Iranians, it was once said, are afflicted by a unique strain of melancholy: Those who live in Iran dream of leaving, while those who were exiled dream of going back.
When 44-year-old Alireza Pahlavi, the youngest son of the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, took his life on Tuesday, it was undeniably attributable in part to a demoralizing malady, chronic depression, which he may have inherited from his father. But it was also an undeniable aftershock of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, whose reverberations are still being felt today.
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A country like Iran that has repeatedly been subjected to public heartbreak over the last few decades -- most notably the loss of over 200,000 native sons in the ruinous eight-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- naturally confronts the self-inflicted death of a child of privilege with mixed feelings.
As is often the case, however, Alireza Pahlavi's great privileges were coupled with equally profound misfortune. Until he was 12, he had experienced a fairy-tale childhood as a scion of one of the world's richest and most powerful monarchs. By 13, he had abruptly fled his homeland and experienced the painful and public humiliation of his family's legacy, as well as the death of his father from cancer.
Later, he would lose the person closest to him when his younger sister Leila, age 31, killed herself in a London hotel room in 2001.
For those, like myself, who were born outside Iran or left at a very young age, the term "exiles" was never an appropriate fit. We were second-generation immigrants, and we took it for granted that we would adopt new cultures and languages. We had few if any memories of or claims over what had been lost, only romanticized stories from elders about the verdant Caspian Sea region (shomal), the majestic Alborz Mountains, and the luscious Persian lamb whose fat was miraculously concentrated in the tail -- the original "junk in the trunk."
Alireza Pahlavi's generation of uprooted Iranians -- young adolescents at the time of the revolution -- were often affected more profoundly than those who were too young to remember, or old enough to cope. Three decades later, many still struggle to find their bearings. They negotiate what Brazilians would refer to as saudade, a deep longing for something that is unattainable. Their lack of rootedness has often prevented them from forging stable emotional relationships and fulfilling their professional potential.
I sometimes wondered why Alireza, a serious student who had cut short his Ph.D. studies at Harvard in ancient Iranian studies, remained silent all these years. Although the Pahlavi family's experience as exiles was no doubt softened by significant (though significantly exaggerated) wealth, it was made more difficult by the scorn of many of their exiled compatriots who held them partially if not entirely accountable for their collective plight.
Consumed with his own demons, Alireza perhaps concluded that he had been dealt a hand that he could not win. If he remained on the sidelines he would be excoriated by some for not speaking out. And if he became active and outspoken, others would excoriate him for having Ahmed Chalabi-like aspirations, as they have his older brother Reza.
So he chose to remain in his Boston home, surrounded by his books, with the shades always pulled down.
As a student of history, Alireza was perhaps puzzled by the discipline's relationship to his father. While Hafez al-Assad, the ruthless Syrian dictator who massacred some 20,000 civilians in the city of Hama in 1982, is most commonly remembered as a "shrewd tactician," it has become impossible to maintain intellectual credibility while writing about the Pahlavi era without referring to the Shah as a "blood-soaked," "imperialist puppet."
(It is one of the brutal realities of power and statecraft that today Assad's son Bashar, president of Syria, is feted by visiting U.S. politicians and analysts extolling his shrewdness and moderation, while Alireza's obituary writers render him the forgotten son of a two-bit dictator.)
Meanwhile, longtime inhabitants of the Islamic Republic have developed a more nuanced take on their recent past. Of course, Iranians acknowledge that the rampant corruption and political repression that was endemic in Pahlavi's Iran sowed the seeds of its own demise.
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