Composing a Life

training of revolutionary mullahs. For months when it was being built, I argued for the inclusion of traditional-style toilets that allow religiously correct cleansing, and these have no doubt been constructed. Efforts to incorporate a respect for traditional ways in moving toward modernization were insufficient to overcome the bias of the larger system toward polarization.
    The old regime was ridden with moral ambiguity. Today, Iran’s leaders seek ideological and religious consistency—and their own power—by looking backward. It is not possible to combine a realistic acceptance of the future with the expectation of consistency; change is inevitably uneven and full of surprises, carrying all the moral uncertainty these changes are likely to entail. The alternative to the fundamentalist call for total reconstruction that produced the present Iranian theocracy was the hope that it would be possible to build within ambiguity, a hope that made it possible for us to work—warily—within the system.
    Vanni and I were together on the Caspian in 1978, as the Iranian revolution heated up, and it was easy to become frightened as friends urged us to keep off the streets and try to be invisible. A little girl and her baby brother were killed by a stray bullet as she stood holding him, hidden behind a gate in a nearby village, and I worried that a bereaved father might seek victims for his vengeance. I had Vanni sleeping in my bed and kept a small bag with shoes, passports, and traditional veils, a big one for me and an eight-year-old size for Vanni, beside the back window in case we had to leave in a hurry. But most of the Iranians we had direct contact with were protective. When I had the chance to walk through demonstrations in Tehran, where armored cars of soldiers rolled along the avenues firing tear-gas canisters up on the rooftops, strangers would draw me into sheltered doorways and would respond warmly when I spoke to them in Persian. Barkev and I lost a great deal in the Iranian revolution, years of work and cherished possessions, and had to start again like refugees. We were spared memories of personal hostility and betrayal, but it was the end of a chapter in our lives.
    Johnnetta commented to me on her innocence when she went off to college, but black children learn early that the good guys don’t always win, and disenchantment had begun for her with the discovery of the bigotry waiting for black children beyond their front doors. After that, she went through a series of disillusionments that have ultimately been empowering and brought her to the point of being an effective critic and reformer, far more moderate and realistic than she once was. The discovery that the first man she loved was addicted to heroin was a disillusionment with a curious core of reassurance, the decency of her potential father-in-law, who refused to let her waste her life and vitality on the conviction that a good wife could be the young man’s salvation. Of all the women I worked with, Johnnetta has been the most ideologically committed. She had had to work toward an understanding of the flaws and blind spots in those with whom she shared passionate convictions in the civil-rights movement, in postrevolutionary Cuba, and at the University of Massachusetts. The fact that a cause is right is no guarantee of fairness and decency in the people that espouse it or benefit from it. The very people who are most committed to some significant frontier of social justice or compassion are likely to become locked in self-serving battles for dominance. The corruption of progressive hope in Maurice Bishop’s Grenada into dogmatism and internal conflict and the resultant takeover and assassination probably marked the end of Johnnetta’s early idealism. Anyone who has been involved in trying to support and encourage outsiders to move into full participation knows something about disillusionment. All too often, the noble disinherited and their advocates prove to be fractious and inept, or even vicious and corrupt.
    Each of us has repeatedly had to salvage a capacity for commitment as we became aware of the flaws of institutions and indeed of the individuals who seemed to embody those commitments. Like all the other discontinuities we have faced, this implies possibility as well as loss, the need to construct a new mode of self-preservation, and, finally, commitment without dependency.
    At Amherst, as in Iran, I worked for gradual change within a