PEPSI. Flickr/Mike Mozart. Some rights reserved.In 1979, I was almost seven years old
when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan and my father decided to move
the family from Herat, my home town in the west of the country, to the Islamic
Republic of Iran. Once we crossed the border, my father unloaded a few
household things we had managed to bring in the truck and waited in a long
queue for the Iranian border police to search us and let us in. The bearded
officers emptied our suitcases and used knives to rip through pillows and
mattresses. At this point, my father got angry and shouted at them: “Not
even a Jew would do this to a Muslim!”
If those police officers hadn’t pushed my
father hard and handcuffed him, what he said probably wouldn’t have stuck in my
mind. But children never forget the reason their dads are humiliated before
their eyes. My father had to kneel there, beneath the scorching sun with his
hands tied behind him, for hours until they decided that he’d learned his
lesson and set him free, allowing us to continue our way into a new life in the
Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is only fair to mention here that the
experience of my father being harassed and restrained at the Iranian border was
just the beginning of the discrimination my family and I, like many other Afghan
refugees, had to go through. But it is also true that when I was eleven years
old and had to leave school in order to work and support my family, an Iranian
teacher of mine offered me a part time job in his shop for full time pay, only
to help me continue my education while supporting my family. After all, we
human beings are not perfect: but neither are we as bad as we may assume.
I loved my school in the city of Mashhad, where
we settled for the first few years. I wonder how the kids in Israel start their
school every morning, but this is how I began in mine: I happily engaged in a
noisy contest of shouting slogans against Israel, the cancer of the earth, the
USA, the leader of the world’s expansionists and Saddam Hussein, the Infidel
who’d attacked Iran. We also prayed wholeheartedly that God would subtract
years from our lives and add to the years that Ayatollah Khomeini would live.
In the Religious Education class, our teacher read verses of the Quran, which
said Jews are the arch-enemy of Muslims. Those who believe in Allah, said these
verses, are not supposed to trust Jews or Christians and must never take them
as their friends.
For the next ten years of my life in Iran, I
never met a Jew or an Israeli, and yet I was made to believe beyond any doubt
that Jews were treacherous and that Israel, the nucleus of all corruption, as
Ayatollah Khomeini famously put it, was not supposed to exist in the first
place.
And I wasn’t the only one believing in endless
conspiracy theories: from the Jews being in control of all the media in the
world, to PEPSI being an acronym for Pay Every Penny to Save Israel and more recently,
that the Jews knew about 9/11 in advance and those of them working at the World
Trade Centre called in sick and didn’t go to work on that day.
It wasn’t until I left Iran at the age of
eighteen, that I realised what kind of evil spell I’d been under. Like
millions of other teenagers, I had grown up mesmerised by the beliefs perpetuated
by the government-owned media, leaving one no choice to think for oneself. It
was after I left Iran that I read books banned in Iran due to their so-called
blasphemous nature and met people, including Iranians, who thought
differently.
I even met Jews finally, when I moved to London
in 2003 to work for the BBC World Service as a Journalist. By then I knew that
religious and political extremists existed everywhere and that they did not
represent the nations (or the religions for that matter) they claimed to
represent. But it was reading Etgar’s stories that made realise how for us, the
people of the Middle East, including Israelis and Iranians, it is not
enough just to be able to distinguish between the people of a country and the
policies of its state, which, in the case of the Israel government, just like
the Islamic Republic, have had no less a significant role in feeding this
vicious circle of spite and resentment.
That’s why spreading Etgar’s words is important
in the Middle East and even more so in Iran and Afghanistan. His stories, apart
from being creative, are honest and open the door to the lives of ordinary
Israeli citizens.
A non-Middle Eastern may find it hard to
believe how surprising it is for many readers in our part of the world to know
that people in Tel Aviv and Haifa too get worried about being late to work and
stress about paying their bills and that not all Israelis support the policies
of their government. Strangest of all, even their fear of being bombed by one
another is uncannily similar.
What Etgar’s stories remind us is that war is
war, no matter where it happens. Of course the bombs and rockets and suicide
attackers kill Afghan and Palestinian and Israeli citizens the same way, we may
say to ourselves. Of course we all feel brokenhearted and weep over the tragic
death of our beloved in the same way. These are simple truths we all think we
know. But reading Etgar’s The Seven Good
Years and his other stories, I was amazed to realise how the obviousness of
these simple facts often get so tainted by political antagonism and conspiracy
theories and it is these that pull nations apart and make us forget no one’s
blood is darker than the other.
I am not saying that stories can change
everything for good, but they humanise our enmities; they let us walk into the
lives of those we may think of as our foes, listen to what they have to say and
see life through their eyes. And that can help us recognise that what we all
have in common is incomparably bigger than the trifling grudges and resentments
we hold against one another.
As the Swiss Guy in Etgar’s memoir, The Seven Good Years told him, ‘this
world perhaps is full of lizards, and even though there’s nothing we can do
about it, it is always helpful to at least find out if they are as big as we
think they are.
Aziz Hakimi is the Persian Translator of Etgar Keret’s memoir, “The
Seven Good Years”, which will be released on 1 November 2015.