Aim of the Book
This book is based on the empirical findings of a Ph.D. study which explored the experiences of migration/exile 1 of middle-class (in their pre-migration lives) Iranians living in London, who left Iran after the Revolution of 1979. Since the revolution, it is estimated that between one and three million Iranians (Elahi and Karim 2011, p. 1) have left Iran, with around 100,000 living in the UK. The term ābrain drainā is widely used (Keddie 2006; Axworthy 2008) to highlight the demographics of the segment of society capable of leaving Iranāthe group with both the means to leave the country and the motivation to seek better opportunities abroad. The UK Office for National Statistics (2011) approximated the number of Iranians living in London to be around 30,000, making it a significant minority group. As one such immigrant in London, I have been curious about other Iraniansā personal experiences of migration , how they have coped and their feelings about migration nearly 40 years after the revolution.
Despite the considerable number of Iranians living outside Iran as migrants or exiles, there appears to be scant empirical study of the life experiences of this group. There is, however, a focus on their identities as āMuslimsā highlighted by sociologists Afshar (1998), McAuliffe (2007), and Gunaratnam (2013a), as, particularly since the September attacks of 2001 in the USA , Islam has become a global political, social and cultural issue for scholars as well as the media. This has led to Iraniansā identities as Iranians or āPersiansā being overshadowed by their identities as Muslims, which contradicts the experience of modern secular Iranians who chose to leave the Islamic Republic of Iran due to its extreme religiosity. While a dominant concern of studies on Iran has been the examination of the strategies and influences of the Islamic Republic in the region, its influences and effects on society in general and the ways in which this has touched the individual lives of people who have chosen to leave Iran have been overlooked. There is, for example, little heed paid (particularly in the West) to the 8-year-long war with Iraq during the 1980s (less than 30 years ago), in which one million young men were killed and which touched the lives of almost all Iranians, not to mention the Iraqis. This book aims to explore the dynamics involved in the experiences of Iranians who left Iran for London and contributes to a deeper understanding of what life in migration or exile has meant to them, and hopefully by extension to other migrant lives.
Throughout this research, I have been aware of what the American psychologist Clark Moustakas considered the āpersonal motivationā (Moustakas 1990) of a study. Psychosocial experiences of migration have been with me almost all my life. My father was a diplomat who had his first assignment abroad when I was four years old. He would be posted to a place for four years, return home for one year, before being posted abroad again. Repeated uprootedness from familiar surroundings that came to be āhomeā and re-settlement in different countries, houses and schools were key features of growing up for me.
I returned to Iran as an adult to work and settle down. Within three to four years of my arrival there, however, the thunder of revolution shook Iran and I left the country in November 1978. The Islamic Republic was confirmed in April 1979. I left Iran because as a young woman educated abroad and working in a government organisation holding a responsible post, the spectre of revolution did not bode well for my future. During 1979, my boss two levels higher up was executed on charges of ācollaborationā with the Shahās regime, and my direct boss left the country.
There have been deep issues for me as drastic sociopolitico-cultural changes shook Iran in the aftermath of the revolution, and traumatic events, such as the deadly 8-year-long war with Iraq, dominated most of its subsequent 39-year-history. During this period, there have been new sociocultural frameworks and challenges for me as I have settled into life in London. Understanding aspects of my intervieweesā memories and histories as if āconjoined in mutual constructionā with them, as sociologist William Tierney proposes (2003), has assisted the understanding of my own issues.
I consider my life in London over the last 39 years as aligning with the group of interviewees whom I have categorised as middle class formerly in Iran and now in London. In common with two of my interviewees, I have been able to obtain a new professional training in London and in time have been able to achieve and maintain a professional status comparable to the one I had in Tehran. Had things not changed in Iran, however, it would be realistic, I believe, to suppose that by this stage of my life I would have gained greater recognition and status in my profession in Iran (reaping the fruit of the tree that had been sown, as Gol, one of my interviewees put it), than I have in London. Time lost and the stage of life that I embarked on my new career have been crucial factors affecting progress in my second career.
As indicated by Mehri, another interviewee, in migration there is the loss of a number of years to be acknowledged even when you āmake itā as a migrant. Years are lost in the limbo of revolution, movement, mourning , settling down, obtaining citizenship and organising training/work. For me, British citizenship epitomised disconnecting from Iran; it also bestowed a level of security and entitlements in London that were particularly privileging. Alongside the sense of privilege and relief in settlement, however, was a sense of guilt for having escaped the problems in Iran while many remained āimprisonedā or lost their lives: this has been a strong emotion of my migratory experience.
There has also been a push from the past. Over the years, training and working first as a psychologist and later as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, I came to realise that my mother had been depressed for most of her life. Her depression was mainly triggered by my fatherās work which separated her from her family of origin and her home country. The repeated separations led to resentment of my father and exacerbated their existing problems of incompatibility and her sense of loss. As sociologist David Karp (1997) and researcher Lewis Wolpert (2006), sufferers themselves, emphasise, depression is often ignored, denied or normalised. Sociologist Ian Wilkinson (2005, p. 28), on the other hand, believes that āthe inner sense of suffering as lived experience seems to remain āunspeakable āā. My experience of āunwilling exileā and earlier that of my motherās, and the issues we have both confronted, have induced a curiosity in me to learn more about and attempt to understand the experiences of those in similar circumstances and to speak the āunspeakableā.
The Approach of This Study
The approach of my study is psychosocial ; that is, equal weight is attached to the psyche and the social and the intertwining of the two in understanding people. I drew on two strands of psychosocial methodology, BNIM (Biographical Narrative Interview Method) and FANI (Free Association Narrative Interview) to collect data for my research. The two methodologies are briefly described in Appendix.
Based on the assumption that people are social beings, I used both intrapsychic and intersubjective theories to understand my interviewees. I have drawn on psychoanalytic, sociological, postcolonial and psychosocial theories to explore the experiences of migration and/or exile of my interviewees. My understanding and analysis of their experiences in London have been shaped by focusing on the following research questions, which examine the dynamics of migration...