Why can I find resonance with going to primary school in 1950s Tehran?

When I begin to read Marjan Kamali’s description of going to primary school in down­town Tehran, Iran, in 1950, I’m transported into an immediately familiar world. 

So how can this be when, for me, it’s in another continent and in ‘the East’ – and at a time remote from today’s very immediate sense of globalisation? Cynics will say it’s due to 1950s Iran being in an era of intense Westernisation. But this thought needs to be set against Mehri Honarbin-Holliday’s corrective statement that ‘you don’t need to be Western to be modern’.

Of course I do have some background. I lived in Tehran in the 1970s, and know something about where Kamali is describing. I’m close to people who went to the same or similar schools.

But this familiarity and some shared history is not the main thing I want to point out. There is something more universal about going to school for the first time and the life-changing and early autonomous experience of working out how to be and behave. This is the case whatever the location, the period of time, the cultural styles and environments, no matter how apparently distant and strange. It does not even have to be buildings and classrooms that ‘look’ like the ones that you are used to. 

I remember someone describing schools under trees in distant rural settings and still feeling some resonance. The image of Alexander being taught by Aristotle in a similarly minimalist setting in Oliver Stone’s film also communicates an archetypal  essence of the school – that takes me back to idealised stories of ancient Greece that we read aloud in class from our rows of two-seater desks in the early 60s – probably very similar to the ones in Kamali’s description.

We therefore do very often find these resonances with events from widely different cultural locations across the world, back in time and even imagined in the science fiction future. We do this when reading novels and watching cinema and TV drama. Even in more traditional times we were used to making sense of fantastical stories – fairies, dragons, princes, giants. 

But to all these stories we bring narratives which we pull down from our social environments. There is, for example, powerful Romantic imagery of different types brought to Jane Austen and the Brontës, and to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky depending on the cultural or geographical background of the readers – and now people all over the world reading Harry Potter. 

The issue is when this brought ideological baggage involves prejudice and Othering. Hence, in my own childhood, when I was drip-fed Orientalism, the act of reading and hearing stories about the East and the South was laced with exoticist imageries of so-imagined ‘endangered women’ and ’noble savages’ who needed to be ‘understood, led or saved’ by ‘clever White heroes’. I say ‘the act of’ because it might not be the stories themselves, but what we do in how we frame them.

This therefore connects with my concepts of blocks and threads in intercultural communication. We need to work hard to find the threads which run through the seamless flow of cultural diversity (which I have referred to elsewhere as the varicultural flow). The blocks which get in the way derive from the ‘us’-‘them’ narratives that surround us.

Finding threads in Kamali’s story of schooling and friendship in Iran is therefore not because I’m ‘familiar with the culture’. There are seductive blocks in that statement – ‘that “culture” in which you wouldn’t normally expect to find threads’.

Finding threads instead takes me much further. Kamali’s main character visits the home of a school friend which is culturally very different to hers. And although the friend’s family is considered by her’s to be ‘lower-class’, she finds there a richness in terms of music, poetry and political discussion that she has not experienced at home. This resonates directly with my own very poignant memory of visiting a school-friend’s ‘working-class’ family where they had a piano, played classical music and talked about ideas – which I had not experienced in my own home.

Indeed, reading Kamali helps me to make more sense of that childhood memory.

The threads with the world that Kamali describes therefore run in multiple directions. Not only can I find resonances with and learn more about my own personal cultural trajectory, I can also travel culturally in that world in ways that help me make sense of travelling culturally everywhere and in the world in which I was brought up.

Reading Kamali’s novel and others of distant places and times is therefore a lesson not in the exotic, but in the politics of how we make sense of the intercultural everywhere – not only in those distant places, but in the intercultural that we encounter every day and all around us, including going to primary school and visiting friends’ families.

References: Kamali, Lion women of Tehran, Honarbin-Holliday, Becoming visible in Iran. Edward Said, Orientalism. I speak about my Orientalist upbringing on my imagination of Iran in Contesting grand narratives of the intercultural, and about the varicultural in ‘The varicultural, translanguaging and deCentring‘.

My earlier blogs are now published on Amazon Kindle as Small cultures on the go and Doing academic writing