The Forbidden Box of Unthoughts

Time is not a friend of revolutions. With the passage of time, revolutions grow distant from their ideals, opening their successes and shortcomings up to fresh contestation. This perpetual flux makes thinking about them difficult, not least because “popular” remembrances of revolutions, including of the Iranian revolution, tend to be filtered through the prism of present feeling. The judgment of those writing in proximity to revolutions is often warped by the still receding shadow of upheaval, and so they write of solidarity, hope, and boundless promises. But post-revolutionary power struggles have a way of stifling the spirituality of revolutions (that is, their electric sense of shared purpose and hope). Stories sediment into orthodox narratives of loss and despair. Yet the ossification of and disenchantment with revolutions forms part of their histories too, so we ought to confront these aspects by reverting to a view of the revolution in its early days.

My memories of the revolution's end are clouded by my flight from Iran on the threshold of its success and my entry into a movement opposed to the post-revolutionary government. Yet distance has only deepened my affection for Iran. It was only after I spent several years in the United States that I came to appreciate it as my home, as a unified idea. In Iran, I had been a stranger everywhere I went and so thought of the country as a project still in the making. It was one member of a worldwide community of developing nations striving for self-actualization. But with distance comes perspective, and I now see Iran has much to tell us. Unearthing and sharing its stories with the world has been my life's work. My appreciation for Iran's specificity, however, has been replaced by a new kind of ghorbat, since little hope remains of my returning and living there.

The Algerian philosopher Mohammed Arkoun once argued that thinking and remembering always happen within the bounds of the unthinkable and the unthought. The moments we cannot or do not remember may seem incidental to our life narratives but are in fact at the core of them. These unthought moments, a curious feature of our lives and psyches, cannot be readily retrieved by conventional ways of thinking.