Review: To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America by Tara Bahrampour
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read the book, "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America" by Tara Bahrampour from April 29th to November 9th, 2017. I recognized one Farsi word, ta'arof, on page 274 in this book after learning about it from an Iranian friend less than a couple months before and reading some of the research paper, "Offers and Expressions of Thanks as Face Enhancing Acts: Ta'arof in Persian" by Sofia A. Koutlaki that can be found in the Journal of Pragmatics. It is a word meaning to give food and drink to guests when you are having the same food and drink for yourself. According to the research paper, Iranians are similar to Japanese people when saving face. It is rude to eat or drink something without offering it to your guests first. Page 274 did not really explain what ta'arof was but since I already knew what it meant, I was pretty excited to show my Iranian friend this page when he came to visit me. He was only aware of the Iranian author, Ms. Firoozeh Dumas, of the contemporary book, "Funny in Farsi," being sold in the United States, and so Ms. Tara Bahrampour was an unfamiliar Iranian author to him. In spite of my excitement with this book, this is the book that scared me with the horrors of the komiteh, which according to the author, went to the house she was in for a wedding reception. All the other women at the reception scrambled to put their Islamic chadors or hijabs on before the komiteh arrived at the front door. She had to hide alone in another room because she didn't have her hijab with her. It was locked up in another room upstairs in the house. It was a very tense situation. The tension was relieved after the host of the reception bribed the komiteh to overlook the house. After they left, the women threw off their chadors or hijabs and resumed the celebration. The komiteh is a policing committee that looks for violations of the Islamic dress code and other Islamic laws. If a member of the komiteh decided that a woman on the street was not dressed according to the Islamic dress code, then she might get thrown into jail or whipped. This concept was completely horrifying and felt inexplicable and wrong to me. Why spend the time, effort, and money on enforcing a dress code when there are hardened criminals committing acrimonious and atrocious crimes against humanity? In addition to this negative concept being expounded upon throughout the book's illuminating stories, the book also viewed the times with the Shah as very negative, in sharp contrast to Farah Pahlavi's book, "Enduring Love, My Life with the Shah: A Memoir." I couldn't reconcile the two accounts of the prevailing political climate prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution. It seemed that I was getting two contradictory viewpoints regarding how the people viewed the Shah and his political actions, including the land reforms. I did not realize until I read this book that a feudal society existed in Iran back then. The landlords lost their properties due to the land reforms and received little to no compensation for their value. The landlords went from being wealthy, benevolent overlords to impoverished citizens who were stripped of their lordship titles overnight. I remember how Farah's Pahlavi's book did not explain this critically important fact clearly when it discussed the land reforms in a more positive light. After all, the peasants were getting their own land and wasn't that a good thing? As a result, I gained a deeper understanding of Iran's political history. I highly recommend this book for American adults wishing to learn more about Iran from an author's personal perspective. I give this book five stars.

View all my reviews