“Everything is in confusion, as though the police have just finished a violent, nervous search.”
I was born in the alight aftermath of Iranian Revolution which was mostly the political aftermath in the US with the lingering hostage situation and the recent election of Ronald Reagan. Culturally, I think I knew of and understood Iran entirely through Naked Gun and The Simpsons. I now know a lot of the specific history of the revolution, but that has come in disparate ways here and there. It’s interesting because one of the results of it is a partial closing off of the country to outsiders, but also, like most things, I get interested in topics in ancillary ways like here. I picked up this book because of an obituary that Margaret Atwood wrote in her recent collection of nonfiction, which was originally published when Ryszard Kapuściński died in 2007. I hadn’t heard of him before.
The book is a series of reportage from Iran in the immediate after of the revolution, with a slight focus on the history of the Shah and his family in particular. But the method is fractured, beginning first with a scene of being locked up in a hotel room as a Western reporter, which seems to capture the isolation and control. Next, the author ruminates and analyzes a series of documents like photographs and reports and memos that allow him some time to share and reflect on the experiences of being in the country. It ends with an analysis of the Shah’s vision for the country upon returning, and the almost immediate overthrow.
The book does not capture the history and I think that this would more or less be impossible, or worse, unsatisfying. One of the aspects of authoritarianism is the erasure and freezing of history, usually in theory as a way of restarting history or rewriting it, but in a state of terror (or to use Carl Schmitt, a state of exception) time only exists as an eternal present. So while the past is informative, it basically is erased to make way for the new present, and of course, the future is nonexistent (or as Masha Gessen says “the future is history”).