The Maraz Review:

By Salar Abdoh

In the Spring of 1990, I paid over a thousand dollars in extra charges at San Francisco airport to move eleven large boxes of books and two suitcases to Tehran. In the back of my mind was an old photo of my father — one of many — that the hideous fly-by-night papers of the revolution had printed about him eleven years earlier, this time accusing him of the murder of Takhti, Iran’s legendary wrestler, an Olympic champion and a man staunchly opposed to the effete regime of the Shah. When Takhti committed suicide in 1968, all of Iran went into mourning. He was bigger than life, and in death he became a myth. Therefore, to be accused of having had a hand in his death was not unlike being accused of killing — take your pick: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jesus Christ.

The grief from this lie would soon kill my old man, who had dedicated his entire life to professional sports and, expressly, to sportspeople like Takhti, who had in fact been his friend.

Which is to say the chip on my shoulder going back home had the weight of a man accused. Iran was just coming out of eight years of fierce war with Iraq. During that first week back home, my sister, who had remained in Tehran, took me to a restaurant. The napkins were cutout pieces of paper and when I asked for mustard the waiter simply laughed. I had come back to a country that was still reeling.

And why had I come back? Because I had never imagined I wouldn’t. I wanted to reclaim that land and also find out what kind of a people it takes to make disinformation and denunciation a national pastime. 

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