Yesterday was Persian New Year - Happy Nowruz! I hope that the year 1390 is good to us all!
Among other places, Persian New Year is celebrated in Iran. How embarassing is it that a few months ago, I, who am an International Relations professor and not generally a completely dumb person, didn't know that most Iranians are Persian. Or that the main language of Iran is Persian. Or that Persian and Farsi are the same thing. I'm not sure I'd actually considered WHAT the people of Iran might be called (other than Iranian), because truth be told, I'd never thought much about Iran at all. I was quite content for my knowledge of that part of the world to be limited to what I 'learned' from the 1991 movie 'Not Without My Daughter' (whose uncritical reception into my brain I am blaming on my youth when I watched it), and what the ongoing procession of news stories about Iran say in the media I most commonly watch (the NY times, CBC, BBC,
NZHerald).
I guess a person can't be interested in
EVERYwhere ALL the time. It's reasonable to think that each of us has a sort of awareness radius that is tuned to certain places and certain people at certain times, depending on our experience. So it's not my general lack of knowledge of things Persian that troubles me. It's how easily I allowed what knowledge I had to be bounded by those extremely limited sources listed above. How I never, not for even one story that I read about crazy Iran and its crazy leader, stopped to ask the question 'What's so crazy about them?' or to look a little deeper than the paper in my hands.
And I should know better than to generalize people that way. When I first came to Korea, my best friend was (is) a man who had lived and travelled throughout Asia for several years. I would go visit him, thumb through his masses of photos, and he would ask me where I thought a particular picture was taken. I learned pretty quickly to always answer China. Even though I had never imagined that one country could contain even a fraction of the magnificence and diversity that I saw in the various prints. How had I never known this before, I wondered, that China is such an incredible country? How had I never ached to go there and discover it for myself? The first vacation I got I took a boat to China, and have been fully enamored ever since.
The news I read about China is pretty much never right. MY China, and the China in newspapers, don't have a whole lot in common. This is something I've come to expect, and to make adjustments for when adding to the big China file in my brain. Which is not to say that China doesn't have any problems - of course it does! Just that it pays to try to keep the big picture in mind when considering what I read.
And don't even get me started on Korea! I live in a very modern and cozy two-bedroom apartment on a quiet residential street in a city whose standard of living is easily the highest of any I have ever lived in. I went to the doctor this afternoon, a doctor who completed his residency at Harvard, in a state-of-the-art private hospital that would turn any of the Canadian or American or Kiwi doctors I know green with envy. And it cost me $5 for the medicine I was prescribed. Afterwards I got a tall Chai from an upscale coffee chain to soothe my throat and browsed a selection of multi-lingual books that I might have wanted to read in bed later, before taking a luxury taxi home (for $3.50). There is nowhere in town I wouldn't walk in, alone, at any time of the day or night. And my grad school colleagues back in Canada (IR majors all) once had an earnest discussion about whether I was living in a more dangerous country or whether that 'honour' fell to our classmate busy starting an NGO for refugee children in a camp in Palestine that was mortared at least once a day. This is what happens when you take the news too seriously. You forget that places are real, and that people everywhere are just people, like you. Both more and less than any 60 second news story you could ever read about them.
Somehow, however, these revelations about one part of the world never managed to penetrate that part of my brain responsible for thinking about other parts of the world. And this is a problem because I teach about the world for a living.
One of my flatmates in New Zealand, where I study when I'm not at work in Korea, is from Iran. He seemed nice enough right from the beginning, but my first inkling that things were probably not as I had imagined them in his home country came the morning he was telling me about this Canadian TV show that ALL his friends used to watch back home. This REALLY popular show in Iran, called 'Due South'. You could have knocked me over with a feather that entire day...of all the shows he might have mentioned, the cheesy mid-90s comedy/drama about a ridiculously polite mountie in Chicago was definitely not the one I was expecting. We had fun trying to remember all the characters names together (though really, who cares to name anyone except that beautiful dog Diefenbaker?), and laughing at the absurdity of that shared connection. It turned out to be the first of many connections.
Aside from TV shows, our family lives also have much in common. And our childhoods. The paths of our educations. Even our cats look alike. His family is Muslim, mine is Christian, and I had no idea whatseoever that that would make as little difference as it does to what we think, and dream and do. He shows me pictures of Iran with the same enthusiasm that my friend in Korea used to show me pictures of China, before I'd become as enthralled with it as he is. And I feel that same sense of absolute wonder imagining all the possibilities there. Iran is a place that's going to be as important to me in its own way as China already is, and probably for the same reason - because it has opened my mind and made my world infinitely bigger.
Now that I'm paying attention, I hear a lot of different people make a lot of different comments about Iran on a pretty regular basis. People who, like me, should know better. That China is the great economic and imperial worry of North America and Iran the religious is pretty accepted rhetoric. Which makes it pretty okay in a lot of different circumstances to make disparaging comments about, based on very little actual knowledge. Now that the face of Iran has shrunk for me, from a featureless mass (that I wasn't afraid of, exactly, but certainly wasn't rushing out to get to know better) to a single real individual, I find these comments hurtful. And want to do what I can to help other people think beyond them as well.
I gave a presentation about Iran in my classes the other day, as an example for my students about looking beyond the news when talking about places. I started with a slide show of pictures from various places in Iran, and asked everyone what country they thought I would be talking about. Knowing my history, the first guesses were predictably Canada and New Zealand. When they saw a photo of the capital in winter, the majority decided that it was in fact Bern, Switzerland. The sense of wonder on their faces when they discovered that the snowy city was Tehran and that it is smack in the middle of the imagined desert of the middle east gave me a glimpse of the wonder I feel every time I learn something new about Iran. 4 distinct seasons were the beginning for me too. Followed by fields of fragrant roses. Pistachio farms. The birthplace of Shiraz and polo. Some of the world's best caviar. A consolidated history going back almost 5000 years! Comparing some of that history of Iran with some of the history of Korea made it very easy for my students to contextualize what I was saying, and, they told me, made the place seem real to them for the first time. And who knows how many more worlds will open up from there?
Step 2: take your purchases to someone who
