Introduction

“We stormed every classroom, inscribed our slogans on the blackboard . . . Never had mayhem brought more peace. All our lives we had been taught the virtues of behaving, and now we were discovering the importance of misbehaving. Too much fear had tainted our days. Too many afternoons had passed in silence, listening to a fanatic’s diatribes. We were rebelling because we were not evil, we had not sinned, and we knew nothing of the apocalypse. . . . This was 1979, the year that showed us we could make our own destinies. We were rebelling because rebelling was all we could do to quell the rage in our teenage veins. Together as girls we found the courage we had been told was not in us.”

In Journey from the Land of No Roya Hakakian recalls her childhood and adolescence in prerevolutionary Iran with candor and verve. The result is a beautifully written coming-of-age story about one deeply intelligent and perceptive girl’s attempt to ?nd an authentic voice of her own at a time of cultural closing and repression. Remarkably, she manages to re-create
a time and place dominated by religious fanaticism, violence, and fear with an open heart and often with great humor.

Hakakian was twelve years old in 1979 when the revolution swept through Tehran. The daughter of an esteemed poet, she grew up in a household that hummed with intellectual life. Family gatherings were punctuated by witty, satirical exchanges and spontaneous recitations of poetry. But the Hakakians were also part of the very small Jewish population in Iran who witnessed the iron fist of the Islamic fundamentalists increasingly tightening its grip. It is with the innocent confusion of youth that Roya describes her discovery of a swastika—“a plus sign gone awry, a dark reptile with four hungry claws”—painted on the wall near her home. As a schoolgirl she watched as friends accused of reading blasphemous books were escorted from class by Islamic Society guards, never to return. Only much later did Roya learn that she was spared a similar fate because her teacher admired her writing.

Hakakian relates in the most poignant, and at times painful, ways what life was like for women after the country fell into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who had declared an insidious war against them, but we see it all through the eyes of a strong, youthful optimist who somehow came up in the world believing that she was different, knowing she was special. At her loneliest, Roya discovers the consolations of writing while sitting on the rooftop of her house late at night. There, “pen in hand, I led my own chorus of words, with a melody of my own making.” And she discovers the craft that would ultimately enable her to find her own voice and become her own person.

A wonderfully evocative story, Journey from the Land of No reveals an Iran most readers have not encountered and marks the debut of a stunning new talent.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

Chapter 1

NEW YORK CITY, JULY 13, 1999

It was an ordinary morning at the office. wrapped in a heavy sweater, sleeves pulled over fingers hiding from the arctic indoor summer temperatures, I had every reason to expect this to be a day like any other. CNN was on. A pile of several major dailies lay on one side of my desk, and on the other was a second stack of magazines I had brought back from the Delta Shuttle courtesy stand. The first order of business was to answer e-mails, which I usually managed to do while sipping a tall cup of latté. I glanced at the names in the in-box, keeping an eye out for any breaking news on the Associated Press wire service. The telephone rang.

"Roya speaking."

"Hi, Roya. This is David, David Unger, calling from the New York Times."

"Oh, hi! You are . . ."

"An editorial writer working on a piece on the recent student uprisings in Iran. You come highly recommended as a source. Is this a good time?"

No. It was not a good time. It was never a good time to talk about Iran. I rarely did. But this call, I knew, I had to take. Thousands of students had taken to the streets in the largest pro-reform demonstration since 1979. Now, in the demonstration's third day, the students were calling on the newly elected president, Mohammad Khatami, to join their movement against the "hard-line" elements in power, mainly the supreme leader, Seyed Ali Khamenei. Many had been arrested. A few had disappeared, among them Elahe, a dear friend. And sitting in my office, watching the news, seeing young men and women face the riot police, their shirts bloodied, their faces hidden under rags, thugs charging at them with batons, seeing them be clubbed and fall to the pavement, was all too familiar. All too frustrating. There was nothing I could do to help them or my missing friend, except to talk to an editorialist. In my guilty helplessness, I had placed all hope in the New York Times to save Elahe, the students, and Iran itself in a sharp cluster of five hundred words or less. So I said, "Yes. I have been expecting your call. But hold on for just a minute, please."

This was simply a call between a television journalist and her colleague in print. Still, I got up from my chair, peeked into the hallway, and quietly shut my door. This was a call about Iran; no call could be more personal. We began talking.

I had expected to hear from David. I had also expected the conversation to proceed as it often does with Americans. They come, I had decided, in two kinds: the misinformed, who think of Iran as a backward nation of Arabs, veiled and turbaned, living on the periphery of oases and fairly represented by a government of mullahs; and the misguided, who believed the shah's regime was a puppet government run by the CIA, and who think that Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical cabal are an authentic, homegrown answer to unwarranted U.S. meddling.

The first group always amused me. In their company, I would blame every appalling trait in my character on my "Bedouin upbringing." Walking along Coney Island beach on a hot summer evening, I licked the drops of ice cream off my palms, and when I saw the shocked look on my date's face, I explained that my lack of etiquette was due to a childhood spent in a land where napkins and utensils were unheard of. His believing blue eyes welled with tears of empathy.

A college roommate once asked what my family used for transportation in Tehran. I told her we kept six camels of various sizes in our backyard. My father rode the papa camel, my mother the mama camel, my brothers the younger camels, and I the baby camel. While my roommate's common sense was still in the grip of political correctness, I went on to design a fantastically intricate grid of four-legged traffic regulations for bovines on even days and equines on odd.

But that second group-those misguided Americans-exasperated me. Bright individuals abandoned inquiry and resorted to obsolete formulas: America had done Iran wrong. Therefore the clerics cut ties with the United States. Therefore the clerics were leading the nation to sovereignty. These individuals had yet to realize that though Iran's rulers fervently opposed U.S. imperialism, they were neither just to nor loved by their own people. This second group had not accepted the notion that the enemy of their enemy was yet another enemy.

It took only one question for me to decide that David belonged to the second group. He asked, "Do the 'reformists,' backed by President Khatami, stand a chance against the 'hard-liners'?"

This bipolar division between reformists and hard-liners was as crude as my own division between misinformed and misguided Americans. Reducing a nation of seventy million, with three thousand years of history, to two simple camps infuriated me. The assumption that Iran was on the verge of an imminent transformation if only one faction managed to subdue the other had the ring of a sensational headline, and though as a reporter I understood its logic, as an Iranian I detested it. True watchers of Iran knew that Iran itself was the "beloved" its great poets had serenaded for centuries: capricious yet slow, inspiring hope in one breath and evoking despair in another.

However, David quickly added that the editorials did not always reflect his own personal views. In fact, they often did not. This was an important disclaimer. Several more nuanced questions followed. His voice was tender. If a deadline was looming, his voice did not reveal it. In its timbre, there was time and infinite patience, which encouraged me to tell him my worst fears. Every horrifying possibility flashed through my mind: Elahe assaulted, bleeding in a ditch or along one of the many canals of Tehran; or sitting before interrogators, blindfolded, forced to write a recantation letter. Talking to David, I dressed in words the horrors I was conjuring. I told him so. I also told him that I had no faith in the new president, or any other cleric, to deliver what the students were demanding. I saw that the protestors were in grave danger. In the most dignified way I knew, I begged him to write with utmost urgency.

The next day brought an editorial headlined fateful moment in iran; the next week, the quashing of the uprising; the third week, the news of Elahe and her release from custody; the next month, another e-mail from David-a new editorial deadline.

In the weeks that followed, David's notes continued to arrive. He wanted to know about the reformists' background and their former allegiance; the Iranian relationship with the Lebanese Hezbollah; the role of secular Iranians in the revolution of 1979 and in the subsequent fallout. With Elahe's release, I had little incentive to talk about Iran. Writing to David took real effort. I had to provide him with the "insider facts," information only natives are privy to, and add my own views, which were embittered by my history. Every time I wanted to substantiate an opinion, I drew upon a personal experience I had never talked about before, until at last I wrote, apologetically, that I could not continue. Despite my reputation, I confessed that I was not a good source after all. There were experts far better than I, whose names I suggested. When it came to Iran, I admitted, I was anything but objective. The past and the events of the years that followed the revolution had biased me forever.

Within moments after I e-ma view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Questions from the Publisher's Reading Guide:

1. Roya refers to her brother Albert’s departure for America as “the first mystery of my life.” How does she go about sleuthing out his reasons for leaving? What political realities does she glean from the coded images in Tofigh magazine? What is the significance of the image of the black fish, “lynched, hanging lifeless in the middle of the page?” Why does she fail to question her family about these strange images?

2. Roya views her uncle Ardi as a stunning success for his ability to pass as a Muslim: “Even Jews mistook him for a Muslim and behaved as they did in the company of one. They offered him the best seat in the house and waited cheerfully on him… He had made a safe passage to the other side.” Why is the family awed by and envious of this phenomenon, yet horrified when Ardi wants to marry a Muslim woman? What does Roya learn about her own identity as a Middle Eastern Jewish female from this episode? She writes, “What Uncle Ardi had really shed was fear, the fear of claiming his share of the good life like any other middle-class citizen.” Why does the Ayatollah’s return in 1979 reverse Ardi’s luck?

3. What do the ads in Today’s Woman reveal about the status of women in Iran in the1960s and 1970s? Neela’s mother wore a black veil, whereas her daughters dressed in modern clothes and did not cover their hair. What does this say about the attitude of Iranians toward women in those years? How does that attitude change after the revolution in the 1980s?

4. The Seamus Heaney poem quoted at the beginning of the memoir concludes with: “Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime/To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring/Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” Discuss Roya’s use of writing as a replacement for more childlike coping mechanisms. What are the circumstances during which Roya discovers writing as a liberating and grounding act?

5. Roya describes a subtle but pronounced shift in mood and physical comfort from being among all Jews –“effortless, like being in my pajamas”–to being around a mixed group of Jews and Muslims–“like being in my party dress… the fabric itched… the zipper pinched.” Yet she enjoys the slight discomfort: “I liked how it changed me… I liked how all of us reshuffled to put on our dress as a family.” Is this a childish conceit? If not, discuss why Roya is energized by this tension. Is her family similarly energized?

6. When Jahan questions Farah’s virtue the morning after their wedding, throwing the family into turmoil, Roya discovers that, despite all their bluster and swagger about keeping women from harm, men are useless. “All of them stood by and watched Farah be forsaken, realizing this should have saddened or disillusioned me. But, instead, it filled me with glee.” Why? Why does this incident inspire Roya to rush home and read, a pursuit she calls “my corrective device?”

7. Why is Roya thrown into a panic when her classmates at the Jewish girls’ school nominate her as their class representative? Why does she insist, “Genius snapped all good things in half… Clown was the praise I longed to hear?”

8. Like many Iranians enraptured by the revolution, Roya is callous toward the early executions of the shah’s ministers by the Ayatollah’s administration. “I smiled too. I, too, believed those dead to be lesser people, if they were people at all.” What changes her attitude?

9. Why does Roya refer to Z’s home as “that other school,” and a place where “I watched my childishness swirl down the drain.” What private rituals are enacted in this basement by Bibi, Roya and Z, and Great-Uncle? What impact will they have on Roya’s future?

10. Mrs. Arman uses a strategy of touch in her attempt to reach and rehumanize Roya and her classmates under their government-mandated veils. “She would… stand behind the next student, tug at the next scarf, turn the next collar over, lay her book on a head or her hands on one of our shoulders… she undid what the uniforms were meant to do: drive us out of sight.” Where else do we see physical contact used as an antidote to the depersonalizing effects of the Ayatollah’s regime? What prompts Roya to comment, “How much more tolerable everything would be in Iran if only I could live in it blind?”

11. As Tehran’s political climate grows increasingly threatening to non-Muslims, and the family’s avenues of escape narrow, Roya observes her father’s harnessing of poetry as both solace and weapon. “He locked himself in a room for days to forge his own brand of remedy: compose a poem for the passport officials!… Thrilled by his creation, he smiled the smile of a great schemer on the verge of pulling a most vicious trick on his unknowing adversaries.” Discuss the role of poetry in Hakakian family mythology, and in the fabric of prerevolutionary, everyday Iran. Was there a comparable tradition of poetics anywhere in the West during this same time period? Where in the text of the memoir do you find lyricism and/or rhythm that hint at the Iranian appetite for poetry?

12. Of starting over in the United States, Roya writes,“In the new country, you must begin anew. To make yourself do so, you invent a metaphor. Not a beautiful metaphor, but a practical one to propel you. You imagine you are a secondhand car whose odometer has been reset to zero by exile….” What feature of her friendship with David Unger of the New York Times persuades Roya to step out of this exile and examine her memories? Why is her choice between Persian and English so vital to the writing of this memoir?

13. What is the truth behind the disappearance of Samad Behrangi, author of The Little Black Fish? Why does it smack of betrayal to thousands of young revolutionaries? The book begins with the story of Behrangi, the mystery of a death, and notions of blood and sacrifice run through the whole story. What is the significance of each of these notions in Roya’s life? What do they reveal about the Iranian culture?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Information
»	Publisher's Reading Guide
»	Author's web site Includes op-eds by the author, interviews, essays and upcoming author appearances.
»	"Revolution Redux: Watching the Uprising in Kiev" Washington Post Op-ed
»	Reviews
»	Pictures of Characters in the Book

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

Rate this book