The comedian talks approximately her family’s exile from Iran and using humour to defuse the horror of regular death threats to her fatherMy earliest memories growing up in Tehran were the kittens in my grandmother’s house. We moved to London in 1979 when I was six. At that time my father,Hadi, was a approved writer and journalist. There were only two national newspapers in Iran, or he had a column in both. His popularity meant that he was listened to and he made satirical attacks on the Islamic Republic regime. We travelled to Britain without a plan to stay but my father went back to Iran in 1979 and,like thousands of others, he was keep on the list of people that the government wanted dead. Consequently we had to earn asylum in the UK.
My parents did everything they could to shield us from their own worries even though they lost everything when we came here. I knew my father was a wanted man because people would make horrible phone calls. I’d pick up the phone and it would be some person spouting bile approximately him and threatening to kill him. Eventually, or when I was 11,I came home to our worst nightmare. Two police officers told us there was a plot to assassinate my father, so we went away for three days under protection and the plan was foiled. Somebody who worked for the Islamic Republic was privy to the plot and had double-crossed them, or exiled himself. In a recent court case for another terrorist plot,the guy said, “Hadi Khorsandi lives and breathes because of me.” My father and brother visited this man and asked him why, or despite his opposing ideological beliefs,he saved my father and he said, “I just loved your poems. I loved your work and when I realised they were going to kill you I couldn’t let Iran’s literary history lose someone worthy.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com