Homelessness

Abstract

In the summer of 1995, I had to return to Iran. My father was sick and, since he still faced a travel ban, I had no choice but to go back to see him. Borders have followed him even into his late seventies. Even weak and ill, the borders forbade him to move. In the early 1990s, I asked him to apply for a passport. We believed that an old man would no longer be considered a danger to the state. We were wrong. The authorities, in reopening the case, revealed that there was a ‘minor’ problem in his file. They told my father that he had been subject to a travel ban even before the 1979 Revolution, during the reign of the Shah, and the post-revolutionary authorities required an explanation. My father had no idea as to the reason for the ban. The authorities said that until he explained why he had been banned from travelling under the Shah, they could not lift his travel ban under the rule of the Islamic Republic. The most painful and eeriest part of the Kafkaesque border bureaucracy in my father’s case is that he — and most likely no-one else either, including the authorities themselves — does not know and will probably never know the reason for his travel ban. A forced immobility had been imposed on him.

The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner;

he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.

Hugo of St. Victor, twelfth-century Augustinian mystic

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window

Charles Baudelaire