We are very pleased to have with us Davar Ardalan with us this evening, Davar is a senior producer with NPR News and tonight she is here to talk about her memoir, my name is Iran. Davar was actually born here in San Francisco and moved to Iran with her family and then returned to graduate from high school in Massachusetts. She is well equipped to speak about the Iranian diaspora and her experiences of Iran as a resident, as a citizen and as a reporter. Jacki Lyden the Senior Correspondent and hosted NPR's at NPR said here you will meet the Iran Davar Ardalan who long ago captured my imagination and encouraged my love for Iran. Without fear she reveals her place as the great granddaughter of the revolution caught up in its complexities. I especially was fascinated in the book about hearing about her American grandmother meeting her Iranian grandfather so I hope she will start with that. So please give a very warm Codys welcome to Davar Ardalan. Thank you so much its such a thrill to be here in the town where I was born on April 1st in 1964 and if my parents only knew what would happen if they named me Iran you know they might have thought twice about that but its been a fantastic journey and I am delighted to share some of that with you this evening. Yes I was asked to speak about my grandmother Helen and also I will be reading several passages from the book but in 1927 my grandfather Abol Ghassem Bakhtiar who was a physician at Harlem Hospital came across a 22 year old women from Boise, Idaho she was a nurse, she had just arrived and from Los Angeles actually and there is a passage in my book where I talk about this first meeting of Helen and Abol Ghassem and I would like to start with that. My grandmother Helen got off an east bound train at New York's grand central station in the fall of 1927 all alone. When she asked the policemen for directions to Harlem Hospital he replied put five cents in the slot and get off at 125th street. I came upstairs at three in the afternoon and everyone was black she remembers, Helen had traveled three thousand miles by train from Los Angeles to begin teaching nursing. Standing in the heart of Harlem she walked to 135th street and found the hospital. A fellow nurse welcomed her and showed her around the hospital. As they were talking Helen asked about the doctors. She was told that there were some Italians, some Jews, some Blacks and one Persian. Persian my grandmother thought I have never met a Persian. The residents had gathered in the courtyard through which my grandmother and the nurse had to pass by. My grandmother asked the nurse which one was the Persian. The nurse said doctor Bakhtiar, the one with the bald head. Before introducing my grandmother to the whole group of doctors, this is Miss. Jeffries from California, she will be teaching anatomy to the nurses. An Italian doctor was the first to ask her for a date, he took her along the east river where he became too friendly, when she began to cry he took her home. The next day she saw my grandfather at work. He had heard about her date and how it went, he asked her not to accept anymore dates without first consulting him. Not long after she was in Central Park on a date with him. It was there among the burnished orange and reds of the fall foliage that my grandmother courted my grandmother through the Shahnameh feeling insecure about their age difference he was 33 years older he wanted to impress her with a story from Iran's National Epic. He chose the love story between Zal and Rudabeh. The parents of the famous mythical hero Rostam. Once Helen heard the story of Zal she asked Abol his age. He told her he was 55, he certainly didn't look his age and his sincerity and caring protection of her won her over. My grandfather recounted the story sometimes residing it in Persian. He explained to Helen that Zal was born with white hair and was therefore considered old at birth. His father the Hero warrior Sam Neriman was afraid that these enemies would claim that Zal was a child of the genius so some order that he would be taken away. Zal was taken to the base of the Alborz mountains where he was left to die but as fate would have it a mythical bird called the Simurgh saw him and took pity on him, carrying him to here nest and raising Zal with her own youngster and so it was this story of the white haired warrior Zal that completely mesmerized Helen and what also fascinated her was that Zal ended up marrying Rudabeh a foreign woman the daughter of the king of Kabul and so to Abol Ghassem the union between him and Helen was very much a page out of this national epic where he had been able to have his own foreign bride. And so my families love affair between America and Iran goes back to Harlem Hospital at 1927 and my mother was the youngest of seven children and Helen and Abol Ghassem went back to Iran and they started one of their first hospitals there and Helen had seven children and she named six of them Persian names and by the time she was pregnant with her seventh her mother Nell pleaded with her to choose an American name and so my mother was named to Mary Nell. And Mary Nell and my father Nader Ardalan met each other in Pittsburg, my father was attending Carnegie Mellon studying architecture and she was at Chatham College they met on a blind date and they had been raised in the United States. My grandfather from my fathers side worked at the United Nations and later at the embassy in the Iranian embassy at various different levels and that was where the two of them met. They ended up here in San Francisco and my father was working here at the time and when I was born they had a longing for their homeland and so they named me Iran. My father and mother both even though they hardly spoke Farsi missed and wanted to learn about their Iranian heritage and so just as Helen took the risk and went to Iran in the 1930's my mother and father picked up and packed us up myself and my sister and took us to a rural town named (indiscernible) and this was where the first oil wells in 1908 in Iran were founded and it was a company town something that my parents did not expect they were thinking that they were actually going to be living in sort of classic rural village Iran but no it was a company town and soon they began their own journey of discovering Iran, they wrote a book together called the Sense of Unity which followed the historic connections between Persian architecture and Sufism which is a mystical dimension of Islam. And we as their children traveled with them throughout many parts of Iran and I would like to read a passage this was in the mid 1970's and we have a Land Rover and my sister, my brother and I and my mother and father and our driver were all packed in the car we had our cowboy hats on that my father had purchased for us in Texas. And so here is a little passage from our journeys through the south desert in Iran. We left Naine late in the afternoon after dark heading towards Natanz when suddenly the wind swept up a dust storm, the road was filled with sand swirling in front of us using our headlights to illuminate the sands from road we saw what looked like waves it was as if each grain of sand had remembered when it had been under the sea and learned to move like water. Once the dust storm passed we stopped just short of Natanz to stretch our legs. As I got out of the Land Rover I looked up to find millions and billions of stars as a matter of fact stars stretched from horizon to horizon, a road map to ancient times. Each of these tiny little towns and villages in Central Iran was an oasis in the desert created from a small body of water and trees. After miles of sand palm trees would just appear and with them a dobby style low raised buildings would loom in the distance, each small town had a mosque, which would be spotted even from far by its dome and minaret. Each town had a little inn called caravanserai where we would stay, they were very modest, they also were authentic and so these were you know this was just one of hundreds of little towns that through their journey we traveled to. And my mother as she became older and matured gravitated towards Sufism and to the understanding more of Islam spiritually and within herself. My father while he also believed in Sufism was as an architect a worldly man and so he in fact resented the fact that my mother was turning much more inward than perhaps he would like and so their journey began to separate and we as children of course didn't realize that this was happening. But it was almost to me as though overnight they were divorced. And it was an absolutely dramatic time in you know my siblings and my life as we had the unity that they had created for us and the exquisite life the magical childhood of traveling through Iran and learning about our culture together as a family had shattered. Helen died my grandmother and the revolution happened and so my world was turned upside down like many other Iranians and my international high school was closed and so we went to Boston where my father had gone to start a new life and I attended Brooklyn High School and my name was Iran and the hostages were still being kept hostage into Iran and I felt very much a crisis of identity both publicly and privately I changed my name. I dropped my first name which is Iran and used my middle name which is Davar named after my great grandfather and pronounced Davar here and still I felt as a teenager that I wasn't sure where I fit in, was I American, was I Iranian and what was it about life that you know very much had me puzzled you know was I to turn to my religion like my mother, was I to become a worldly person international traveler you know man of the world like my father and I wanted to read you yet another passage it's the last one I will read. I drifted into a state of passive suffering I grabbed a handful of sleeping pills but as soon as I swallowed them I called for help, fortunately I had enough presence of mind to know I had gone too far, this was not the way it was meant to be well I was struggling trying to find some meaning in life, I contemplated the existence of god. I felt that as my creator he was the one who had thought me to hear, to see, to taste and then I thought of the genuine Iranians I had met in the villages as a child, pious and down to earth they were happy with fresh baked bread, goats cheese, homemade yogurt, fresh tea and greens, here I am living in America I thought with its wealth and plenty. All the amenities one could ask for and yet I was searching for more. I felt myself spiritually lost living in Los Angeles, would I ever find balance and be satisfied with it I wondered. I try to engage in my environment but my heart was still detached, those around me thought that I was living in heaven they did not know that inwardly I was in hell. My name is Iran but I could not even say that. I felt vulnerable and lost and alone I was faced yet again with a momentous question where was I to go now, the only answer for me was to return to Iran to join my mother and younger brother the only words that consoled me were my mothers. She asked me come back to the Islamic Republic by sending me a poem that resonated in my soul. What is to be done oh Muslims for I do not recognize myself, I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor is a Restrain, nor Muslim. I am not of the east nor of the west nor of the land, nor of the sea, I am not of natures meant nor of the circling heavens I am not of India, nor of China, nor of Bulgaria, nor of Spain I am not of the kingdom of Iraq nor of the country of Khorasan my place is the placeless, my trace is the traceless, it is neither body nor soul for I belong to the soul of the beloved. I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one, one I seek, one I know, one I see, one I call. Longing to find a part of me that I had lost I agreed to return to Iran, I don the veil left the western world and flew back to revolutionary Iran to be with my mother. It was there that I agreed to an arranged marriage and I very much wanted to find security in an Islamic dream and I felt when I wore the veil that I felt protected and that so much that had been taken away from me I would be able to script back and create my own life because perhaps as a true Iranian marrying someone from a true Iranian background a pious Muslim that I would be able to find my own new reality. I also was translating at a medical conference and an African American Muslim came up to me and he said do you they are auditioning for the English news and so I went and before long I was anchoring the English news on the Islamic Republic of Iran with a veil and really living the sort of Hollywood glitz version of an Islamic life where a yellow jeep would come and pick me up every afternoon and I thought everything was going well until I saw sort of the perhaps the superficiality of the situation around me. Drug addiction was going up it personally affected people I knew, prostitution was going up in Islamic revolution of Iran and marriages were breaking up, people had a very difficult time economically having to have several jobs. And I also was faced one day face to face with a news director of the television station and he said to me in farsi (foreign language) and he said I am just too attractive for television I was already veiled my face wasn't covered. But he said that there were complaints by conservative clerics that I looked too attractive and I pulled on my eye lashes, because he wanted to know if I was wearing mascara and I said these are my own eye lashes. And so I felt as though his assessment of me was not based on me as a woman, as a person, as a person as what I had learned about my Islamic heritage what I had studied as the icons of my religion the daughter of the prophet of Islam Fatima or his wife Khadija who was a business woman and who had asked for the prophet's hand in marriage herself and these were the feisty women that I knew and had learned about and yet here was this man you know questioning sort of my identity again. And so I once again was at a cross roads and at this point because of my American heritage I turned to the philosophy of the west and that is freewill because from my eastern heritage I had learned about kismet or what is your destiny and I was willing to try that but I understood as a women who had done whatever was asked for me and wasn't finding home as that I could perhaps go back to my American heritage and we were able to convince my in laws to have my husband and my son leave Iran in 1987 and go to New Mexico where I started my career in public broadcasting. I went to journalism school and soon he became disillusioned, it was very difficult for him to live in this country, he didn't speak the language well and so he decided to go back and my journey of self actualization began very briefly in 2003. On October 2003 when it was announced that an Iranian Human Rights lawyer has own the Nobel piece price. I woke up and turned on NPR and realized that we actually had interviewed her Jacki Lyden my colleague in 1997 had interviewed her and so I knew of her work I went and checked my e-mail and there was an e-mail from an Iranian political science professor on a list serve that I belong to. And he said let it not be mistaken that Iran searched for a lawful society did not start with shooting a body it started with Davar and that was my great grandfather and he said somebody needs to do the story from a body to Davar Iran's lawful search for a lawful society and so I went to my editor at NPR and I said you know what do you think I mean I would probably be the best one to tell the story and they were very delighted to be able to personalize of course a story like this when a Nobel laureate had just won for her human rights work. So I went to Oslo Norway I covered the Nobel piece price my colleague an Iranian American scholar by the name of Rasool Nafisi who had fantastic connections with lawyers inside Iran, reformed his clerics went to you know he went to Iran and interviewed them, he came back he had tons of tape, I had tons of tape and as we were going through them I looked at my editor and I said well you know my first name is really Iran and that's when she said this series has to be called my name is Iran and that aired on national public radio in February of 2004 both in a one hour documentary where we traced Iran's search for justice going back to the time of Ali Akbar Davar my great grandfather who was the minister of justice all the way to Shirin Ebadi and what was fascinating was as I was doing this story I was listening to a lot of the Iranian media and I had Radio Farda which is an Iranian Program that is also broadcasted inside Iran, funded by the government here. And the anchors said that a journalist in Iran has questioned the minister of justice and his abilities and has said perhaps we need to shutdown the ministry like in the time of Davar and what he did which was you know he completely revamped the ministry of justice and so it was just fascinating to hear that and I included that in my story. And the evolution that came about as a result of the documentary was this book and so I have spent the last three years very fortunate to have been able to produce NPR's morning edition. I was doing the graveyard shift, the show goes on air at five in the morning and so I worked from 11:30 at night to 07:30 in the morning putting the show on and it was one of the most creative times of my life and believe it or not you know my partner will tell you that he you know he says that I probably have slept five hours you know in the last two years and its probably not an exaggeration but I was on a mission and so I would be delighted to take any of your questions and we can take it from there.
