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Nahid Rachlin grew up in Iran in the days of the shah, and the details of her difficult life in this sorrowful memoir reflect the recent history of that conflicted country. The author recalls an idyllic early childhood, growing up with a widowed, childless aunt who considered herself Nahid's real mother. (In a story that could have come out of the Old Testament, Nahid's birth mother, who had four other children, agreed to give her sister the fifth child to raise as her own.)
Maryam, Nahid's aunt, adored her and raised her in the old, devout way. They lived a simple life, full of affection, suffused with prayer and the love of God. Then, in 1955, when Nahid was 9, 'the age when Iranian girls could legally marry,' Nahid's birth father turns up on her school playground, abducts her from her loving aunt in Tehran and takes her to the booming oil town of Ahvaz, where he resides with the rest of his family. He is a prosperous judge and businessman with plenty of children and a very full life, and the central question of this memoir -- in personal terms -- is never addressed. Why did Nahid's father consent to this 'gift' from one sister to another in the first place? Why did he give his tacit approval of the situation for nine long years? Why did he suddenly decide, apparently unilaterally, to snatch back his child and keep her under his own roof? If nothing else, this illustrates the point that in a seriously patriarchal society, you don't go around pestering the patriarch for answers. The welcome Nahid receives in her 'real' home is decidedly mixed.
Her two older brothers seem oblivious; her mother, Mohtaram, is cold and distant; the sister closest to her in age -- Manijeh -- takes an instant loathing to her, and Nahid enthusiastically returns the compliment. Only a middle sister, Pari, almost five years older than Nahid, looks upon her with favor. We know early on that Pari will come to no good because (a) her mother doesn't love her, and (b) Pari has already fallen under the sway of American influence.
She takes Nahid to her room and shows her pictures of 'Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Ava Gardner, Montgomery Clift.' Pari dreams of becoming a movie star, about as unrealistic an idea as dancing a polka on the moon. So the family dynamic lines up. The older brothers, because of their father's wealth, will soon be going to college in America. They're blissfully self-absorbed. Nahid's mother and the favored sister, Manijeh, spend their time sneering at Nahid and Pari. The father -- who, in the photograph in the text here, looks tiny, clenched and beleaguered -- strives to keep order in a home beset by divisions. This family is 'modern': They don't pray, the men drink arak, the women don't wear chadors, but the family (and the nation, even under the shah) is obsessed with the purity and chastity of women. If that weren't enough, the shah has gone overboard in his use of SAVAK, the dreaded secret police; Nahid's father's sternness may stem from real fear.
When he forbids the rebellious Pari to act in a high school play or prohibits Nah
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id from buying a book that might be controversial, he's not just exercising mindless authority, he's keeping in mind that SAVAK 'could, at any time, declare som! eone guilty, arrest them, and even execute them for speaking against the Shah.' Pari is the one bound to make trouble for her family. She becomes smitten with a comparatively penniless high school teacher, declaring that she, of course, 'loves' him. Her parents, grounded in financial reality and the customs of the day, insist that she accept a highly unpleasant rich man in an arranged marriage.
After countless tantrums and family scenes, Pari gives in and marries the rich man, who turns out to be a sadist or worse. Pari returns home to beg and plead for her freedom but, naturally, is sent back to her awful husband. Nahid has been having tantrums of her own, sobbing and crying in her room, insisting that she be allowed to go to America. Manijeh, the hateful sister, becomes involved in the machinations of an arranged marriage with a man who backs out of the proceedings, then comes back. The marriage, another awful venture, occurs. Civil unrest flares. Nahid's father, fearful for her because of her headstrong ways, suddenly relents and sends her to the United States. He and his wife must stay and continue to make their way in Iran; she has given birth again -- to two more girls. Here is where the tone of the memoir changes. Nahid finds herself in a tiny Christian college full of mean, vapid coeds and nearly dies of loneliness. In 1979, the shah is forced to leave Iran, and the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to the country with his own form of (deeply religious) repression. In 1980, Iraq invades Iran, and eight years of butchery ensue. It's not exactly clear what Nahid Rachlin's position on all this actually is. She's terrified and repelled by the Khomeini regime, but she still reveres the devotion and old ways of her now aged aunt. She plainly adores her sister Pari but never seems to grasp that the goal of being a movie star is one of the weakest and most deceptive of American dreams, full of sorrow and trouble and rejection -- and simply not going to happen in a society that disdains entertainers as the lowest of the low. Time and again, reading this book, one feels most sorry for the father of this unruly family. The boys never return to Iran -- why should they? The women persist in their unhappiness, which is their only weapon: You can boss me around, they seem to say, but you can't make me like any of it. They pitch fits, go on hunger strikes, lock themselves in their rooms, speak to no one for days on end. So Nahid's life plays out against a backdrop of tragedy. She has escaped to America, but she's lost so much of what she loved.
Again, the author doesn't comment directly on the meaning of these events. She just tells the tales of individuals crushed. This is just a story of how it was, during a certain period of time, for one upper-middle-class family in Iran, destroyed from within and without by forces it couldn't begin to reckon with.
To learn more about the author go to her website www.nahidrachlin.com.
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