Peripheral Visions

freedom that Iranians feel to approach a woman in public and criticize the way she is treating her child. “That child isn’t warmly enough dressed,” they used to say to me about Vanni. “That child will get dirty.” The business of child rearing is not private. Strangers accompany their advice with food offered without checking with a parent, or kisses on the lips. Vanni loathed having her cheeks pinched, but Iranians were charmed by her responsive openness, and disapproving of our permissiveness. In a supermarket, she captured the manager and ended up on his lap eating ice cream, which became her regular prerogative. In a restaurant—there are often children in restaurants and nightclubs in Tehran, sitting quietly in their mothers’ laps without high chairs and gazing wide-eyed at the crowd until they fall asleep—Vanni went up to the stage and joined the chanteuse. Unaccustomed to more gregarious American children, Iranians are not armored against them.
    A week after Joan and Becky’s visit, I brought to my class an Iranian mother and child, Parvaneh and baby Shahnaz, almost the same age as Becky but just slightly ahead in development since Shahnaz had learned to crawl rather than wriggling from place to place on her tummy. Parvaneh ignored the chair and sat down on the floor with Shahnaz, modestly tucking her full skirt around her legs. She was not veiled but wore a silk kerchief. She gave Shahnaz her own handbag, with handles that flipped back and forth, to play with, and a rattle and a small doll she had brought with her.
    The students had carried over expectations from the previous visit and were looking for the same response from Shahnaz that they had gotten from Becky. They cooed and called and offered whatever enticements they had in their pockets—keys, a candy, a string of worry beads—but each time Shahnaz crawled to the edge of the rug she stopped. Her mother reached out with an enclosing gesture, patting her and telling her, go for a walk, go see the nice students, but offering her a piece of banana at the same time.
    After a while, one of the students, frustrated, came and took the doll, standing it up just a few feet beyond the edge of the rug, with the mother’s purse strap over its shoulder and his own shiny key ring in its hand. Shahnaz crawled to the edge and gazed. You could hear her breathing quicken at the fascinating assemblage of toys. She literally panted with desire. And then she turned her back on the room to play with her mother’s foot. The students later agreed that Parvaneh was a very good mother, pointing out that in the course of the class session she had produced a bottle for Shahnaz while Joan had neglected to bring food, and that Shahnaz’s lacy dress had remained clean and fresh.
    Of course I was lucky to happen on a pair that offered such a sharp contrast. But I did the same thing a year later with different mother-infant pairs and the contrast was only slightly less vivid, and I had been watching the same patterns in families we visited and in the way people responded to Vanni. Infants go through stages in their response to strangers, but parental expectations continue to shape them. Each culture has different expectations of male and female infants, but a comparison of mother-son pairs would have exemplified the same kinds of differences in the handling of space and exploration.
    While the students were watching the mothers and infants, I was watching the students and the entire classroom scene. The door of the room had a peephole in it, and I was constantly aware of movement in the hall, one eye after another peering through the window. Something unheard of was happening in that classroom. Classrooms in Iran are places where professors lecture to students, who are expected to memorize what they are told, combining French models of pedagogy with the traditions of Islamic scholasticism. Iranian students are highly sensitive to interactions and skilled at observing their professors, working out what will please them, and negotiating their grades, but these skills are not seen as internal to the educational process. Observation—particularly observation of an infant—simply did not fit the definition of what is appropriate to educational settings. Education is indissolubly linked to authority. Indeed, there was one man in the class, a military officer always in uniform, who gazed out the window the entire time. I wondered sometimes whether he was the SAVAK spy I