Embassies and Empires
Empires do not announce their intentions on embassy walls. They paint them there after the fact. What is unfolding among the United States, Israel, and Iran is not new. I watched an earlier version of it from the sidewalks of Tehran in 1981, when I was fourteen, and the outside world had become forbidden. In a city where Western magazines had vanished from the stands, swept away by bans, sanctions, and ideology, finding out what the world thought of us had become difficult.
On weekends, I wandered past what had once been the American Embassy. The diplomats in pressed suits were gone; Revolutionary Guards, Islamic Student Association members, and government loyalists now moved through the compound. Behind those high walls, 52 Americans had been held for 444 days. That history hung in the air like dust that refused to settle.
Where long black sedans had once glided through iron gates, street theater now set the scene. Crowds pressed against the walls, fists raised, voices raw. “Marg bar Amrikā!” “Marg bar Esrāʿīl!” “Marg bar Ettəhād Jamāhīr-e Showravī!” Death to America. Death to Israel. Death to the Soviet Union. The slogans no longer sounded like protest; they had become liturgy. Men in crisp black shirts stood beside women in chadors, children tugging at their sleeves. Together they formed a living barricade, sealing off the embassy gates with their bodies.
The American Embassy was not the only empty building. The British compound also sat abandoned, its gardens wild. The Israeli mission had become an office of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
On long walks home, I kept a running inventory: missing flags, murals of clenched fists, portraits of martyrs, and young guards gripping rifles, eyes darting, shoulders slumped under the weight. Tehran itself had become a lesson in estrangement. The embassies told the same story: the world beyond us was receding, step by deliberate step.
I found another door. A Soviet bookstore housed within the Soviet Embassy compound. I slipped inside for contraband of glossy pages that celebrated collective labor and distant victories of the Great Patriotic War. The elderly Russian woman behind the counter rang up my purchases without looking up. I sometimes wondered whether she found it strange to watch an Iranian boy leafing through Soviet propaganda, or whether strangeness had become ordinary.
On my walk back, magazines hidden under my arm, I passed the graffiti-scarred American Embassy again. “Den of Spies” sprawled across its wall in red paint. I had just stepped out of one superpower’s propaganda repository and was walking past the shell of another. The irony did not escape me. I had gone looking for news and had come back with a different version of the same lie.
At home, there was still the radio. Late at night, my father sometimes joined me. We leaned toward it, straining to hear voices break through the government jammers — the Voice of America, the Voice of Israel, a fragment of weather, a clipped headline. “They’re talking about us,” he’d murmur. But the picture they painted of a nation flattened into a caricature of zealots and hostage-takers never matched our muddled days of ration queues, Komiteh patrols, and hushed worries in cramped living rooms.
The chanting crowds outside the embassy gates, the Soviet bookstore’s glossy optimism, and the radio voices that rendered us unrecognizable; all three offered me only distortions. That was our life: suspended between toppled empires, Soviet periodicals, and Islamic chants. We belonged nowhere entirely, caught among competing worlds. The boulevards roared with chants while subtler lessons waited elsewhere.
Ramin Farahmandpur is a Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy at Portland State University. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming memoir, “Between Borders and Belonging: A Refugee’s Memoir,” about his journey from Iran through Pakistan and Vienna to America during the 1980s.