"See, when all the doors are shut on you, God opens a window" pg.21
Author Nahid Rachlin has written a very engaging memoir of her family and homeland, Iran. As so many who have read it found, the book "Persian Girls" reads like a novel. Nahid covers the place, politics and peoples of Iran throughout different political eras and leadership. She places you right there with her in a family and country full of social restrictions, western distrust and revolt. The Iranian historical relationship with the west shows good reason why the people distrust western influence. (oil)
What pulled me in from the beginning was the loving act of a birth mother promising her widowed, childless sister her next born as a gift. She does this against the wishes of her husband, Nahid's father.
Then, to have that precious gift "snatched away" by the father and returned to her birth mother after nine years of bonding love between adoptive mother and child is heart-wrenching. This is where Nahid's story begins, snatched up and tossed like a pebble thrown into a calm lake (family) and causing wave-like, rippling effects on everyone and everything in it, especially the pebble. The rippling waters continue throughout the memoir to push and pull on the inhabitants of the lake, its high and low waves lifting some up while also tumbling down upon others. It makes for a page-turning drama.
"Persian Girls" blends the story of daughter and mother relations with fathers, brothers, husbands and male acquaintances. In the book, Iranian politics and religious fundamentalism, along with all their restrictions on female actions, activities and overall lives, gives readers a feeling of imprisonment/ownership of women by men.
Arranged marriages are contracts drawn up and negotiated by family fathers. In selecting a groom, more care is given to financial and community status of the groom's family than the bride's love for and compatibility with the groom. Should the bride after marriage decide to file for and be granted a divorce, she forfeits the family dowry given to the groom in marriage. I think somewhere in the book I read the groom retains half the dowry if divorce is mutual. Wives also forfeit custody of any children to fathers when divorcing.
Much of the history about the Shah of Iran, as well as Ayatollah Khomeini is included. Memories of the 1979-81 Iran Hostage Crisis (444 days) reignited in me memories of that era. Iran, an oil rich country whose money hungry leader (Shah) basically sold the country's natural resource rights to British, then American interests, at the expense of Iranian citizens.
With the Shah's marriage to the west for Iranian oil came implementation, at least in name, of untraditional (non-religious) westernized modernization in the country. Old laws were loosened, and some new ones written to give women more freedom, but they were not enforced, leaving male heads of families the power to continue restricting female family members' actions and activities.
What came across towards the end of "Persian Girls" is the love and forgiveness of those scarred and changed by life's stormy, rippling circumstances. It can take a lifetime to give an apology and a lifetime to humble oneself enough to receive one.
Also, the story shows how love of home can become stronger as the years away from it mount up. First, we leave home to escape, then we miss home when disillusioned by the place we escaped to, eventually we return home and find love of culture and understandings about childhood questions. Finally, we accept our adopted home as a place of growth, self-discovery and destiny.
After writing all this, I still have not identified all of what made reading this book so enjoyable for me. It read so easily and talked to me without preaching or instructing. It's a story shared in a welcoming format. The book combines so many genres, and it all works well together; history, travelogue, politics, feminism, nationalism, motherhood, American immigrant, Iranian culture/lifestyle, education.
I felt I was traveling with Nahid on her journey through life in two different worlds (first Iran then America) learning as she learned, loving as she loved and understanding as she understood the many life-lessons revealed to her. I enjoyed her loving relationships with sister Pari and mother Maryam just as much as her unloving relationships with sister Manijeh and birth mother Mohtaram.
I especially found interesting the part where Nahid talks about her inner strength possibly inherited from the love, attention and freedom given her at such a young age by mother Maryam. I thought the author hinted that her sisters' lacking inner strength might have been partly due to mother Mohtaram's mix of adopted western lifestyle while attempting to adhere to Iranian cultural traditions enforced by their father.
Or perhaps it was just Mohtaram's mothering ways, fawning over one "beautiful" daughter while the other two were left with table scraps of love. As for Nahid, Mohtaram could give her nothing she hadn't already received and treasured from mother Maryam.
note: While with mother Maryam a young Nahid overhead gossip told to her mother about a blind one-year-old baby girl left in the doorway of a house in an alley. Years later it would inspire her to write a short story. At the time though, the gossip had Nahid seeing parallels in her and the blind baby girl, causing her to question why her mother gave her away.
Nahid: "Mother, is something wrong with me that Mohtaram gave me away?"
Maryam: "You're a perfect creation of God, my dear girl. It was your destiny to be my child. As soon as a baby comes into the world an angel writes its destiny on the baby's forehead.
NPR - Trapped in Tehran, living in St. Louis
