both sides of the street, stretching to Bagh-e Melli, the National Garden, a beautiful place with big, old trees and a historic, beautifully crafted iron gate.

The area where the pumping station was located had been a military training site in the late 19th and early 20th century, but after Reza Khan (the father of the Shah who was toppled in the 1979 revolution) seized power from the Qajar Dynasty in 1925, it was redeveloped by the new government. By mid-century, the Central Police Station, the State Department, the main Post Office of Tehran, the Registration Administration, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and the Museum of Ancient Iran were all clustered there. The northern end housed a military complex, which included the Military Treasury Administration, the Supply Administration, and the Military Police Administration and its prison; warehouses and depots for clothing and food; a bakery and a tailoring factory; plus, a block north of this complex, the Ministry of War and the Joint Chiefs of Command. The Aab-e Shah Pumping Station was built on the south side of the area, against the wall of the Police Provisional Prison, which later became the infamous Komiteh.

Despite the separate distribution of drinking water, many people, especially children, died of typhoid and other waterborne diseases. They died because they were impoverished and too poor to live in neighborhoods other than those like Ferdows Garden, where people were crowded together at the bottom of the sloping plain of the city and which thus were among the last neighborhoods to receive the water after it had washed through all the streets and alleys of Tehran.

2

OUR NEIGHBORHOOD

The southern neighborhoods of Tehran are still poor and, in terms of altitude and social status, the lowest in the city. Ferdows Garden, my old neighborhood, vanished long ago; a charity institute and a maternity hospital now occupy the area where the public garden used to be. My family’s house, the first house that I clearly remember, had a large courtyard, with families of three, four, or five people living in single rooms in the two-story buildings around it. My family lived in two rooms on the second floor. Our rooms were sunny all day. For a short time, five of us lived there, until my sister Manijeh died at age five, when I was three years old. I have a vivid memory of the morning my parents left home to bury her. My mother carried Manijeh out of the house with outstretched hands, as if offering a precious gift. My father followed silently, sorrowfully. I ran out after them, because I knew something bad had happened. A horse-drawn carriage stood in front of the door. My parents climbed into the carriage and sat there with my sister on my mother’s lap covered in a blanket. I stood in the open doorway, watching. My mother told me, “Go inside. We will be back soon.” But when they came back, they came without my sister. After that I was lonely at home, because my brother was older and already away at school all day. My sister had been my closest friend and my playmate. Like so many other children in the southern neighborhoods, she had succumbed to typhoid.

My parents were very simple, ordinary people and I always loved and appreciated them. Although my father was in the army and a lifelong military man, he never forced us to do anything. He was not aggressive or violent. During most of my boyhood—the last ten years of his life—he did office work for his unit. My mother was ready to give everything for her children and for whomever she loved. I learned the meaning of love from her. I got a sense of freedom from both my parents, because they never ordered us to do this or that. My father wanted me to be an engineer, but he always said, “I won’t force you; do whatever you like.” He was thinking of my future; he just wanted me to be safe financially. Whenever I was in need it was my mother who suffered. She was always willing to help me with money, to look for me when I was arrested, to visit me in prison, trying to get me out, and later suffering from separation when I fled Iran into exile.

My whole family was close: my brother, Mansour, was five years older than me; my second sister was ten years younger than me and called Manijeh after the sister who had died. Her birth name was never used, and Manijeh in a real sense replaced her deceased sister for the rest of the family. My mother always wanted her little girl back.

■ ■ ■

Ferdows Garden, which was the name of the neighborhood’s park, sat within the larger neighborhood of Chaleh Meidan. Chaleh, means “pit” and meidan usually means “square,” but in this case it meant “market.” Before the local city administration (barzan) gathered all wholesalers of fresh vegetables and fruits into a big caravansarai called Anbar-e Gandom, a former wheat depot, they were crowded at the southern end of the Tehran Bazaar, or Bazaar-e Hazrati. This area was a jumble, with almost no recognizable method used in categorizing goods for sale. Besides the wholesalers, there were also vegetable retailers, mostly women, who displayed chives, parsley, radishes, cilantro, basil, and the like on pieces of cloth on the ground. Most of them were clustered in the area called Amin Soltan Square along with purveyors of seasonal cooked beets, barbecued liver, beef tripe and sirab shirdoun made from lamb or sheep stomach; ferni, a kind of rice porridge made of starch or rice powder, sugar, milk and water; and jaghour baghour (fried onion with veal’s larynx, skin, fat, and every other scrap left over from the butcher’s). These popular dishes, served hot on small aluminum plates, were something like the chitlins of poor blacks in America or the menudo of Mexico. In Tehran’s poor areas, vendors used cast-off animal parts to create a cuisine so well spiced, so delicious, that you would forget you were eating the cheapest and unhealthiest ingredients.

Mingling with the market crowd were pickpockets—both teenaged amateurs and adult professionals—stealing an apricot here or an apple there from the vendors and picking the pockets of poor men and women, trying to gather enough for a meal. There were also more sophisticated petty thieves—skillful con artists who worked in teams to swindle the unwary. One of them would start a card game and the other would pretend to be an ordinary passerby who would somehow just be always lucky, winning and taking money from the “mark”. These con artists were fast, articulate, and extremely compelling. This is part of the reason that, even today, if you are trying to reproach someone for bad behavior, you might say, “Did you grow up in Chaleh Meidan?”

Like poor urban neighborhoods everywhere, Chaleh Meidan had, in addition to these petty thieves, its share of serious gangsters. Our local criminals organized gambling houses and opium dens (shireh-kesh khaneh), and extorted money from businessmen and other better-off people. In addition to these dependable money-making ploys, they launched a number of other schemes on the side.

The most famous gangster in our neighborhood was Tayeb Haj Rezai, who was usually referred to by his first name. One of the main sources of Tayeb’s income was the wholesale fruit and vegetable trade, especially once it was moved to Anbar-e Gandom. At each of two gates of the market there was a kind of office where Tayeb’s minions (nowtcheh) illegally “taxed” everybody who purchased produce wholesale. There were of course no specific regulations on this tax, because the whole business was unlawful. The term for this daily robbery in the produce market was dar baghi (literally, “garden door”). It operated in broad daylight under the semisecret protection of the local police, who took their daily cut of the money that Tayeb stole from the poor grocers and other small businessmen.

Other lucrative neighborhood activities were run by Tayeb’s relatives or other, less powerful associates. There was an opium den just a few houses from Tayeb’s house, run by his cousin Mahmoud Soltanali. The whole neighborhood knew him well. Mahmoud had organized a very skillful group of thieves who would travel to the north of Tehran to rob the wealthy and to the central districts to burglarize the houses of the better-off haji bazaari (traditional merchants in the bazaar) and others. This crew was famous for jumping from second-floor windows with bags of loot in their arms. But Mahmoud was no Robin Hood; he robbed the small-time merchants of the southern neighborhoods as well.

The opium dens were particularly horrible. The servant women of the opium houses, called saghi, were the most exploited, miserable people in Tehran. Addicts themselves, they were under pressure from all sides: from the owner or manager of the opium den, from the customers, and from their own desperate addictions. Not only was the position of saghi considered a filthy, gruesome job in our culture, but saghis were also assumed to be prostitutes. Because of this perception, some customers expected to have sex with them. These women were virtual slaves, not accepted anywhere outside of the opium houses, and they were brutalized and degraded. The image of the saghi of the opium den was particularly disturbing and sadly surreal; in classical Iranian culture, the saghi appears in countless poems and painted miniatures as a muse and companion—a young, beautiful, and enchanting woman carrying a jug of wine serving men.

The gangsters wielded barely concealed power over the neighborhoods. In our neighborhood, the one who had the most power was Tayeb. He was somehow, directly or indirectly, involved in everything that went on in the area, and profited from everything. He was considered the local boss. Supposedly he could be helpful when needed. A story circulated about Tayeb and Ferdows Garden when I was a child. I never knew whether it was actually true; nonetheless, it gives an accurate picture of the power relations in our neighborhood at the time.

Someone from our neighborhood raped a young boy. This action outraged everyone, especially because a few years earlier there had been a serial killer, Asghar Ghatel—“Asghar the Murderer”—who had raped and killed boys. The story of Asghar Ghatel still haunted people’s minds. Tayeb, in his role as protector and power figure, found the perpetrator, grabbed his arm, and dragged him into Ferdows Garden. There, in broad daylight, Tayeb beheaded the rapist while the neighbors waited outside. After he finished the job, Tayeb walked out and left the area. Everyone knew what had happened, but no one said anything. If the story is to be believed, Tayeb protected the neighborhood by killing a rapist, although he and his associates profited from the daily rape and exploitation of the saghi women.

These gangsters in the poor neighborhoods, who seemingly had no role in the larger society, were instrumental in at least two major events in twentieth-century Iranian history. During the early 1950s, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a popular elected official, nationalized the Iranian oil industry in an attempt to let the people keep a larger portion of the profits from the sale of their natural resources. In response, British and American government agents jointly organized and backed a coup that ousted Mossadegh and consolidated all local power in the hands of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Local gangsters played an important part in the 1953 coup, acting as paid agents, demonstrators, rioters, and assassins.

The second instance of gangster participation on the national scene took place during the 1979 revolution. Local gangsters were used by the clerics who were organizing against the Shah in mosques and poor and lower middle class neighborhoods. Gangsters were used to threaten, intimidate, beat, and murder leftists and other secularists as the mullahs, the Islamic clerics, struggled to consolidate power. Our Tayeb did not survive long enough to participate in the revolution. He had already been executed by the Shah because he had supported the Ayatollah Khomeini in the riots of 1963. Although the mullahs were already a powerful force in the 1960s, they were not yet the dominant force, and Khomeini had been forced into exile. Tayeb was sufficiently ignorant of power relations at the top that his siding with the mullahs was premature, and this miscalculation cost him his life.

■ ■ ■

When I was a little older, we moved to an alley called Doukhteh Foroush-ha, “Ready-Made Clothes Dealers.” It was here that my brother, Mansoor, organized a theater group with the children in the neighborhood. We put on plays for the neighbors in the alley. I was in the fifth grade at the time but was already completely entranced with acting and theater. The plays we staged were of a particular genre called Takht-e howzi (takht meaning “board” and howzi meaning “pool”), a traditional style of theater that takes place in homes (mostly the homes of the wealthy), at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• My Steel Heart
• 1 Water (Aab)
• 2 Our Neighborhood
• 3 Anahita Theater
• 4 Wandering Years
• 5 Interlude
• 6 In Shiraz
• 7 The Mehr Theater Group and the Iran Theater Association
• 8 Sean O’Casey Aborted
• 9 The Prison Commune
• 10 Release and Reimprisonment
• 11 Qasr Prison and a Belated Trial
• 12 Politics and Theater During the Time of Revolution
• 13 Flight to Turkey
• Acknowledgments