What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This armchair trip to the Islamic Republic of Iran,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

In the mid-1990s, I travelled to Iran with a young woman. In the two months we were there, we met maybe twenty Western travellers, all of them with transit visas and all speedily making their way along the central corridor that passes through Iran from the border of Turkey to the border of Pakistan. We were specifically interested in Iran, not in getting from Europe to Asia, so we had managed to get tourist visas. We wandered all over the country, visiting not only Teheran, Esfahan and Shiraz, cities you will have heard of, but others, too: Tabriz, Rasht, Mashhad, Gorgan, Yazd, Kerman, Bandar Abbas, Bam, Ahvaz, Khorramabad, Sanandaj. (Sorry for the long list of names; they may mean nothing to you, but each one opens up a volume of memories in me.) We also visited Zoroastrian fire temples in the desert. We climbed an ancient ziggurat. We took ferries to islands. We rested in oases.

I’ve often found that, excluding war zones, a foreign place is never so dangerous as when you are far away from it. The closer you get to it, the more the distortions caused by fear and misunderstanding dissipate, so that, to take the case at hand, the image we had of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that terrifying place that brought the world full-on religious fanaticism, with oppressed women going about dressed from head to toe in black and people flagellating themselves in public and fountains spewing blood-red water, disappeared once we entered the country and was replaced by this or that friendly individual standing in front of us, eyeing us with curiosity, wanting to be kind but uncertain of his or her English.

If Iran was challenging, it was in the way it challenged our expectations. For example, in all our time there, talking freely to men and women of all social classes, from the rural poor to the urban middle class, from the devout to the secular, we never met, not once, a person who complained about living in an Islamic republic. A government has to be a mirror into which its people can look and recognize themselves. Well, the Iranians we met recognized themselves in their Islamic democracy. The only complaint we heard, and often, was about the state of the economy. Iranians complained about lacking money, not lacking freedom.

There wasn’t much to do in Iran in the way of leisure then. It was, by Western standards, and probably still is, an arid society, with little space or money given over to cinemas, concert halls, sports complexes and the like. And there were no bars or discos, of course. Iran was a sober place, both literally and metaphorically. So Iranians did the only thing they could easily: they socialized. As a result, they are a people with the most graceful and sophisticated social skills I’ve ever seen, a people who, when they meet you, really meet you, turning their full attention to you. The Iranians we met were open, curious, generous, extraordinarily hospitable and endlessly chatty.

And the horrors of fundamentalism? The people who brought us Salman Rushdie’s fatwa? The oppression of women? That’s all true, too. But what place is above censure? People in Iran are like people anywhere: they want to be happy and live in peace, with a modicum of material well-being. The rules of their society, their values—the means by which they hope to become happy—are different from Canada’s, but what of that? They have their problems, we have ours. Let them muddle through theirs, as we hope to muddle through ours. Progress can’t be jump-started; it must arise organically from within a society, it cannot be imposed from without.

Such eye-opening travel as I had the luck of doing isn’t a possibility for everyone. Work, family and inclination may prevent one from ever visiting this or that foreign place. Which is where books come in. The armchair traveller can be as well-informed as the backpacker roughing it, so long as he or she reads the right books. Travel, whether directly with one’s feet or vicariously through a book, humanizes a place. A people emerge in their individual particularity, miles away from caricature or calumny.

And so Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. It’s a graphic novel, the second I’ve sent you after Maus, by Art Spiegelman. It’s charming, witty, sad and illuminating. The point of view is that of a ten-year-old girl named Marjane. She’s like all ten-year-olds the world over, living in her own half-imaginary universe—only it’s 1979 and she lives in Iran. A revolution is afoot, one that will be welcomed at first by her middle-class family because it will bring down the odiously corrupt and brutal regime of the Shah, but later will be hated because of the excesses that followed. It’s a story that has the ring of truth to it because it’s the story of an individual telling it as she saw it.

I invite you to read Persepolis and get a hint of the Iran I visited some years ago. If you enjoy it, you should know that there’s a Persepolis 2, which continues Marjane’s story, and there’s also a movie.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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