The book by Ramita Navai explains how the truth is more bizarre than fiction in modern-day Tehran
By Eliza Griswold
‘Let’s get one thing straight: in order to live in Iran you have to lie,” the British-Iranian journalist Ramita Navai begins her searing account of life in Tehran, City of Lies. It’s an audacious disclaimer with which to open a book of true-life stories. It was Camus who said that “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth”. But this isn’t fiction, Navai tells us. These profiles are based on real Iranians.
In order to survive, the eight Iranians she writes about have to bear the weight of desperate secrets. The setting is Vali Asr Street, the sycamore-lined road that both unifies and divides the debauched rich and devout poor of the Iranian capital, a city of more than seven million people. Although Navai has altered details and created composites to protect their identities, her Iranians share stories intimate and unforgettable enough to establish City of Lies as a remarkable and highly readable map of its human geography.
She speaks to a bumbling Iranian-American terrorist who botches an assassination attempt. A devout schoolgirl who escapes a horrific marriage. An underground blogger struggling to come to terms with his parents’ assassination. A local gangster cooking up sheesheh – crystal meth. A porn star risking her life. A basiji boy leaving his militant thug life to have a sex change. In one chapter, a dapper jahel, an old-school hoodlum, loses his wife. In another, an ageing socialite comes to terms with her vanished Iran. Even when the religious police raid her high-end belly-dancing class under charges that it could encourage lesbianism, she resolves to stay.
The stories are almost unbelievable. They reveal a Tehran so riddled with social, political, sexual and religious contradictions that it’s difficult to imagine how someone could navigate the fraught maze of daily life. Navai stunned this reader with her attention to detail: devout girls wear skinny jeans and Converse trainers to accentuate their slimness while still remaining modest; anal sex is practised to preserve virginity; rural villages are paradoxically more free than urbane Tehran; “going to San Francisco” means having sex. The much-touted Iranian films that Westerners flock to see are, in her characters’ eyes, “overrated and pretentious”.
City of Lies explodes the stereotypes of rebellious young Iranians doing drugs and attending raves, as it also challenges those about devotion-addled zealots who have benefited from the rise of religion after the revolution.
Navai doesn’t shy away from drugs, sex and self-flagellation; she moves through stories about each to reveal the underlying motivations beneath the nose jobs and restitched hymens. “Sex,” she writes, “is an act of rebellion in Tehran. A form of protest. Only in sex do many of the younger generation feel truly free.” With a keen eye for the absurd, she watches prostitutes and taxi drivers approach one another awkwardly, unsure of who’s a trick and who’s a ride.
Navai’s prose is startling. As they trudge up and down Vali Asr Street to work, eat, shop, pray, turn a trick, Navai’s characters observe the wrecked beauty of the world around them. Through these observations, the book is elevated far above typical reportage. She picks up snatches of songs, poems, billboard propaganda and is quick to find the knife and turn the blade on the hypocrisy of the city she knows so well.
One regime billboard advises: “Let’s not spend too much time discussing society’s problems in our homes.” As Bjian , her young gangster, drives to his meth lab, he listens to the music group Anonymous Sinners sing a satire of a famous old war song: “There’s no prostitution, no drugs, press freedom, food and jobs, oil money for everyone, people are so happy they never complain…” But in the course of the book we discover that complaining in Iran is de rigueur; an art form, even.
The demands of secrecy pervade every aspect of city life. Many people are trying to find a way to endure the challenges of poverty and an oppressive regime. The government is cutting down the sycamores on Vali Asr in the dead of night. No one knows why they do it at night, other than to avoid the voice of protest rising from the streets of Tehran. In Navai’s energetic, eloquent book, these protests are sometimes a mumble, sometimes a scream.
City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran
By: Ramita Navai
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Pages: 320; Price: £18.99
