Baggage Claim

How do tensions between refuge and its refusals shape the nature of university labor, especially in light of recent upheavals? From the protest encampments on UC campuses to memory landscapes of Iran and trans activists in South America, UC PhD students in UCHRI’s 2023-24 professionalization program map the search for refuge from local to global.

I keep a running list of notable people who have traveled to Iran, begrudgingly titled “People Who Have Been to Iran That Are Not Me.” Currently, there are seven people on my list: Andy Warhol, Frank Sinatra, Anthony Bourdain, Agnès Varda, Michel Foucault, Paul McCartney, and Vita Sackville-West—better known as a friend and lover of Virginia Woolf. 

Each person on the list has a corresponding archive of their travels through Iran; from television to literature, each traveler archives their experience in distinct ways. What the archives share is not simply that they are constructed through Western eyes, but that they represent Iran for a primarily Western audience. As a hyphenated American, I am technically implicated in this audience. I turn to my archive of notable travelers to see how they document Iran and its places, people, and politics, yearning to find something in their archives that will tell me about this country I am of but not from. This desire is a confession of how long the hyphen stretches between my two selves.

How many more times can I watch Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Iran, keeping an eye on the people and the streets? Or Varda’s short film “Plaisir d’amour en Iran,” which follows a fling between a man from Isfahan and his French girlfriend, the two chasing each other around a picturesque mosque? What exactly am I looking for when I stare at these scenes? For how much longer can I gaze at the grainy, sepia-toned photograph of that still-living Beatle smoking hookah on the floor of some pre-Revolutionary home in Tehran? Or Warhol’s pop art portrait of the last empress of Iran against a background of Pepto Bismol pink, in all its synthetic acrylic pomp?

Reading Vita Sackville-West’s travelog Passenger to Teheran on my iPad, I toggle manically between the digital text and the Google Maps app.¹ Every time Vita arrives at a new location, I rush to the map to figure out how she might have gotten there, what other towns or villages she might have passed through. I want to know every possible route. Could she have passed through my father’s city? Can she tell me something about him that I don’t know yet? How did they take their tea in Kermanshah, Vita? With sugar cubes or rock candy?    

I try to enact some strange version of an impossible return by studying Vita’s representations of Iran, as if this is where I’m going to find answers, to truncate the hyphen between myself and this place I am of but not from. Is it even my country? Isn’t it my parents’? What if they don’t want it anymore? How will I know whether Vita’s descriptions of the landscape match that of my family’s memories? You wouldn’t know, my mother’s voice echoes in my head, you never lived there.

Archives, of course, don’t contain answers to these kinds of questions, and Vita cannot tell me anything about my family. What she does tell me comes at the expense of a kind of archival violence, which claims colonial possession over an allegedly barren landscape, in the name of cultural cachet. Still, I find myself drawn to this record of a lost country—lost to myself and to an unreachable past—documented in the English language, by an English woman. The unanswerable questions still rattle around in my heart. Because I have been severed from my context, there is a longing that comes from the gap between what I know about the place of my ancestors and how I know it, without having seen the place with my own eyes. This is how places come to stand in for the fiction of origins. It doesn’t matter that I already know I won’t find answers in Vita’s travelog. I look anyway, because desire doesn’t easily dissipate. 

Both of my parents were born in Iran but have lived most of their lives outside of its borders—not by choice but by necessity. Exile, in this case, is not a metaphor. By which I mean: Despite being (up)rooted in the land I circumstantially occupy and not the land that holds my parents’ memories, most of my existence is refracted by a place whose unsteady land I have never felt beneath my feet, but which I believe holds me up in some way still. Most of my existence is modulated by futile efforts to retrieve some lost past I’ve inherited. Most of my existence is marked by the baggage of ostensible peace and porcelain toilets. For most of my existence, I have been longing to locate myself in one, stable place.

On her way out of London, Vita outwardly materializes her own kind of longing in the form of luggage tags, flaunting imperial trappings as she departs from Victoria Station. She boards a train to that “unexploited country whose very name, printed on [her] luggage labels, seemed to distil a faint far aroma in the chill air of Victoria Station: PERSIA.” Vita admits that it was “unnecessary…to have had those labels printed”—but she “enjoyed seeing [her] fellow-passengers squint at the address.” She confesses: “[If] I put my bag in the rack myself I always managed to let the label dangle, a little orange flap of ostentation.” Persia, the address on her luggage tags: not simply a place anymore but an empty signifier, representing not only Vita’s desire to reach that “unexploited country” but also her desire to be desired because of it. 

Vita’s yearning in anticipation of her arrival to Tehran is paradoxically matched by a similarly preemptive and nostalgic longing around her impending departure. From a rooftop in Isfahan, Vita laments that she “had no time to” visit “Shiraz and Persepolis that April,” but that “it was a pleasure deferred, not a pleasure forgone,” and she looks out at the Bakhtiari mountains, which she realizes she could “cross next year also.” Vita is explicit about the pleasure these places can and do bring her, and she doesn’t deny herself that pleasure. Rather, she defers it, enhancing the place’s allure and letting the landscape tease her. She goes on: “All this gave me an agreeable sense of anticipation; it was agreeable also to feel that I should be in Isfahan once more, for it is very poignant to say to oneself, ‘I shall never see this place again.’” There is an anticipatory yearning here, as well as a latent nostalgia that Vita begins to experience as she thinks about her inevitable departure. Indeed, when Vita does eventually leave, the nostalgia solidifies. Sulking, brooding, she writes, “[The] fading mountains on the horizon were the last I should see of Persia,” and she wonders: “[Where] was my Persia gone?”

In 1985, after years of protesting the Islamic Revolution and facing surveillance, jail time, and a new form of oppression for women, my mother had to board a bus that would take her out of Iran and into Turkey. There, she would spend most of her twenties as a refugee: poor and undocumented. I think about the bags with which she left on that bus. I wonder whether her luggage had labels. I can’t imagine there was anything about her baggage that signified ostentation, but I can imagine my mother sitting on the bus, gazing out at the horizon she was leaving behind, and saying to herself, I shall never see this place again.

During the Iran–Iraq War, my father witnessed his hometown turn to ruins when Saddam Hussein’s army invaded and captured the port city of Khorramshahr in the early eighties. My father went on to enlist in the army but eventually decided to leave in the middle of the war. He fled the country by moonlight and never returned. He fled on foot, across mountains, to Turkey, where he met my mother and her same fate as a refugee. I imagine him walking along that unforgiving terrain, gazing at what he would describe as the fading mountains on the horizon, the last he should see of Persia, and thinking, Where was my Persia gone?

Passenger to Teheran was written in 1926, the same year Reza Shah Pahlavi (often considered the founder of modern Iran) was coronated in then-Persia. Vita attends the Shah’s coronation and dedicates a whole chapter of her travelog to the event. She also writes about other British diplomats in Persia who helped put on Reza Shah’s coronation , including her husband Harold Nicolson, a British ambassador posted to Tehran at the time. This secular moment of national consolidation during the Pahlavi reign (partially recorded in its inaugural stages by Vita’s travelog) quickly shifted Iran’s status from rural to industrial. With the coronation at the center of her narrative, Vita’s travelog thus speaks to a larger political context: namely, the British Empire’s involvement in foreign politics, regime change, and modernizing projects—globally and in the Middle East specifically. 

One morning, Vita wakes up in the village of Dilijan and sees a group of women in a courtyard spinning wool in the sun. She photographs the women: “[They] besieged [her], asking to see the result, but [she] had to explain that they must wait at least three weeks before the post-cart would bring the pictures. They seemed disappointed, and none too confident that the promised photographs would ever arrive.” Vita includes one of the photographs in Passenger to Teheran. It’s grainy and black and white, and there are three women in the center of the frame. The woman on the left is sitting on the ground and looking curiously at the camera, half of her face hidden in a shadow cast by the woman in the middle standing beside her. The woman in the middle holds one hand up to her mouth while her other hand holds a bundle of yarn. She looks like she’s holding back a laugh. On the right, there sits the third woman who looks younger than the first two (more like a young girl than a young woman). She is the only one whose gaze averts the camera’s lens as she focuses on the yarn in her lap. The photo is captioned: “dilijan: women spinning.” 

How natural, how human, this desire to possess one’s own image. Viewing the photograph with the knowledge that its subjects wanted but were unable to see the image of themselves is an ethical dilemma—one that Vita does not seem to consider. To whom does the photograph belong? 

To whom does the pain of war belong? To think that it belongs to me is an ethical dilemma that I consider every morning when I wake up here, thinking about revolution somewhere out there, where there is a flower blooming in death. Meanwhile, at my mother’s house, pots and pans in dank wooden cabinets emit a faint scent of lamb, labor, and clarified butter. At my mother’s house, pots and pans emit a faint scent of lamb, while my mother is looking in a mirror. In the mirror, my mother sees herself; and in the cabinets, I see her womb wounded the color of a smile spoiled in dust. Representation, her reflection tells me, doesn’t mean shit when your own people have been the main source of your oppression. Maybe this is why my father fled the country right after he tried to fight for it.

Vita calls her departure from Persia “a curious journey home.” After spending twelve days traveling out of Tehran, “sighing with relief, and saying ‘Thank goodness, we [will] arrive in civilised Europe again,’” Vita is “met with quite other news. Revolution in Poland.” She writes: “[It] seemed sufficiently absurd that I should have come out of Asia only to run into a revolution in Europe”—just as it seemed sufficiently absurd that I should have been born not in Iran but in the United States only to run into a revolution in my mind, but perhaps such is the absurdity of revolution. Vita finds herself among other European travelers also delayed in their journeys home, for “[no] news was coming through” to the train station—just as the women of Dilijan were given the empty promise of a kind of ownership over their image but knew, likely, that no news of the photo would come through to their village. 

Bragging about where she had just been, Vita piques her fellow travelers’ interests. “‘Say something in Persian,’ they demanded, and I repeated a verse from Hafiz,” Vita writes. This exchange signals a paradoxical association between, on the one hand, speaking the “uncivilized” Other’s idiom and, on the other, signaling modernity. Vita’s recitation of Hafez in its original language is an appropriation that marks an imperial status, class, and privilege. Here she is, waving another label of ostentation: this time through a speech act rather than a bag tag.

The last chapter of Passenger to Teheran returns to the image of Vita’s luggage labels, thus also returning to the beginning of the text but from a different perspective: “There they hung, in the restaurant of the Polish station, crumpled, defaced, but still saying: PERSIA.” What was earlier a marker of ostentatious exoticism—as if the mystery of the East were awaiting Vita’s arrival and discovery—is now a marker of having survived some perilous journey to the proverbial heart of darkness. The tags are weathered now, and (with heavy-handed symbolism) so is Vita. The eroded labels perhaps signal what’s true of every traveler, which is that, although the journey inevitably changes us, we still want to carry some semblance of a stable self from beginning to end. Indeed, it is ostentatious to have such constant talismans in one’s life, like Vita’s luggage labels: distractions from the unsteady ground beneath our feet. They appear again in the very last lines of the text: “The orange labels dangled in the glare of the electric lamps. PERSIA, they said; PERSIA.”

I think about my mother’s luggage again, on that bus, full of jars of rice and dry food her mother sent her off with in anticipation of insufficient resources as a refugee. But my mother couldn’t bring herself to eat a real meal for months, so she lived off of water and tea and olives and shared her dry goods with her fellow travelers, in the liminal space that refugees often occupy. I wonder, if my father had not walked across mountains to escape Iran with nothing but the army uniform on his back, what color would his luggage labels have been?

This publication was supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding M22PS5863. UCHRI thanks editor and writer Michelle Chihara for her developmental work with the series contributors.

Notes

1. All quotes sourced from Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran (London: Hogarth Press, 1926).