586: Who Do We Think We Are?

Sean Cole

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Sean Cole. Ira Glass is going to be back next week.

So Ted Cruz dropped out of the race this week for president, and a lot of Republican voters were thrilled. But a lot of them were heartbroken and confused, asking themselves a lot of questions about themselves and their party and what they stand for. And I wanted to talk with my colleague Zoe Chace because she'd been doing a lot of campaign coverage for the show, talking to Cruz supporters.

Zoe Chace

Hi, Sean.

Sean Cole

Hello.

Zoe Chace

Yeah, I was worried about the Cruz supporters, to be honest. Some people had been waiting for 30 years for somebody like Ted Cruz to get as far as he did-- this strong, Christian, very conservative evangelical candidate. And there was one guy I knew that might be pretty heartbroken, and I wanted to check in with him. I had to call Tony.

Sean Cole

And just say who Tony is again.

Zoe Chace

Tony Beam is a radio host in South Carolina. Conservative, evangelical Christian talk radio. Remember, we did a story on Tony a couple months ago. And the issue was that when his evangelical listeners started embracing Donald Trump, Tony felt betrayed and confused and upset.

Sean Cole

So how is he taking the news?

Zoe Chace

He couldn't even bring himself to watch it on TV.

Sean Cole

It occurs to me, Zoe, that a lot of people who were upset about this, they can sort of just go hide or drink somewhere. And he has to be on the radio, upset.

Zoe Chace

He has to go on the radio, live, at 7:00 in the morning with all his feelings.

Zoe Chace

He's talking about Donald Trump.

Zoe Chace

Tony is never going to get behind Donald Trump. He sees him as a fake conservative. He's just an opportunist.

Sean Cole

He doesn't share his values.

Zoe Chace

Right, he just grabs principles when he wants them and then just drops them when he doesn't anymore.

Sean Cole

Right.

Zoe Chace

Tony has built his entire life around Christian values, and he doesn't think that Trump has those. And now he's in this situation where he's looking ahead over the next couple months. He has a live radio show, two hours every single day. He's going to be dealing with this. So I asked him, Tony, what is the plan? How are you going to handle this on the radio?

Sean Cole

So when you did the first story, there was this guy.

Zoe Chace

Barry.

Sean Cole

Yes, Barry, who was like the Trump interpreter.

Zoe Chace

Yeah, he called Tony all the time to harass him about Donald Trump.

Sean Cole

Yes. And did he call this time?

Zoe Chace

Of course. He called the morning after Cruz had dropped out. Tony said, of course Barry called him and tried to sell him on Trump and party unity.

Zoe Chace

Tony remembers those first Republican debates when Trump was talking and saying all this outlandish stuff. And his listeners were calling in and being like, we love this guy, and this guy is speaking for me. And it just felt so viscerally wrong to him, like he was like, this is not who we are. This is not who we Republicans are. And then he wakes up one morning, and Cruz is out.

Sean Cole

It's jarring when you're rolling along with a group of people, for years sometimes. They're like family. And then you hit this one dividing point that makes you think, wait, is that who we are? Because if that's who we are, what does that say about who I am? Even if the "we" is just you and one other person, it's hard. And that's what our show is about today, in two acts-- two families with two very different contentions. Stay with us.

Sean Cole

Act One, "Whose Great Idea was This?" This first story deals with something controversial that's covered now and then in the news. But this is the first time I've heard it talked about so personally as opposed to abstract and far away. It comes to us from Mariya Karimjee, and I'll let her explain what's at issue. But I just want to say here that, as Ira sometimes says, this story does acknowledge the existence of sex, and it probably isn't right for young kids. OK, here's Mariya.

Mariya Karimjee

When I was in high school, my mother caught me reading a grocery store Harlequin novel in my room. She raised one eyebrow as I shoved it under the covers. It wasn't until weeks later, driving me somewhere, that she mentioned she'd seen it. I remember the firm line of her mouth as she explained that sex was almost never a good feeling. Don't go looking for that, she told me. That's almost never true.

I hadn't had sex, but I had started to wonder about it. My mother said that she thought, for men, it was the way that they described it in the books. For us, she said, it's different. At the time, I assumed that by "us" she meant women in general. Later I wondered if she meant her and me specifically.

When I was seven years old and living in Karachi, Pakistan, my mother took me to the pediatrician. While I sat on a stool, polishing imaginary dirt off the buckles on my Mary Janes, my mother quietly asked if it was time for me to get the bug removed. According to my mother, a bug was growing in an egg down there-- her language, not mine-- and that it would hatch and eventually crawl to my brain unless we removed it, she said. My pediatrician agreed. It was time to see the woman who removes the bug.

A girl down the street that I'd grown up with had her bug removed, my grandmother told me. She was also seven, and after she came home from the operation, she felt fine, enough so to jump up and down on her bed. It was a story my grandmother told with enthusiasm. My older cousins, both girls, were each presented with a piece of gold jewelry when they returned home from their respective operations. Remembering this, I asked specifically for a simple gold chain with a teardrop pearl at the end.

I did not feel well enough to go around jumping on beds after my surgery. For two days, I wore what I can only describe as a big-girl diaper, wet with blood. Peeing was so painful that I tried to last for hours without going, until my mother explained that I could give myself an infection. For the next year, I'd break out into a cold sweat whenever I saw the kind-faced woman who, on a tarp on her living room floor, had spoken to me softly as she took a knife and cut me. I received the exact necklace I had requested and wore it all the time.

Soon after my 11th birthday, my parents, brother, and I moved to Texas. The Houston area, where we lived, happened to have a decent number of Muslims from the same sect we belonged to in Pakistan. We're called Dawoodi Bohra.

But unlike many of the other immigrant families we knew, my parents wanted my brother and I to fully assimilate into the world we'd moved into. They encouraged us to sign up for any activities. They enrolled us in summer camps and group sports. My mom in particular really saw the benefit of raising me in the US. She was worried that in Karachi I'd always be in the shadow of my younger brother. Boys are valued more than girls in a lot of ways there.

My family has always been close, but the move to the US cemented our closeness. But when I was 15, I overheard a woman at my mosque asking the woman next to her if her daughter had the operation already. Her question nudged something deep in my brain. Until that point, I honestly hadn't thought about my operation-- my bug. At that moment, the kind-faced woman came back to me. I could hear her comforting tone as she told me it would be over quickly.

I'm not sure what I googled, but soon after returning home from mosque, I had words to describe what I thought had happened to me. Female genital cutting. Female genital circumcision. Clitorectomy. Female genital mutilation, or FGM.

I sat with my copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that my American aunt had given me. The book has photos and diagrams of female genitalia, and suggests using a mirror to be able to see and understand your body better. Locked in my bathroom with a hand mirror between my legs, I realized that there was no diagram in the book that could explain what I saw. It was really confusing.

Over the next few weeks, I continued searching for information on FGM online. Mainly I found articles about small tribal villages in Africa where girls sometimes had their labia sewn shut, and where infections, fistulas, and sometimes death could happen. I could see that what had happened to me was different from the cases I was reading about online.

That's when I decided to search for FGM with the name of my particular sect, Dawoodi Bohra. One lonely academic article came up, titled "The Practice of Female Circumcision Among Bohra Muslims." That was it.

Once I'd linked FGM to my culture, I was consumed by anger. I couldn't believe both that it had happened to me and that it had been completely ignored as a topic of discussion by my friends, by my religion, and above all by my own family. Why hadn't anyone said anything, especially my mother? She'd done this.

For the next several weeks, I didn't say anything to my mom about it. I'd go back and forth between being furious at her and remembering her cool hand on my forehead after I peed for the first time after being cut. When I finally brought it up, the two of us were cleaning my bathroom. I was standing in the tub, a roll of steel wool in my hand. I hadn't meant to talk to her about it, but I was angry-cleaning and running out of things to scrub.

"What exactly was that bug thing you told me about?" My mother made a face I didn't recognize and didn't know how to interpret. First, I was terrified that my question made no sense, that I'd have to clarify further. Then I realized I was even more scared that it had made perfect sense.

My mother's explanation came out as fumbled as my question, something about how women shouldn't be sexual, and shortening my clitoris. "You removed the part of me that makes me feel good while having sex?" I asked. I was 15 and armed with Our Bodies, Ourselves and some internet articles. I thought I knew. I thought I appreciated exactly what had been taken away from me. It'd take me another five years to realize I had no idea.

"I didn't have a choice," said my mother, "and it happened to me too. All seven-year-old Bohri girls have to go through this," she said. I slammed the door shut in her face and waited. She didn't try and open it back up.

I couldn't understand how my mother-- the woman who made sure I got all the same opportunities as my brother, who cried when I told her I needed a training bra for gym and then got me one anyway, who attended every free seminar about preparing her children for college-- how could she be the same person who'd watched as a stranger cut me? I learned what it was like to love someone without forgiving them.

My college roommate and I would never be close. One night, as I highlighted a sociology text, my roommate asked me if I masturbated. I sputtered, "no." "You should try it," she told me. She moved off her twin bed and onto the corner of mine. "Don't be so prude," she said when I cringed.

I attended a small all-women's liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke, and it was a far cry from the conservative, Baptist, perfectly-coiffed Texas girls I knew as friends in high school. I could never really confide in them.

But to my college roommate, I inexplicably opened up. I told her everything I could think of. I confessed that I had no idea what it meant to have a clitorectomy, that I had no idea of the extent of the damage. I explained about the girls in the African villages and the pictures of their labia sewn shut, making clear that this wasn't my situation. She smoothed my back, chewing on her lip.

In the months that followed, we didn't get closer. We never talked like that again. Every few days, though, she encouraged me to go see a gynecologist at the school. Before going home for the summer, I made an appointment at student health services. 20 minutes after walking in, I was in stirrups.

If you're listening right now with small children, they may not want to hear this next part. When the doctor finally arrived, she sat down between my legs, murmuring something about a pap smear. "Let's have a look," she said. I clamped my knees together and started bawling.

The doctor didn't miss a beat. "Why don't you sit right up, and let's talk about any questions you may have." She had questions of her own too. "When did this happen?" "How long did it hurt?" "Are you able to wipe yourself with toilet paper without discomfort?"

The doctor admitted up front that she didn't know much, but said that taking a closer look might help her out. When I finally let her examine me, she let out a long, low breath. For a few long moments, she looked without speaking. Then she asked me for my cell number. She would ask around, see if anyone in the area knew more than she did.

"What I can tell you is that there's a lot of thin scar tissue," she said. "This doesn't look like a full clitorectomy," she added, explaining that while she'd never seen one before, it looked like a partial cut. "Did a medical professional do this?" she asked. I didn't know, I admitted.

The question would linger with me, and for months I would weigh the consequences of asking my mother. Later, after I put my clothes on, she came back in to hug me. "Come see me anytime with any questions," she said. And before I could stop myself, I blurted out, can I ever have an orgasm? She handed me a few printed pamphlets on healthy masturbation.

I figured out that getting to orgasm wasn't going to be easy. Even when I tried, any wrong move, any sudden accidental movement, would shoot an incredible pain inside of me. I hardly ever mention this-- to anyone. Even when friends who knew my secret talked about sex, I would pretend I was just like them. I'd assure them that I was hooking up randomly with people, same as they were. It's ridiculous, I know, but I didn't know what to do.

When I finally started dating, it would take me months to let my boyfriend know why we weren't progressing past second base. In his dorm room in DC, I took three shots of green apple vodka and then blurted out as much as I could. My boyfriend silently listened, holding my hands as I spoke. He didn't ask questions or try to break up with me. He told me he would wait until I was ready. I wondered if I would ever be ready.

After a year of dating him, I decided that I needed to get it over with. I broached the subject with my boyfriend. I wanted to have sex before the end of the summer. I don't want you to stop, even if I look like it's hurting me, I told him. He grimaced, but I repeated the statement again and then again.

So one night, I drank a half a bottle of wine in 15 minutes as my boyfriend watched warily. For a blissful 45 minutes, we made out on the couch, his hands staying in all of the safe spots, the ones that months of dating had taught him didn't make me clench up. The wine turned my limbs heavy.

We moved from the couch to the bed. I closed my eyes, counting to control my heartbeat and the nausea welling up inside me. Technically, we began having sex. Pain shot up my body. I could feel it in my teeth and in the muscles of my jaw. My insides felt like they were being sandpapered. The pain was everywhere. We didn't continue. My boyfriend kissed my forehead, reminded me he loved me, and left for the bathroom. I sat in the bed and cried.

I was still crying when my boyfriend came out of the bathroom. He took one look at me and then told me he was heading out to our favorite neighborhood bar. I know that sounds callous, but he knew that in moments of distress, I rarely wanted to be comforted.

Then I called my mother. "Is sex ever good for you?" I asked her. There was a brief but important pause. I heard the click of a door and then her voice, clear, unmuffled. "Excuse me?" she asked. "I tried to have sex with my boyfriend," I said. "It didn't go well. It hurt so bad that I'm not sure I ever want to try it again. I know you don't think I should be having sex, but I'm so scared."

What I didn't say out loud, but what my mother instinctively knew, was what I was so scared of. It wasn't just that I was scared of sex but that because of that, true love would escape me forever, that I was unlovable.

She told me about how when she was a teenager, she saved up pocket change for Harlequin romances. All I wanted was to figure out how to feel like those women, she told me. She also told me how when she was with my dad, if he moved too fast, she'd feel sharp pain. I knew exactly what she was talking about, pain that suffocated any of the good. "I get panic attacks when that happens," I told her. "I did too," she told me. "Your father and I talked through what felt good, and we figured out a way," she explained.

It was a good conversation. I told my mother that I loved her. I kept wanting her to apologize for giving me the same pain that she herself had suffered, but she stayed quiet. As we said our goodbyes and were about to hang up, she suddenly said, unprompted, "I hate everyone else too. Those women on TV who love sex, who enjoy it, I hate them too."

Since that first experience with a gynecologist in college, I've been to a handful of other doctors. Many of them hadn't seen anyone who'd been cut before. When I'd peppered them with questions, they seemed hesitant to respond with authority. Only once since my college ex did I hook up with anyone again-- try to hook up, that is. It too went badly.

That time prompted me to take action. I visited a doctor who specialized in victims of FGM. I was living without health insurance that year. And when I called her office explaining this, the receptionist told me to plan to spend somewhere around $2,000 for the consult. It was all of my savings.

The money was worth it. This doctor, unlike so many of the gynecologists I'd seen before, didn't wince when she peered between my legs. She didn't over-apologize or pat my knees. She didn't murmur in a hushed whisper, like the medical resident at Columbia, "oh, bless your dear heart." Instead, she silently examined me. She'd heard of the religious sect that I belong to and had examined other girls like me.

She explained that because the cutting is done in the living room without proper medical equipment, for girls in my sect, the results varied. Some of the girls can easily go on to have great sex lives. But for me, the main difference was in the extensive scar tissue and the nerve damage.

I'd read of a surgery where a doctor was grafting other genital tissue as part of a regenerative process. I asked her about it. She shook her head. "I wouldn't recommend this," she said. "The science was unreliable."

She told me what I'd long suspected. I'd probably never have a wonderful, easy, uncomplicated sex life. Instead, sex for me would likely involve many careful conversations with my partner, a sex therapist, and a willingness to trust a human beyond what I could imagine.

I wasn't horribly mutilated or defective in a way that made me incapable of enjoying sex. She explained, "this is not terminal. This is not a life sentence. Find a sex therapist you trust. Learn to allow yourself to let go." I wasn't sure what she meant and didn't ask further questions. In the moments after she gave me her verdict, she mentioned a support group she held at Brigham and Women's Hospital. I nodded enthusiastically, knowing I'd never attend.

A few years ago, I moved back to Karachi for work. My parents had moved back while I was in college. Here's a quick little explainer about Karachi, just so you know what to picture. Karachi is a huge city with around 22 million people. It's modern, and it's not. It has gleaming, gorgeous, multi-story malls and large movie theaters that play the latest Hollywood and Bollywood films. People are on Tinder.

Karachi also gets listed as among the most dangerous mega cities in the world. There's no international tourism. There's beggars at almost every street corner and piles of burning trash pretty much everywhere in the city, even the really nice areas.

The Dawoodi Bohra sect, which I'm from, is a small, typically pretty well-off minority in Karachi. There's about 40,000 of us. I live in a neighborhood made up entirely of other Bohris.

Readjusting to life in Karachi as an adult was difficult. I reluctantly attended services at the same mosque I went to as a kid. I'd sit there and scan all of the faces to see if I could recognize the woman who had cut me. But then I realized that seated beside me were at least 100 other girls who had likely also been cut. I wondered what their sex lives were like. I'd sit fidgeting, wondering if any of them had escaped the cutting.

So I started asking women in Karachi to talk to me about this. Half of the women I asked said no. This woman said yes.

Mariya Karimjee

This is a friend of mine from childhood. She asked that I not use her real name, so I'm going to call her Sameena. Sameena is 27. We were friends when we were very young, but we didn't stay in touch after I moved to the US.

We sat and talked on my bedroom floor. Sameena said she'd been cut too. Unlike me, though, she knew the woman who did it. She was a distant relative.

Mariya Karimjee

The bug story. I had thought that was specific to my family. Like me, Sameena figured out on her own what had been done to her. When she was 17, she read a change.org petition asking Bohris to ban clitorectomies. Almost every Bohri I know has seen it. Sameena thought it was probably drafted and circulated by Bohris who weren't as devout as she was. Why are they questioning this? she thought. Then she did the same thing I did. She asked her mother about it.

Mariya Karimjee

That was 10 years ago. She feels differently now.

Mariya Karimjee

Recent as in February of this year, three months ago. When she says this, I know exactly what prompted the argument. It was my brother.

In February, he spoke out against FGM, female genital mutilation, at a panel at the UN. We were asked to do the panel together, but I was out of the country, so he did it alone. He sat at a long, curved conference table in a stately room with wood walls. He was one of five people who spoke that day. It was videotaped.

Mariya Karimjee

My brother learned about FGM in his college anthropology class. He thought it was something that happened in rural African villages. He had no idea about me or our mom and grandmothers. Then a Bohri girl at college set him straight, and he called me immediately, saying, "why didn't you tell me?"

After he spoke at the UN, he posted about it on Facebook. It's a long, passionate post where he urges Bohri men not to stay silent and condone FGM. In the post, he says, "FGM is not simply a women's issue, but a human rights issue. Men must start seeing it as such," and that "FGM has absolutely no place in Islam. There's nothing in the Quran about it."

The video of my brother's speech made the rounds in the Bohri community. On Facebook, there was only a show of support. Bohris from around the world Liked my brother's stance on FGM.

But less publicly, my brother had sparked some controversy. His private message folder filled up with messages from Bohris who disagreed. My parents received texts from Bohri friends in Pakistan, Tanzania, the UK, and the US, warning them that they may get in trouble with the clergy for this. A high-ranking clergy member's wife strongly discouraged me from attending further services at my mosque. Like a lot of Bohris in Karachi, Sameena saw my brother's post and showed it to her parents.

Mariya Karimjee

Quick translation. Sameena's mom basically argued, why not question everything we believe then? Praying five times a day. Fasting. Every major tenet of Islam. As Sameena pointed out, none of those things are an assault on her body. Anyhow, Sameena's fight with her parents went on.

Mariya Karimjee

The thing I really wanted to know, though, was much more personal. It was the question that had been haunting me from the moment I found out that I had been cut. My question centered on the very thing her parents told her was the goal of FGM, curbing women's desire.

Mariya Karimjee

Sameena's not married, and she hasn't had sex. She's also not in pain the same way I am.

Mariya Karimjee

I told Sameena that I thought the whole idea of curbing desire is a myth and BS, and that saying that cutting limits a woman's desire is just a way to hide what the goal really is-- to take away our enjoyment of sex. Sameena didn't entirely agree.

Mariya Karimjee

[GUJARATI]. It's a part of our culture, her mom said.

Mariya Karimjee

She was making perfect sense. I had wondered the same thing. Why were women still subjecting their daughters to this? Until recently, my grandmother didn't even know what the term FGM meant. Out of the blue, she asked me to explain it. She read about it in the paper.

This time I told her about the bug story. I asked her if she remembered when I was cut and told her how wrong I thought the practice was. I asked her if she thought it was wrong. She mumbled something about the religious clergy wanting it done, and that she supposed they knew best. I was stunned. She seemed to have no idea what the surgery did exactly, what it took away. Before I left, my grandmother held my hand and said, "your mother tried to stop it."

I didn't understand. I couldn't even process what she'd said. It took me weeks to speak to my mother about that conversation I'd had with my grandmother. When I finally did, it was so hard to bring up, I just whispered to my mom, "did you try and stop them from cutting me?"

She explained it was my grandfather who had insisted that the women in the family be cut. He believed that if the religious clergy thought this was necessary, we were wrong to question it. The fights about having me cut grew so out of control that he threatened to kick my mother out of the family. My grandmother was silent about it all. After my mother told me what really happened, our relationship changed. My anger towards her was gone almost immediately.

I wish I could tell you definitively that things are changing among Bohris. Mainly because of the secrecy, people don't really say where they stand. After my brother spoke at the UN, my father was proud of him. He apologized to me for what happened. He said it's like if someone cut off his penis. I said, yep. He shared my brother's Facebook post with more than 50 of his friends.

And then within days, he lost his confidence. He got word from a close family member that he was on the wrong side of this and he shouldn't criticize the practice-- publicly. And "publicly" is the thing. He stopped sharing the post.

Recently a Bohri leader in Sydney was prosecuted and sent to jail for FGM. After that, a handful of clergy from the Bohri community around the world started circulating letters saying that cutting is illegal and we should stop doing it. That's on the heels of a small group of us who have become very vocal about ending FGM. That's what I can do. That's a new Bohri tradition.

Sean Cole

Mariya Karimjee. Her story came to us through a podcast called The Heart, which is really great and well-produced. You should listen to it. You can find their version of the story this week on theheartradio.org or wherever you get your podcasts. A print version of Mariya's story was originally published on the website thebigroundtable.com.

[MUSIC - "NEW TRADITION" BY COMPANY]

Coming up, a brother and sister with extraordinarily similar first names and completely opposite ways of dealing with what happened to their dad when they were little. That's in a minute from WBEZ Chicago when our program continues.

Sean Cole

It's This American Life. I'm Sean Cole. Every week we choose a theme and play you all kinds of stories related to that theme. This week, "Who Do We Think We Are?", stories of folks trying to reconcile their beliefs with those of someone or someones they're related to. We're up to Act Two of the show. Act Two, "Who Wants to Know?"

This last story is also about folks coming to a kind of reckoning with their parents, but in a very different way. It's about a brother and sister named Nema and Neda Semnani. Their father died violently when they were very little. Nema, the brother, actually never met his father, and their mother died of ovarian cancer back in 2010. After she died, they packed up boxes and boxes of her stuff and sent them off with various relatives.

Nema ended up with a bunch of the boxes himself, and a filing cabinet, which he hated. He didn't want to look at any of it. Both of his parents were dead. There was history in there that he didn't want to deal with. And he was moving around a lot, apartment to apartment.

Sean Cole

This is Neda, Nema's sister. She's three years older. She felt very differently about the boxes.

Sean Cole

So Nema tucks away the boxes and the filing cabinet in a storage unit outside Washington, DC. And then a few years after their mom dies, Neda's trying to piece together the details of their parents' lives and what happened to their father. And she says to Nema, can we go check out that storage unit? So they head over there, and it's like a Hardy Boys episode.

Sean Cole

It was a trove of information about their father. And it wasn't just that one folder. In another drawer there were more files, and more in some of the boxes.

Sean Cole

She showed it to me.

Sean Cole

This is what was in the box of bad, what Neda began finding out more and more about as she dug through the folders and files. So their parents were both from Iran. They met when they were students at Berkeley in California in the '60s. And they became involved in a leftist political movement there that opposed the shah of Iran. There was the revolution in '79. The shah goes into exile. And all of these leftists who had been agitating from abroad come streaming back into the country, back into Iran, high on the possibility of new freedoms in their country.

Neda and Nema's parents were two of them. Except the shah was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, an Islamic fundamentalist who, arguably, was even more restrictive. And when the leftists-- the secular leftists-- agitated against this new regime, a lot of them were imprisoned, including Neda and Nema's dad. Their mother was still pregnant with Nema at the time. Neda was two years old.

She and her mother escaped back to the States. Nema was born about a month after they got there. And then, four months after that, their dad and 20 other activists were executed. And as Neda got older, this image of her father formed in her head.

Sean Cole

30 years later, every new fact that Neda uncovers about her dad is like a strand of DNA she can use to re-engineer him, to bring him back. For example, Neda learned that in Tehran, after someone informed on their father, he and Neda's mother and Neda all went into hiding. Neda only has shadowy memories of this-- more like memories of memories. She certainly didn't know back then that her family was essentially waiting for the government to come and arrest everyone. And they figured they wouldn't be waiting long.

Sean Cole

Every time she found out a detail like this, she'd want to tell her brother, to share it with him. This is what Mom and Dad went through, our mom and dad. This is where we come from. But Nema, her brother, wasn't interested. Not that he wasn't interested, he aggressively did not want to know any of these details she was finding out. This whole project of exhuming the past, re-animating their parents, what did he have to gain from that?

Sean Cole

Whereas Neda is swimming in the details of the revolution and the escape and the execution practically every day-- she's writing a book about it, actually-- and those details are sometimes hard to carry around. A bit of what she's learned. And here I'll just issue a personal content advisory warning to Nema, who, if you're listening to this and you still don't want to know this stuff, you should turn down the radio for a minute.

Firstly, the group their dad was part of staged an armed uprising against Khomeini. It was a terrible plan, and it went badly. The irony is that their dad opposed the uprising, didn't take part in it. But it didn't matter. The governmental guards arrested him, bound his hands behind him with a rope, and marched him back to his parents' house.

This whole eerie scene ensues there, with their dad, their aunt, and these four armed guards sitting around, waiting for their mother to arrive. She doesn't arrive. She calls instead. The aunt says, everything's OK. Bring Neda to your mother's place. It was code. Her mother lived in California.

The escape through Iranian Kurdistan was harrowing and took days. They rode horses and walked and were driven by smugglers-- smugglers who abandoned them on the roadside twice. They were desperately thirsty and hungry. Neda went half crazy for a little bit from heatstroke. Again, she was two. Their mom, pregnant with Nema, fell down an embankment at one point but climbed back up and kept walking.

Meantime, Neda and Nema's dad was being held in solitary confinement at Evin prison. Neda describes his cell block as a prison within a prison, filled with torture devices. So Neda understands Nema not wanting to know these things.

Sean Cole

Nema learns about these things almost by accident. Through his earmuffs, as he says, things just creep in now and then. And yeah, the torture is very high on that list of things he doesn't want to know. But practically everything's on that list.

Sean Cole

Their dad doesn't move around a lot in the video, actually. His hands are resting on a table. He looks tired, defeated. In certain moments, he seems near tears. It's not the kind of video you watch when you want to have a sunny idea of where you come from. Still, in a way, Nema had the same experience watching that little bit of the video that Neda has had this whole time in all of her research. He says it proved that his dad was a living person, that he wasn't a myth. But he doesn't think he's going to watch any more of it.

It's funny, but Neda and Nema's mom knew they'd end up each feeling the way they do about the past. She all but said it in an interview with StoryCorps, that traveling recording booth where people tell stories about their lives. In this case, their mom was just talking to one of the StoryCorps volunteers, who asked her what her late husband would have thought of the family's life in America.

Sean Cole

Neda first heard that recording long after their mother died. Nema has never heard it, unless he's listening to this right now. But I did tell him what she said. And he said, that's 100% accurate. She was a smart woman.

[MUSIC - "WHAT I AM" BY EDIE BRICKELL & NEW BOHEMIANS]

Sean Cole

Our program was produced today by Neil Drumming and Nancy Updike. Our production staff includes Zoe Chace, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Lyra Smith, and Matt Tierney. Our editor is Joel Lovell. Editorial help from Julie Snyder and Elna Baker. Other staff, Elise Bergerson, Emily Condon, Kimberly Henderson, and Seth Lind. Research help from Christopher Swetala. Music help from Damien Graef and Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Extra special thanks to my boss, Ira Jeffrey Glass. You know, he performs magic too. And he was doing this magic trick for the Cookie Monster the other day where he presented him with three sealed envelopes.

Sean Cole

I'm Sean Cole. Ira will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.