El Gobierno del cambio: Gobiernos panistas 2000-2012

Marjan meets us on the main road, anxiously eager that we locate the correct side street: a crooked laneway running narrowly between high brick walls in which a series of imposing doors face each other barely more than a metre apart. From the time we first met, in late March, in the home of a mutual friend, Marjan had enthusiastically embraced the ideas around my research that, at that early stage, were still in nascent form. On that first occasion Marjan had reminisced in length about an Afghan family that had lived in the neighbourhood where she grew up. It was, however, my thinking around Iranian hospitality that really fired her imagination. She had made me promise, then, that I would visit her home so she could show me ‘true Iranian hospitality.’ Now, almost two months later I am fulfilling that promise.

Jasmine creeps over one wall, a fragrant cascade of white blossoms and glossy leaves. Around a corner the street comes to an abrupt end at a blue painted door. Marjan indicates the place where a metal doorknob has been wrenched off, leaving twisted screws protruding threateningly at eye height. Apocryphal rumours abound as to the involvement of an Afghan mafia in the lucrative scrap metal trade. Stolen fixtures, hazardously gaping manholes and the periodic blackouts that plunge parts of the city into darkness are attributed to the international market in copper-coated inductors and cast iron.

Marjan rings the bell and the door clicks open softly, revealing a tiled courtyard, into which she ushers us, insisting that her guests’ first step across the threshold and urging us to ‘Please come in.’

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Marjan’s husband, Adham, and their five-year-old son, Arya greet us at the front door, ‘You are very welcome. You have troubled yourself to visit us.’ Shoes are left on the doorstep and slippers in the correct size are produced from a selection within a cupboard at the entrance. Inside the house it is cool and the sunlight that shines through the barred windows is dappled, filtered through the leafy branches of fruit trees that crowd with surprising density in the pocket-sized garden. A low coffee table is spread with an array of fruit, pastries, nuts and chocolates. The whole scene exudes a kind of artful effortlessness. You can’t help but feel that were you to turn up on the doorstep unexpected you would be just as welcome, that the same spread of food would be there on the table waiting for you. On another occasion Adham puts words to this sense of ready hospitality, ‘In Iran, a good host is always prepared to receive guests. Even unannounced guests.’

After polite greetings, hand shaking, cheek kissing and the asking after various absent family members, we are urged to sit. As I perch awkwardly on the edge of an elaborate settee it occurs to me that I have yet to come across a truly comfortable chair in any Iranian house I have visited. Alone or in the easy presence of family and close friends most Iranians will sit on the floor. Indeed, almost all activities within the home—from sleeping to food preparation—take place at floor level, and rugs, often room-sized, are the most important furnishing an Iranian will purchase for their home. However, the settee and other little-utilised items of furniture, have become vital middle-class accruements, symbols not merely of financial capacity but, more importantly, of the ease with which an individual is able to appropriate elements of a Western lifestyle. I can’t help but see this as part of the performance of hospitality in which Iranians engage, that which Andrew Shryock (2012, p. S24) calls the ‘stagecraft’ and ‘assemblages’ that

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form such a vital element of the management of hospitable relations. The contemporary performance of hospitality within the domestic sphere departs from earlier forms of traditional architecture in which houses were constructed around particular ideals of hospitality and norms of host-guest relations (see Tehrani & Duffy 2015).

In this chapter I explore the way in which hospitality emerges out of and threads its way through diverse narratives of Iranian identity. I call on Derrida’s formulation of hostipitality in order to investigate the way in which a politics of hospitality is tied up with the politics of nationalism in Iran, ultimately exposing tensions and contradictions within the construction of Iranian national selfhood. I identify three different narratives of national identity: an Islamic narrative, a historic narrative and a literary narrative. Through each of these narratives, hospitality acts as a common thread, even as it manifests itself in distinct ways. I visit Marjan and Adham in order to begin to understand how Iranians think about hospitality and how they construct themselves as hospitable. At the same I have inserted myself at the nexus of hospitality—no longer a mere observer I am now a full participant as a guest of my Iranian host.

Glasses of iced drink—a sweet syrupy concoction—are produced from a hidden kitchen and placed before us on individual tables. Reassurances as to our comfort are sought and we are urged to eat. Any sign of slowing down is met with increasingly forceful reprimands. At one point my own plate is judged inadequately laden and taken from me in order to be piled high with fruit—a tower of apples, peaches, apricots and kiwi fruit, topped with a small green cucumber. Piping hot amber tea is poured from an elaborate teapot and offered along with cinnamon and saffron infused sugar cubes. Half-hearted protests are made and artfully deflected. The first of several small, delicate glasses filled to the brim are drunk. ‘Lab riz, lab suz, lab duz,’ somebody muses, invoking the time-

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honoured tradition of serving tea precisely brewed, lip burningly hot and filled to the very brim of the glass in which it is served.

The conversation meanders along lightly and it is only as shadows lengthen against the wall and the overhead fluorescent lights are switched on that we begin to steer the conversation with a view to departure. Our intentions are immediately identified and countered by an insistence that we remain for an evening meal.

‘Please, you must remain.’ Marjan is insistent on the point and my partner, Abbas, with practiced ease, is equally insistent in refusing. ‘Thank you. We couldn’t possibly bother you.’

Marjan is quick to counter, ‘What kind of talk is this? You are no bother at all. We are happy to be at your service.’ Adham nods in agreement and I see an opportunity for me to jump into the conversation, ‘No, no we must go. The children are tired.’

‘It’s just one night, not a thousand.’ Marjan smiles expansively and adds, ‘We would love to spend more time in your company.’

The vehement protestation that this is not mere politeness (‘taarof nist’) and that a meal has already been prepared in the expectation that we would stay, finally convinces us. The ritualised battle of wills has been won by our hosts and we accept defeat. With dinner still several hours away we all move outside to enjoy the cooler evening air. Across the neighbourhood children can be heard as windows are opened to catch whatever breath of breeze might make its way down from the mountains. A television blares briefly, a snatch of song from a popular LA-based Iranian singer, evidence of the ubiquitous satellite dish, formally outlawed and periodically subject to crackdowns and confiscations. Seated on cushions and leaning back against the still-warm bricks of the

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wall that divides my hosts’ home from their neighbours, I comment on the extraordinary hospitality I have experienced over several visits to Iran and my relative ineptitude when it comes to the art of taarof.

‘Hospitality is not merely something we do,’ Marjan explains, plying me with further glasses of sweet fragrant tea and delicate biscuits that melt away on the tongue, leaving behind the clean taste of cardamom—a lingering memory of these summer evenings. ‘It’s what we are. Iranians are hospitable.’ In a cage above us, hanging in the lowest branches of an orange tree, a canary trills and warbles, an endless soundtrack to a conversation about Iranian identity that will loop and trace its way through time and space, across centuries of Iranian history and months of fieldwork.

Hospitality is a recurrent motif in descriptive works of Iran and Iranians (see for example Batmanglij 2005; di Cintio 2010; Molavi 2005). I was further to discover that it is a common theme in representations of Iranian selfhood. Marvin Zonis (1971, p. 210) identifies hospitality as a central feature of the ‘ritualistic code of interpersonal behaviour’ that functioned amongst the pre-revolutionary political elite of Iran. Twenty percent of the participants in his study volunteered hospitality as an ‘outstanding characteristic’ of ‘Persians as a people’ (i.e. people of Iranian nationality) and Zonis notes that rules of hospitality function across all social classes (ibid). Marjan’s statement to the effect that hospitality is an integral element of the Iranian character points to hospitality’s function as something of an empty signifier. The object to which hospitality is directed remains almost always ill-defined and uncertain. Indeed, hospitality as a character trait is only very rarely imagined to have any sort of outward working. It could be reasonably argued that, in the hospitality nexus, Afghans in Iran are once again rendered invisible.

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