Introduction

The boy wants nothing more than his maman’s lap and a view of the birds that soar over his Kurdish village. Nameless, impressionable, and watchful, the boy soon becomes a man in a mountaintop ritual with his baba, uncles, and cousins. And as a man, he must join the male villagers when they march to war against the shah’s army. But the Kurds, fierce protectors of their homeland against centuries of invasion, fall to the shah; the boy’s father is massacred before his eyes. As the only survivor, adopted by the very soldiers that murdered his father, the boy begins a new life as Reza Pejman Khourdi—conscripted soldier for the new Iran.

Ten years later, in Tehran, Reza is notorious within the Iranian army for his cruelty against Kurds, so-called rebels who fight against an Iran they cannot believe in. Promoted to captain, Reza is ordered to find a Tehrani bride and move back to Kermanshah, his homeland, to enforce the shah’s rule. Reza tells no one he is a Kurd, suppressing all memories of his maman’s tenderness and his baba’s bravery. He weds Meena, secretly hoping to banish his orphan loneliness in her genteel breeding. But Meena has other ideas: when she sets foot in Kermanshah, she is horrified by the lot of a captain’s wife, living among Kurds who look suspiciously like her husband. Reza and Meena fight savagely for dominance—over each other, over the Kurdish villagers, and over the mountainous land itself.

Poetic in its dark beauty, The Age of Orphans casts the clash between tradition and modernity in a new light—as a doomed war within one orphan’s psyche.

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Excerpt

The roof i s made of thick mud, straw and woven sticks.
Each morning the boy climbs a small mound of stones to
reach the window ledge and then the roof’s lip and finally hoist
himself to this top spot that affords a glimpse of endless horizon,
the fan of a more ardent wind. Look, Maman! Look! Legs shrink
and stretch to send the body of the boy, at four and five and finally
six years, up, over and out for a moment’s flight; a swift reconnaissance
of air and cloud and sky quick enough to blur the eyes
and bate the breath. Mountains fold into the earth and the heavens
round their blue nimbus over everything, and in this instant
the boy ascends. His bones are thin and brittle, arms flung out and
lax and his lungs open evenly to shout. Maaaaaaman! Looooook!
No one calls back to him; no one comes; no aunts or cousins
make mention or mind of the boy who every morning jumps
and jumps again. He is but a boy, they say. Let the mountain air fill
his lungs and the flashes of sky pulse through his head. The enthusiasms
of a child are easily exhausted.
In the end, breathless and sore, the boy cannot fly and instead
must run to his maman to sit in the crisscross of her legs, where he comforts himself with the sweet taste of her milk and the
steady sound of heartbeat until the bird in him is sated and calm.
After the love and the drink he is ready again to walk about the
village and take in the sights that repeat every day: his uncle hanging
the skinned carcasses of goats and geese on the posts behind
his house, messily slicing open their bellies as he smiles at the
boy; older cousins stuck in games of stick fight and rock fight
and fistfight turn to tease the boy with their spilled blood and
swollen faces; girl cousins and aunts arguing and singing at the lip
of the fountain, their arms sunk elbow- deep into the water to
wash last night’s rice pots and this morning’s bread pans, keep him
away with a simple tsk and nod of the head. At his own house the
boy tiptoes to peer into the divan, where the men recline, take the
pipe and keep each other company through the hottest part of
the day. It is a room of rugs and whispers and smoke, and he is
careful to see and not be seen, staying just long enough to catch
sight of his baba’s eyes, blue and far and empty of any recognition
for the boy’s little head that peeks just above the rim of the window
and slowly floats past.
He is just a boy, young, useless and kept from the tasks and
play, the chiming world of women and the dark room of men.
And every afternoon he takes to the periphery of the village in
search of birds to watch and want to be, birds without limitations
of mamans and babas, yes and no, mountain and fence.
In the groves he marks the spry stares of sparrows and warblers
for just a minute; they are too quick and low and fickle to
carry the boy’s interest. He does not care for the inky crows
that keep company with the sheep in the pens, or the finches
that peck alongside the chickens and march out to the fields.
... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. A Kurdish proverb, “It is more difficult to contend with oneself than with the world,” serves as an epigraph to The Age of Orphans. How does this proverb speak to Reza Khourdi’s life?

2. Reza’s fascination with birds—from the boy’s flying fantasies to the captain’s pet falcon—endures throughout his lifetime. What is the source of his bird obsession? When the birds speak in the novel, proclaiming, “Of earth, we see all” (47), what do they see in the boy and his people?

3. Maman tells her own story of orphanhood and coming-of-age. What qualities has Maman passed along to her son? How does her story resemble her son’s, and how does it differ?

4. Describe the boy’s emotions during his father’s violent death. What is the source of the boy’s shame, as well as his choice to banish his father to “a damp purgatory of forget and never-remember”? (67) What impact will these forgotten emotions have on the boy’s future?

5. Images of boots recur throughout The Age of Orphans. Discuss passages where boots appear, and consider what they might symbolize to Reza at different times in his life.

6. Consider the significance of Reza’s name. Why is he nameless until he is conscripted into the army? What is the meaning of his new name? Why is he assigned the third name “Pejman,” in addition to “Reza Khourdi”?

7. Discuss Reza’s military training and social life in the army barracks. When is he able to find community with his fellow cadets, and when does he part from his peers? Why do the boys reassert ethnic differences after a like-minded period as “sameskins, brethren”? (88) Why does Reza ultimately lie to betray a fellow conscript, the Baluch twin, and what are the consequences of his lie?

8. When Reza believes he is fifteen years old, the number is actually “an orphan age, as declared by the spurious newlyweds Baba Shah and Maman Iran.” (114–15) What is the difference between a calendar age and an “orphan age”? How does this “orphan age” assert itself upon Reza’s identity?

9. Describe Reza’s experience in Saqqez, the Kurdish village he invades with the shah’s army. How do Reza’s actions in Saqqez determine his future as a soldier and as a Kurd? How do his victims, particularly the little boy with a similar face and the girl he rapes, respond to his violent acts?

10. What are Reza’s first impressions of Meena as he watches her father’s funeral procession from a rooftop in Tehran? What does he see in Meena? Which of her qualities does he not yet see?

11. The Khourdis’ wedding night is narrated from both Reza’s and Meena’s points of view. Compare their descriptions of the marriage and its consummation. How do their perspectives of this event differ? How do their different experiences bode for the future of the marriage?

12. Why does the shah’s army command Reza to return to Kermanshah? What is the reasoning behind this “rare move … to put [him] back so close to the nest?” (202) Does Reza fulfill the army’s expectations in Kermanshah? Why or why not?

13. How do the Kurds in Kermanshah react to the formation of Iran as a nation? How do they view outsiders like the shah’s soldiers? How do outsiders view the Kurds? What is their attitude toward Reza and his changes to their schools, farming practices, and other elements of daily life? How do they handle the open secret of Reza’s Kurdish identity?

14. Discuss Reza’s connection to the land, from the farmlands of his childhood to the winding streets of Tehran to the Zagros Mountains outside Kermanshah. At what points in his life is he particularly attached to nature and the land? In the end, does Reza have a true homeland? Why or why not?

15. The struggles of Reza and his tribe are representative of the larger Kurdish struggle of the twentieth century. What does Reza’s experience show us about some of the personal elements at work behind larger geopolitical developments? How do the tribal populations of the Middle East and ancient internal conflicts play a role in the current crises that plague the region?

16. After Meena’s death, Reza says of his children, “I have orphaned them just as I was once orphaned and now they have absconded from these stone palaces and abandoned me in the shadows of their escapes.” (286) What are Reza’s motivations for orphaning his children? What consequences, if any, does he suffer for the murder? What are some possible futures for Reza and Meena’s six children—how might this cycle of violence and orphans continue or end?

17. Discuss Laleh Khadivi’s unique writing style, and point to passages that are particularly poetic or moving. What is the effect of the multiple perspectives that contribute to the novel? How would the novel be different if it were narrated solely from Reza’s point of view?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Laleh Khadivi's web site
»	Full excerpt

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