Author Excavates Her Parents' Revolutionary Past, From Berkeley to Iran

Neda Toloui-Semnani is an Emmy Award-winning writer and producer who’s written for Vice News and The Washington Post. She’s just released her first book, a memoir, “They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents.”

It’s pieced together from interviews, diaries and archives, and dives deep into her family’s history, both in the U.S. and Iran, starting with her grandfather’s decision in the 1920s to choose a surname for his family, and tracing her parents’ return to Iran to support the revolution after they were radicalized as Marxists in the leftist climate of Berkeley in the late 1960s.

Toloui-Semnani spoke with The California Report Magazine’s host, Sasha Khokha. Excerpts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.

On Iranian students and radical 1960s Berkeley

Whether it’s immigration, or even something as simple as where you go to college, the moment that you touch down someplace can set you on your course. It’s one of the reasons why I spent so much time researching the time and the place, digging into what Berkeley was like in 1969 versus 1965 versus 1972 to get a sense of how Berkeley was changing — how the students within the university, but also the people within the city, were changing.

Iranian students [like my parents] were becoming more political and certainly more militant, looking around at groups like the Black Panthers to see how they were doing it. They were very aware of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. In fact, some of them were members of both SDS and the Iranian student movement. So these weren’t separate groups. The Iranian students very much influenced those groups and were influenced by them in return. For young people who were feeling that drive to change, there was one part of the spectrum that was drawn to the more militant, radical side of political activism.

On that first day in Berkeley, she walked hurriedly down Telegraph Avenue. She had a quick, funny gait: heels in and toes out. It pitched her hips back and forth in a way that was a little tomboyish and a little suggestive. She found the sublet, which belonged to a young couple who were visiting Iran for a few months. The apartment was essentially a small room, but my mother took it to share with another Iranian girl I’ll call Naz, who was a few years younger than she, the little sister of a friend.

The girls moved into the studio with a love seat, milk crates, a phone, and a turntable. They slapped fat psychedelic-flower decals on the wall and pulled down the Murphy bed to share. That summer, their apartment was where everyone gathered on their way to the Iran house, the meeting place for all the ISA [Iranian Student Association] chapters in Northern California, a couple of blocks away.

My mother and my father were part of the Iranian student movement, which was an anti-Shah movement. There were various different factions of that. The one thing that really unified them is that they didn’t want the Shah of Iran to be in power anymore. My parents were on the left. They started as Marxist-Leninists, and as Berkeley tracked towards Maoism, which it was wont to do in the early 1970s, so [did] my parents also go further and further to the left.

As the Iranian student movement, the anti-Shah movement, was really becoming established — after the takeover of the Iranian consulate [in San Francisco in 1970], for example — it became illegal to be part of what they call “the confederation,” the Iranian student movement. So then people were starting to cover their faces [at protests]. Looking at old newspaper clippings and video from protests, you’ll see that often they’re wearing masks or hats and sunglasses. And as the ’70s went on, these became full-face coverings. They were very aware that they were being watched [by both the Shah’s secret police and, potentially, the FBI].

On the promise of the revolution failing for her parents

The planes going back into Iran [after the revolution] were filled with these young, idealistic activists who had been working for so long towards this revolution. One of the stories that people told me was that people filling these planes were singing revolutionary anthems. Both the leftists and, obviously, the Islamists, who were also part of this revolutionary fervor.

At first, this group of the leftist student movement joined up with the Ayatollah and the Islamic wing trying to overthrow the Shah. This was a coalition movement, really. It was a pragmatic choice, one might say. As soon as the goal [of deposing the Shah] was achieved, then questions were brought to the fore, like, “How do we govern?” “Who gets to govern?” “Who takes power?” It became clear that the revolution wasn’t going to pan out the way that the students certainly had hoped, or my parents had hoped.

On her harrowing escape from Iran on horseback as a toddler

I have very vague memories of Iran. I remember feeling part of a family. My mother was heavily pregnant with my brother when we escaped. When you’re a kid and you’re preverbal, it’s like all of your memories are trapped in your body somehow there, and feelings or sensations.

I remember nearly nothing from the journey. I do remember wanting my mother that night. I remember that when she told me I couldn’t be with her, I was confused and wondered if I were in trouble. I didn’t understand that there wasn’t enough room for me on her horse. I didn’t understand that she was too big, the horse too small, and the trail too dangerous.

Now I also wonder if the last thing my mother would have wanted just then was a child pressed up against her. To be strong for me, she needed space for me. I was given my own horse and my own mustachioed smuggler. He scared me […]

It grew later still. The horse swayed beneath me. I fell asleep against the smuggler. In my sleep, my fingers loosen their grip on my windbreaker. I woke up when it fell from my hand, floating down the mountainside. I begged the smugglers, my mother, aunts, and uncle to stop the horses and go back and find it. My smuggler went back and tried, but he didn’t see it.

I know where it is, I told him. I can find it.

But it was dark and late. We had to keep moving. The moment they stopped looking for my jacket, I filled up with a fear so profound, the rest of me shrank to nothing.

The world is unfair and I am washed away. I remember that feeling clearly.

On trying to learn who her father was, after he was executed by the Ayatollah in 1983

[When I was reporting this book,] people would give me these little kind of crumbs of [who] my father [was]. He would bite part of his hand when he was thinking, or he would click a pen when he was talking, or his voice when he would laugh, or how he would respond when he got annoyed. All of a sudden, there was a texture to him that had been missing before. Someone even recently sent me a picture where my dad’s laughing. I had never seen a picture of him laughing before. The only image I’d ever seen of my father speaking was in his trial, which I found online.

So it was these kinds of ways that I was able to patchwork him together from an idea into something that was more textured, more human and flawed, and kind of beautiful. When I was reflecting on it, I realized that’s actually how we get to know who people are. We feel like we know the fullness of them. I started working on this book after my mother had passed away. So there was a lot of comfort in feeling like I was able to spend time with my father.

On hearing a StoryCorps interview with her mother, three years after her death from cancer

I was kind of frozen in place. I hadn’t heard my mother’s voice for so many years at that point, and she and I were really close. All of a sudden, it was actually a really beautiful moment of being parented. She just showed me that she had seen me all those years growing up. When I thought no one understood, my mom had seen what was happening, how lost I had felt, and how much I was grieving my dad, and how I was trying to make sense of everything.

The way I took that moment was that she had given me space all these years, to take my time and find my way through this story and make my own peace with it.

On what she hopes this story will mean for her son someday

I hope that this is where my son could go when he needs his mom. I wanted to be able to be with him. Anytime he needs me. You know, I started writing this book many years before he was born, so I didn’t start this project with him in mind. After he was born, it changed what the project meant to me. I hope my son has something to hold on to after I’m gone.

Neda Toloui-Semnani will talk with The California Report Magazine’s Sasha Khokha in a free, virtual conversation with the Commonwealth Club on March 23.