Dina Nayeri on Iranian Life Under Attack

Prize-winning Iranian American author Dina Nayeri joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the complicated reality of survival on the ground during Israel’s recent bombing of Iran. Nayeri talks about the destruction leveled on Ardestoon, where her father’s family lives; her memories of running for bomb shelters during the Iran-Iraq war; and the current situation for her family in Iran. Nayeri explains how desperately Iranians on the ground want the Islamic State overthrown and the complexities involved in who would take charge should the regime topple.  Nayeri considers the gap between the mainstream media narrative of Iran as a devout Muslim nation and recent surveys indicating rising secularism in the country. She reflects on forty-plus years of the Islamic State in power—a small slice of Iran’s history, but a phase that has irreparably disrupted both the lives of those who left and those who stayed behind.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/. This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Hunter Murray, and Janet Reed.

Dina Nayeri

Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough • The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You • Refuge • A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea • “Why Is Iran’s Secular Shift So Hard to Believe?” New York Magazine • “The True Nature of Iranian Values:  Rethinking a Country The West Thought It Understood” – The Globe and Mail

Others

Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 27: Manufacturing Lies: Dina Nayeri on How Our Cultural and Bureaucratic Norms Often Betray the Truth • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 4: Women Resisting Terror in Iran: Porochista Khakpour on the Historic Protests • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 1, Episode 23: Jasmin Darznik and Dina Nayeri on the 40th Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution • “Opinion | Between Bombs and the Regime, Iranians Face a Moral Paralysis,”  The New York Times • The Daily Show – Iran: Weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 1995 • “Visualizing 12 Days of the Israel-Iran Conflict” Al-Jazeera • “Iran Crackdown Deepens with Speedy Executions and Arrests,” ABC News • “Iran’s ‘Crown Prince’ Calls for Supreme Leader to ‘Face Justice,'” – USA Today • “Mapping the Israel-Iran Conflict,” – The New York Times

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH DINA NAYERI

Whitney Terrell: There aren’t many reporters on the ground in Iran. Do people talk about these nuclear deals? Is that something that your family discusses? Or do people have no idea, don’t care, don’t have an opinion?

Dina Nayeri: No, I think people are really just tired and disillusioned. And I think one of the things you asked me before is who’s really covering this well? I have not seen any real representation of how people are talking about this in the media in the West, because, from what I’m hearing—and granted, it’s a small sample size, but I do talk to a lot of Iranians here who all talk to their families, I work with newly arrived Iranians in all kinds of contexts here and across the U.K., and, of course, I have my own family—and what I’m hearing is that, first of all, nobody trusts anything the Islamic Republic agrees to. So, the whole thing just seems naive from people who’ve been oppressed by this murderous regime for 46 years. They promised something? Great. And nobody really knows if there are nuclear weapons? What do they have? How close are they?

But the thing that’s complicated and really very hard to communicate without having a long conversation— and the reason for this is that people tend to be very black and white: “Oh, Israel should not be bombarding Iran,” or “Oh, you know, we want this regime to go away”—people fail to talk about the complexity of of what people want on the ground. Obviously they don’t want to die. Obviously they don’t want their cities bombed. Obviously they don’t want all of these incredible historic places to be damaged. But people want the Islamic Republic gone, there is no question about that. Every time I see media even slightly prevaricating on that or saying anything along the lines of, “well, if they wanted the Islamic Republic gone, they would have risen up” or “let people decide their own government.” No, this is a brutal, murderous, mafia of a regime that has taken over the country and it’s sucking its resources dry and murdering its people and people want them gone. The Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guard, IRGC, is a terrorist organization. So I think what I’m hearing from people is just desperation, desire for them to be gone, and they see that as a possible silver lining here.

Everyone’s just kind of waiting for that with hope, but also terrified out of their minds, constantly calling people, making sure that they’re okay. Obviously, you don’t want your house to be bombed or your family to be harmed. But the complexity of this is that we are at a moment where people want revolution again. And the last revolution was brutal, and it was full of death, and it did not end the way people wanted it. My own mother, who was persecuted by the Islamic Republic, and that’s what made us refugees, she was in the protests against the last regime. People wanted a new regime in and only a couple of years after that, realized that they had made a terrible, terrible mistake with the Islamic Republic. So, it’s complicated. I find so many simplistic takes on this. Because I think people are afraid.

WT: I want to throw something out there that is probably scary, but that I’ve been thinking about recently, which is that I noticed that Trump in his public statements about Iran and Iranian leadership has actually been very complimentary of the Iranian leadership. He’s been saying, “well, they fought hard, they did a good job, right? I’m mad at them, but I’m even more mad at Israel,” when there were some strikes that happened after the ceasefire. Donald Trump is a fan of authoritarian governments throughout the world, and I think that this exchange is going to make him more likely to be friendly with the Islamic Republic than unfriendly. The problem with America and the Islamic Republic is that we’ve been pushing democratic ideas which they don’t like, but Donald Trump has no interest in pushing democratic ideals. Donald Trump is fine with being friends with authoritarians. And I wonder if this will, actually, in the end, improve the relationship between Donald Trump’s regime and the Islamic Republic’s regime.

DN: There’s no question Donald Trump does not care about the Iranian people. We’ve seen him in general, just side with whoever is best for him at the moment and change at the drop of a hat. That also is just fleeting, and I don’t really believe anything that I hear there.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: We all know that the U.S. has a history of working towards regime change in foreign countries through military or intelligence intervention, instead of supporting local democratic movements. For our listeners, we’ll link to some of our past Iran episodes, including like we talked about, the Mahsa Amini protests. One of these strikes hit Evin Prison, where there are a lot of political prisoners, and we talked during that episode about that particular prison. Various outlets have been reporting that in the wake of these strikes, the regime has been cracking down on ordinary Iranian people in search of alleged infiltrators and collaborators with Israel. I was reading that 700 people have been arrested and accused of collaborating with Israel. They’re rushed to executions, right? Like six executions like yesterday—

WT: Because the Mossad has said openly that they have people on the ground, they’ve said we know what everyone’s doing.

VVG: So I was reading this piece, and I was curious about whether you brought it in. We’ll also link to this in the show notes. There was a New York Times piece by Morteza Dehghani, who is a scholar of morality at USC, and he was writing about this terrible dilemma that you’re sort of talking about: the hatred of the regime, and then also the hatred of the external imperialist aggressor. Where does this leave Iranians? This position of wanting the morality of self determination, and also the morality of not supporting the regime, this incredibly difficult role. So it does seem like you’re putting people in the position of— it doesn’t seem like people want to defend the regime they do not want, right?

DN: They do not want to defend! You know me you guys, I’ve been on before and you know that I don’t just say big, lofty statements that I do’’t really, truly believe in. I have not talked to a single Iranian who has left that country and has said, “Well, it’s complicated about the regime.” It’s not complicated. No, it’s not. They’re bad. I think everyone in Iran is ready to see them go and they’re seeing this potential and it’s painful because we don’t know what’s going to come next. That’s another thing, right? You usher in regime change somehow and the big question mark is, what will you end up with, especially considering that the people who seem to be pushing for this are equally bad people? I mean, there’s Netanyahu, there’s Trump, there’s the Islamic Republic. These are the people that are at the helm of this incredibly deadly war. So people are– it’s a double bind. There’s also the question, I don’t know if you want me to talk about it, about what would happen next?

VVG: Maybe we’ll get to that in a bit. But I also wanted to go back to something you were saying. You were talking about the Iranian diaspora, and growing up during the early years of the Iranian Revolution and the war with Iraq. The son of the deposed shah, Reza Pahlavi, lives in the US, and had a press conference in Paris, and he was like, “This could be our Berlin Wall moment. I am ready to lead a new Iran.” Is that likely? Is it desirable? Do people like him?

DN: So this is the problem too. Before you were asking what people are feeling and I started talking about the double bind. The problem is there is no clear aftermath to this. Even if America and Israel, with the very worst, selfish intentions murderously came in and killed people, and the silver lining was a regime change, there is this big unknown at the other side of who’s going to take over. Pahlavi constantly talks about wanting a secular democratic Iran. A secular democratic Iran is what I want. A secular democratic Iran is what everyone wants. But I think one of the things we’ve developed as Iranians in the diaspora is some trust issues. And

Pahlavi is the son of the shah, the last shah, who was also very brutal, and he was put in place by the CIA and the UK government after they deposed the people’s leader, Mohammed Mosaddegh, who was our prime minister in 1951 to 1953 and who was going to nationalize oil for the interests of the Iranian people, instead of for the foreign interests who were very much against everything he was doing. So then America, and the UK came in, got rid of him, and put the Pahlavis in place. Of course, that wasn’t the perfect situation for the Iranian people, so there’s trust issues with the idea that Pahlavi’s son should now be the new leader. He doesn’t have any birthright. We want a democratic government. So why should it be the son of the shah?

On the other hand, he says again and again that this isn’t about him being born into that position, he’s just a figure that Iranians know and there really isn’t anybody else who is ready to lead a secular, democratic Iran. I don’t know. I’m not a political strategist and I’m not an expert in this, but I’m skeptical and I’m nervous. One time in my previous life, before I became a writer, I was at business school as a student— what year was this? This was like 2005, 2006—and Reza Pahlavi came to speak. The way he came in to speak to us, I didn’t like the tone, because he had such ambition, he had his people scattered through and I didn’t love it. On the other hand, there is nothing he says about what he wants that I disagree with and a lot of the activists and the humanitarians and diaspora intellectuals who I trust think that he might be the best option. So I don’t know.

There’s also the question of, rebellion has to come from inside Iran as well, and how are we going to do that? People aren’t willing to put their lives at risk again and again and again. There’s been so many uprisings in the last couple of decades, and nothing has happened except more murders and death and execution and people are tired. This regime is kind of expert at tamping down and then loosening enough for people to be like, “Okay, I can live with this. I have my internet. I can maybe not wear my hijab, etc.” You see pictures since the Mahsa Amini protests of women walking around in the streets without hijab, there’s not as much crackdown. And of course, that’s strategic, they don’t want that to be a rallying cry again. And they’re so good at that, so that people don’t want to risk their lives to rise up. With only one problematic, diasporic leader who isn’t all that charismatic, a lot of people are hesitant to rally behind him, and Iranian people are afraid and out of resources, and economically suffering. I’ve got no hope ahead, where you have, like, the killing of a lot of leaders who maybe could take the military out from under—I don’t know that’s a level that I don’t have enough clue about, but it just feels like there’s no big, strong opposition leadership to do this. There’s no organized resistance.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of Dina Nayeri by Anna Leader.