Let’s Pretend


You’ve barely escaped the whole damned rotten scene of betrayals and mass executions. In one day after the June 20th coup they killed thousands of students, workers, brave men and women of our lost homeland. In one day thousand of summary executions, rape and torture in their prisons, they were scared, they saw the power of people in the streets and knew that the only way to stop the mass movement is to kill us all. In the aftermath of all that repression we organized and bravely fought and yes our last ditch effort was devastatingly defeated. Most of the people in the leadership those that you knew and love were brought to a trial after months of torture and humiliation some stood their grounds and others failed ! Now I had you near me and for the first time thought that we could win, we can try again how wrong I was !
We were making this slide show it was a month after the execution of 22 leaders of our organization and here we were trying to have a fitting memorial for the fallen comrades. I remember you had just got out of Iran barely escaping from the clutches of Khomeini and his henchmen. I knew you from some of the things you had done and your bravery in the days leading to the uprising, we showed you the slide show, in the darkness I could see the teardrops falling from your cheeks. When the lights came back on I noticed how beautiful your eyes and facial features are some thing that I rarely noticed in anyone especially in those days. We were engulfed by overwhelming defeat and at best were trying to form democratic alternative resistance to the barbaric rule of mullahs!
We huddled together like a bunch of shipwrecked lost people hanging to the broken pieces of long lost ideal. And as the storm hit more and more sank to the bottom of selfish abyss. Your husband was the worse of them all he had long ago abandoned the ideals and like a floating lost soul drank alcohol and invited the rest of us to join in his futile ideological adventures. One day it was revival of Hegelian Marx, the other day Rumi and his luminous thought. He magnified the weakness of many lost lefts inclining intellectuals who were trying to make peace with their new surrounding. One day your little son put it all in perspective, he had learned a new word “pretend” and all through the next few days he played with the word like some precious new toy. He used it in so many different ways and enticed me to play with the word myself that by the end of that week I had a pretty good idea what the uses of the concept was. It was all pretend either pretends like nothing had happened, or pretend like it all was just a game! Or let’s pretend none of it is happening now and gradually we all pretended that our selfish little lives were some how more important than all the suffering and pain that our fellow comrades, our heroic people were going through. I look at this picture from those days I see homayoon with his blond uncombed hair holding his flinstones lunch box and all I remember is how he was proud of learning the word pretend in kindergarten and how I learned from him!!!
I’m sitting here almost a decade after the coup on the tenth anniversary of mass murders. Most of us have found our little “islands of stability” Made peace with the monsters in one way or another. Pretending to be happy and yet the only one at peace among us is the one who still fights, the only one who still is alive is the one who has not forgotten what we started fighting for, dying for, living for, One who is alive is the one who still has hope that the night which has befallen on our homeland will undoubtedly turn in to bright and sunny dawn.