Nahid Rachlin

COMPENSATION
Homa reread Tom’s letter.
With you all the way in Tehran, the apartment, Columbus, feel empty…
Hadn’t that been the case even when she was there, with him, she thought. She wished she could call him and talk about that. But phone connections had been difficult since she came to Tehran a month ago. Lines to the US either rang busy or there was just a dead hum. She hadn’t been able to set up an internet connection and so she couldn’t even e-mail Tom.
Maybe just as well to have the distance; it would help to clarify certain things for both of them. As she abandoned the letter on the mantle, it landed next to a prism, part of a high school project. In fact the room was more or less the same as ten years ago when she left Iran to go to college in America-- the blue carpet with arabesque patterns, the embroidered bedspread, the peach colored walls. Her mother had made the ell of the spacious living room into a bedroom and kept Homa’s room intact, as if she expected her to return any day and live there.
Out of the window she could see that Moghadessi Alley with its gas lamps, cobble-stoned sidewalks and tall sycamore trees, was the same too as she recalled it. And the sounds were the same -- children’s voices as they played soccer or marbles on its sidewalks, a cat mewing, the blacksmiths banging on metal in the adjacent bazaar. Their apartment in Columbus overlooked a row of identical buildings with shutters covering their windows. The main sound that reached her there was the hum of traffic from the street below.
It amazed her how much she liked being here among the familiar sights and sounds that she had once yearned to get far away from. She might not have come had it not been for her cousin, Noushin’s urgent phone call. “Your mother needs help,” Noushin had said. Her mother, sixty-five, was too young to need extensive care, had it not been for a stroke. Homa had no siblings with whom to share the responsibility and her father had died. Her mother’s brother, sixty-seven, lived far away, in Kashan, and her older sister, sixty-nine, was in a nursing home due to a hip fracture that had not healed. Noushin had three young children, ranging from one to five years old and was also responsible for attending to her nearly blind mother-in-law.
The call from Nousin had come six months ago, but it took this long for her to be able to get a visa and all the necessary papers. Her spring semester at OU, where she was getting a masters degree in nutrition science had ended and she didn’t have a full time job lined up yet. She had been doing temp work while going to school part time.
Since she came to Tehran a month ago she had put many things in motion for her mother. The tenants of the first floor apartment of the three story house had left and Homa found a woman, Fatemeh, and her ten year old son, Ali, to live there rent-free in return for taking care of some of her mother’s daily needs-- cleaning and shopping and cooking, attending to the flowers in the courtyard that could wilt in the dry summer months when it never rained. Now she needed to set straight her mother’s jumbled finances.
She left to go to the living room, where her mother was sitting on the sofa. She looked so thin and frail. Once she had been energetic, running the household, gardening, embroidering, entertaining relatives and friends. But at least since she came here her mother’s spirits had lifted and she wasn’t as withdrawn or forgetful.
Homa sat next to her and, taking her hand, she said, “I’m here now. We’re together.”
“Yes, you’re home now.”
Fatemeh came in, accompanied by Ali. They were carrying a samovar, a tea pot, cups and saucers, and cookies. She was a tall heavy-set woman with strong arms. Homa liked that, thinking she could take good care of her mother. Fatemeh and her son arranged everything on the coffee table next to a bowl of rock sugar and a geranium pot.
“Stay and have tea with us,” Homa said to them.
“Thank you but we have a lot to do,” Fatemeh said. “What would you like for dinner?”
“Today is vegetarian day. Make kuku and cucumber and yogurt salad,” Homa said.
Fatemeh and Ali left and Homa poured the concentrated tea from the pot into cups, then added water from the samovar’s faucet. Her mother managed to put rock sugars into her own cup and stir the tea with a spoon.
“Would you like to watch a program on TV?” Homa asked.
“There’s nothing good on TV. All propaganda.”
“We have to get satellite TV, hide one on the roof, like everyone else does.”
“You disappeared for years,” her mother said.
”You know how hard it has been at times for me to get a visa, and harder for Tom. There isn’t even an American Embassy here.” But her not having come to Iran all these years went beyond practical difficulties. Her parents had never approved of her marrying Tom and that had created a strain. Fresh grief floated to Homa’s heart that she hadn’t been able to see her father in his last days in life, that she hadn’t been there to commiserate with her mother.
She looked at the framed family photograph hanging on a wall. Her mother and father sat on a chair, she, their only child, in front of them. In the picture her mother had all her dark wavy hair, now a fuzz of gray. Her father had a pile of curly brown hair, light brown eyes, and the warm smile she liked so much. She had her mother’s dark hair and eyes but though she resembled her mother in looks they had gone in a different directions. Unlike her mother who would never dream of leaving Iran, in spite of all her criticisms, Homa had wanted to see the world, live in a freer country. Then her advisor in high school told her about scholarships available at Oberlin College in Ohio. She applied and got in and was granted a full scholarship, including tuition, room and board. Her parents had finally given up trying to talk her into staying in Iran, to arrange a marriage for her. They did not guess that she would marry an American man and stay in America. She had left Iran without thinking about her future after college. But once she got to America she found herself pulled more and more into the culture. She could say and do what she wanted without fear of being criticized, being arrested. She felt relieved that going back and forth to Iran was difficult, at times impossible.
“I’ll take you to the porch,” she said to her mother after they finished drinking their tea. She helped her get up and walk to the porch on her cane and settled her on the rocking chair in the shade of a plum tree. It was a good place for her to sit. She could look at the activities on the street on the other side of the courtyard-- people coming and going from the mosque with its large blue dome dominating the view, vendors hawking their merchandise from trays balanced over their heads; I have the reddest tomatoes at the lowest prices, practically free.
Then Homa left the apartment to go to the courthouse. It would be open now after the long midday siesta. She wanted to check on the progress of the law suits her mother had set in motion long ago and now was unable to manage. She had lent money to a rug merchant who wasn’t returning it now that she needed it. Tenants of an apartment she owned on the other side of the city hadn’t paid their rent for over a year. Homa had spoken to the lawyer her mother had hired but he told her it was now in the hands of a local court judge. The easiest thing and maybe fastest was for Homa to go to the courthouse, he had said, and a judge would either see her immediately or she would be able to make an appointment with him. A chaotic legal system. But she brushed away that feeling, thinking how chaotic her own personal life had become in a more orderly Ohio. She and Tom came and went from their small two bedroom apartment at different times, not knowing which one of them had picked up the grocery on the way home. The refrigerator, kitchen shelves, were either overflowing with duplicate items or missing essentials. Tom gave his work clothes to different dry cleaners and failed to pick them up and the tickets got lost. He would just buy new shirts and jackets. He liked to sleep late and sometimes the sounds of her getting ready in the morning woke him up and threw him into a tantrum. Books and magazines, paperwork for filing taxes, were all piled up in irrational ways on every possible table or counter top.
As Homa reached the second floor, Massoumeh, the tenant of the apartment there, opened her door and said to her, “Can I talk to you for a few moments?”
Homa went in; Massoumeh offered her fruit from a bowl.
“I’ve had too much to eat already, thank you,” Homa said and sat on the chair that Massoumeh pointed to. A pile of army uniforms lay on the floor next to a sewing box. Massoumeh had told her plaintively that she sewed buttons on the jackets to supplement her income, that her husband, a retired doctor, had a second wife who absorbed all his money. Massomeh sat on another chair and said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your servant, Fatemeh.”
Homa became riveted on her, pulled by the intensity of her tone.
“Fatemeh has an eye on my husband,” she said. “She comes to my apartment when he’s home and flirts with him. I’ve seen a lot of men coming and going from her apartment. Who knows what kind of people they are.”
Homa was startled by the accusation. How could that be? Fatemeh seemed so upright. And she had her son living with her. True she had seen some men entering and leaving her apartment but they could be relatives. With her slender figure, striking large hazel eyes, Massoumeh was much more attractive than Fatemeh; Homa was surprised at her insecurity.
“She pretends that her son has health problems and seeks my husband’s advice.” She added in a whisper, “Fatemeh sells her body. You can’t trust her with your mother when you leave the country. I’d look for someone else.”
“No one is willing to be a servant these days,” Homa said.
“Look for someone in the villages.”
“I’ll have a talk with Fatemeh,” Homa said, though she wasn’t sure what she would say exactly. She had no evidence that Fatemeh sold her body or flirted with Massoumeh’s husband. Anyway Fatemeh’s relationships with men weren’t her business.
“I didn’t know he would get another wife when I married him,” Massoumeh said. “And now I’m trapped. If I left him I’d have to live like Fatemeh”
“I’m so sorry,” Homa said, getting up. “I should be going now before offices close.”
Massoumeh walked her to the door and said, “I hope I haven’t upset you.”
“No, no, I just have to get to the court while it’s open,” she said, though she was feeling upset. Massoumeh had put a grain of doubt in her mind about Fatemeh’s trustworthiness.

Outside Homa turned to Valiasr Avenue and waited for a taxi or bus, whichever came first. But none were stopping. It was a pleasantly cool day with a breeze blowing, making it easier for her to bear the mandatory scarf and long-sleeved, long-skirted rupush. The air was vibrant with the voices of people wandering about, music coming out of car radios. But she felt heaviness in her heart from her conversation with Massoumeh. Not only did it give her concern about leaving her mother’s care to Fatemeh, but it also turned her mind to her own marital problems. She had gone all the way to the other side of the world to find a better life, yet in some ways she felt trapped like Massoumeh. The memory of that afternoon when she had come home early from work and found a young woman in the house with Tom, rushed before her eyes. Their clothes, hair, were rumpled-- it seemed they had just gotten out of bed. He introduced the woman and Homa to each other in an awkward way, then she left in a hurry. He told Homa he was collaborating with her, writing a script that they were hoping to sell to a TV channel.
“Come on Tom!”
He turned on the TV and started watching it.
“I want an honest explanation,” she said, going over the TV and turning it off with an angry motion. “Don’t try to brush this aside.”
He was silent, letting the question dangle between them.
“Tom, I hate this life,” she suddenly burst out.
He finally looked at her directly and said, “She means nothing to me. We’re just friends.”
“Then why didn’t you ever mention her?” She left and went into the bedroom, opened a suitcase, and started to pack. She thought she would stay in the bed-and-breakfast near the advertising company building where she worked at the time, and try to pull her life together apart from Tom.
In a moment Tom came into the room. “It’s really nothing. I won’t have anything to do with her any more,” he said. He held his head between his hands as if trying to hide the tears that rolled down his eyes and said, “It’s been so frustrating, with no decent jobs.” He had begged her to stay.
When she just met Tom, in one of their courses in their senior year in the Communication department at the university in Columbus, she had been attracted to him partly because he came from a different world. They were sitting next to each other in the Investigative Journalism course, waiting for the professor to arrive. Tom had turned to her and said, “You have a nice accent, where are you from?” That was how it started between them. It was late spring then and he took her for rides in his red convertible MG. They stopped by different stretches of woods and parks and took walks. Their conversations were accompanied by birds singing and the gentle thrashing of leaves. He showed her the house he had grown up in standing on the top of a hill in the outskirts of Athens, an hour from Columbus. While he was in college his parents moved to Florida. His father designed programs online and his mother stayed home as she always did. His brother went to California and basically disappeared; they rarely heard from him. “I felt lonely living with my family anyway,” Tom told her. “Their moving didn’t make it worse.” They expected little emotionally from their children or from each other. Her home life was quite different from his, she told him. “There were no silences, but then no sense of privacy. It was stifling.”
Paradoxically she could be at ease and act more herself with him because of being from a different culture. After they went out a few times, he invited her to spend the night in his apartment. She went against all the warnings she grew up with that she shouldn’t mingle, much less spend a night, with a man not related to her. Earlier that day, high on the feeling of rebellion, she went to a department store and bought a black nightgown with lace trim and matching underpants, a shimmering pink satin bathrobe, pink satin slippers.
“You look like a model,” he said that night as they got ready for bed.
In the morning, at breakfast, he said, “I’m in love with you, you know that.”
“I love you too,” she said.
Soon after those declarations they got married by a justice of the peace and had a small reception at a friend’s apartment.
She was exhilarated that she had married someone of her own choice but still she couldn’t help feeling guilty that she had excluded her parents from this important step in her life.
Then gradually tension began to build up between her and Tom. She mainly attributed the change in him to his failure as a documentary film maker. He could not raise funds for his projects and ended up working as a film editor for a local TV station. But it had to be more than that, she thought at other times. The gray chasm that yawned between him and his family stood also between the two of them. “Why do you act so superior?” he said, after she had suggested that he go back to school at night and get a more practical degree, as she was doing. Once during a heated argument he accused her of having married him to become an American citizen. There seemed to be a whirlpool at the center of his existence that pulled him inward. But at times he would become the person she had loved and they would have a few days of celebratory reconciliation.
She lamented the distance but had no idea how to change it; neither of them talked of separating or divorce. More than anything, she felt her life had become meaningless.
At the beginning her father made attempts to win her back home. Being the director of a fish company, he sent her postcards from different cities where he went to select fish and supervise their transportation to Tehran restaurants and markets. The postcards often depicted local fish, lying still, jumping into the air or entwined with another fish. “Light of our eyes, come back to us,” he would write. She had pinned some of them to the cork bulletin board above her desk. Her mother wrote long letters. “I hold your letters in my hand and read them over and over again,” she wrote. Then, after she married Tom, their communications became sporadic.
Finally a taxi stopped and she got in. The driver was a woman. Homa gave her the courthouse’s address.
“I take someone there every day,” the driver said. “In this city everyone has problems.”
“People have problems everywhere,” Homa said.
A policeman stopped them and asked the driver to show him her license.
“Move on,” he said rudely after she showed it to him.
“They can’t bear to see a woman driving,” she said to Homa.
Then they were at the courthouse. Homa gave the driver a large tip and got out.
The marble-covered walls and floor and a gold-rimmed chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the waiting room pointed to a once richer and more glorious Iran. It was filled with people roaming around restlessly or sitting on benches, looking jittery.
She took a numbered card from the clerk and sat on a bench next to two women who were talking to each other. One said to the other that she was there to file a request to increase compensation from the government for having lost a husband in the war with Iraq. “With the inflation, I’m hoping for more.” The other woman wanted to file suit against a relative who had stolen a piece of property belonging to her by forging her name on the deed.
It was already four o’clock and the courthouse closed at five. The numbers were going very slowly and there were at least ten ahead of her.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” an official’s voice reached her. “It’s five o’clock. You’ll have to return tomorrow. Hold on to your numbers.”
She got up and left.
In Moghadassi Alley people were coming and going from their houses. A young man passed on his bicycle, carrying a loaf of sangag bread. He smiled at her and she smiled back. What would my life have been like if I had married a boy from my neighborhood, she wondered? I would have stayed closer to my family, would not have felt the pangs of guilt that had begun to occur with frequency. But then I would always be restless, yearning for more.
When she entered the house, Fatemeh was in the courtyard rinsing clothes under the pool’s faucet. Ali and another boy were sitting on a rug, playing a card game.
“Your uncle Mohammad is here from Kashan,” Fatemeh told Homa.
Homa dashed to the stairway and climbed up rapidly, eager to see her uncle to whom she had been very attached as a child. He was sitting on one of the chairs by the dining table with a suitcase next to him. Her mother was asleep. He greeted Homa and got up to embrace her. His eyes were heavy-lidded and his hair all gray. He had once projected strength. In a photograph she still had of him in an old album he was posing in his gym clothes, displaying his muscular arms and chest, and he was smiling brightly. But sitting with him and talking to him began to bring back the familiar uncle from long ago. He used to take her to the amusement park, play card games with her. He made shadow pictures on the wall with his hands. He played his violin for her, enveloping her in dreamy melodies.
An hour or so later, when they were all eating dinner, her uncle and mother talked about their childhood. “Do you remember when Baba brought us those clay animals and dried cherries from his trips?” “Do you remember we used to shake the mulberry tree in the courtyard and the fruit came down in a white stream?”
It was clear to Homa that her uncle hoped to stay on here. He had lost his wife to cancer and his two sons had gotten killed as young boys in the Iran-Iraq war. He was lonely. He had worked as a clerk in the city hall in Kashan; his whole income, now that he was retired, was a small pension. His wife, before she died, brought in some money by baking bread in a deep stone oven in their basement and selling it to the neighborhood people. He had health problems, the most serious, he told Homa, was hepatitis which had done irreparable damage to his liver.
Moving in with his sister was the best option, Homa thought, and quickly began to prepare for that. She took out one of the folding cots from the closet and put it in a corner of the living room for him to sleep on. As she rummaged through the closet for a blanket, sheets, and a pillow, she came across a box full of her childhood belongings-- the rag dolls, a lacy pink dress with a white collar she loved to wear.
“I wish your aunt Maryam was here with us rather than in the nursing home,“ her uncle said to her the following morning.
His remark only fed into what she was feeling herself. Relatives had put her there after she had fallen and broken her hip. Her husband had been very old and died years ago. She had never been able to get pregnant. Some female relatives had hoped to take her into their own homes, but then their husbands had objected on the grounds that they themselves had other dependants they wanted to take in.
“There’s enough room for her among us,” her uncle added.
“Yes, we should take her out of the nursing home.” A few days ago, Homa had visited her in the nursing home. Maryam’s mind was totally alert. Tears had rolled down her eyes. “My dear Homa, we thought we’d never see you again.” She was sitting in a wheelchair in a large room among other women. One of them said to Homa, “You take her home.”
Homa’s mind filled with memories of the time she was a child and Maryam made her rag dolls, told her stories of ancient kings and princesses. Homa used to be happy when she came home from school and found Maryam there, talking to her mother. She sat close to them, in the radiance of their love for each other and for herself.
She would have to give Fatemeh more than just a rent free apartment to take care of all the three. In addition she would need to hire someone else too to come in daily to help. In fact that would be a good idea. It would be less likely that Fatemeh would do anything wrong with someone else present there.

As Homa was leaving the house to go to the nursing home to take her aunt out, Massoumeh approached her in the second floor corridor again and said, “If the family needs extra care, I’d be happy to do it. I love your mother and can use the money as well.”
“Fatemeh is doing some of the extra work, but we can still use more help. Who’d be better than you.”
They discussed the details of her tasks and her pay. Then Homa went down into the courtyard where Ali waited; he was going to the nursing home with her, to help her to get her aunt out.
As soon as her aunt was in the living room Homa knew that it was the right thing to have done. Though Maryam too was frail and still had a hard time walking, her face became alert and radiant as she sat with her siblings and Homa.

Homa was aware of magical moments of closeness between the siblings. They prayed together three times a day, ate together, sat on the porch and talked. They even liked sleeping in the same room in close proximity to each other. She constructed balanced menus for them. She made sure her uncle went out for a walk every day and she took her mother and aunt into the courtyard so that they could enjoy the flowers and tumbling of goldfish in the pool.
Days were going by and she realized she wasn’t ready to go back. She still had to settle her mother’s tangled financial affairs, and also she needed to be there to make sure Fatemeh and Massoumeh would get along. Then the hard truth went through her mind: I haven’t resolved how I feel about continuing with Tom. Will I ever go back? She would let the question slide until the answer came to her. It could happen at any time, even in the middle of the night when she woke from a forgotten dream. Perhaps Tom would actually welcome her being away; perhaps this length of separation would determine which way their relationship would go-- become fresh and exciting like the early days of their marriage, or get irrevocably severed. But more than anything she could already feel the reward of helping people she had loved and abandoned for so long. She wrote to Tom:
…I can’t come back just yet. My mother’s financial affairs aren’t settled. Also I want to make sure, before I leave, that the women taking care of some tasks here are working out well. The household has expanded to include my aunt and uncle, who also need care. After having abandoned them for so long, this is the least I can do. I hope you understand…
She went on to describe the daily routine she had established for them, though she was not sure if Tom would be interested in any of the details.

INTERVIEW with me at AWP Writers Chronicle and reviews of my memoir and novels
PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin) AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
REVIEWS:
BOSTON GLOBE:
"Persian Girls, reads like a novel -- suspenseful, vivid, heartbreaking. In "Persian Girls, Rachlin chronicles her choices and those made by her sisters, her mother and her aunts, throwing the door to her family's home wide open. Readers who follow her through will be wiser, and moved."

NPR: THE WORLD
Slected by Christopher Merrill, the Director of Iowa International Writing Program as one of the best four books of the year. "If you want to know what it was like to grow up in Iran this is the book to read. Rachlin, the author of five previous works of fiction, including the much acclaimed Foreigner, begins her story at the age of nine, when she was taken away from the only mother she had ever known—her aunt, as it happens—and returned to a family in which the prospects of her becoming a writer were, at best, dim. But her portrait of the artist in an Islamic country on the verge of dramatic change is filled with light."

Publishers Weekly:
"This lyrical and disturbing memoir by the author of four novels (Foreigner , etc.) tells the story of an Iranian girl growing up in a culture where, despite the Westernizing reforms of the Shah, women had little power or autonomy... Exuding the melancholy of an outsider, this memoir gives American readers rare insight into Iranians' ambivalence toward the United States, the desire for American freedom clashing with resentment of American hegemony."

Washington Post:
"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..."

The Charlotte Observer:
"Iran again looms large on the world stage. Rhetoric conjures fear of radical Islam and flashbacks to the Ayatollah Khomeini-- images that obscure Iran's rich cultural history as Persia and ignore ordinary people torn between old and new, secular and sacred. In her bittersweet memoir, Persian Girls, Iranian American novelist Nahid Rachlin fills in the blanks."

Jonathan Friedlander, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies:
“Rachlin’s most powerful work to date. A riveting memoir of separation and reunion and the diasporic life and times of this prolific and beloved Iranian-American author.”

Matt Beynon Rees, author of The Collaborator of Bethlehem and contributing editor, Time:
“Through the touching, tragic story of two sisters, Persian Girls unfolds the entire drama of modern Iran. It’s a beautiful, harrowing memoir of the cruelty of men toward women, and it paints the exotic scents and traditions of Tehran with the delicacy of a great novel. If you want to understand Iran, read Nahid Rachlin.”

CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION
“Rachlin shows us not only the tranquil inner ourtyards with sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending for primacy in the streets outside...”
—The New York Times Book Review

Praised by V.S. Naipaul, Anne Tyler, Tama Janowitz, and other writers, Nahid Rachlin has spent her career writing novels about hidden Iran—the combustible political passions underlying everyday life and the family dramas of ordinary Iranians. With her long-awaited memoir, Persian Girls, she turns her sharp novelist’s eye on her own remarkable life.
Given to her childless and widowed aunt by her mother when she was an infant, Rachlin lived a blissful Iranian childhood with her mother’s sister, Maryam. One day, when Nahid was nine years old, her father kidnapped her from her schoolyard, and the only mother she’d ever known, and returned her to her birth family—strangers to the young girl.
In a story of heartache, ambition, oppression, hope, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin’s childhood and coming of age in Iran under the late Shah—and her domineering father—her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soulmate, Pari. Both girls refused to accept the prescribed traditional-Muslim roles for them and dreamed of careers in literature and the theatre (both considered unthinkable for respectable girls in Iran); they devoured forbidden books and had secret romances.
But then things quickly changed. Pari was forced by her parents to marry a wealthy suitor, a cruel man who kept her a prisoner in her own home. Maryam, heartbroken and alone, lived a solitary life in her old Tehran neighborhood, dreaming of the day when she would be reunited with Nahid.Manijeh, Nahid’s middle sister, hoped for nothing more than to become a good traditional-Muslim wife and mysterious Mohtaram, Nahid’s birth mother, helped her husband to arrange her daughters’ marriages.
Eventually, Nahid narrowly avoided become a young bride to a man of her parents’ choosing and came to America. As Nahid found literary success in the United States, Pari’s dreams fell to pieces. Her ambitions quashed by her husband, Pari’s hopes dissipated. When news came to Nahid in the middle of the night that her sister had died after falling down a flight of stairs, her world was turned upside down. She traveled back to the country where she had grown up, now under the Islamic regime rather than the Shah, to say goodbye to her only friend. It is there she confronts her past, and the women of her family.
This moving and beautifully written memoir offers the reader a rare glimpse into the secret lives of Iranian women. A story of promises kept and promises broken, of dreams and heartache and, most important, of sisters, Persian Girls is a gripping saga that will change the way anyone looks at Iran and the women who populate it.
***
JUMPING OVER FIRE (available in paperback)
"If, as Aristotle reminds us, we are our desire,
then who are we if the object of our desire is
forbidden? What becomes of us if we are born in one world yet long for another? These are just two of the
complex and difficult questions Nahid Rachlin explores
and ultimately illuminates in this brave, engrossing,
and timely novel. I recommend it highly!"--Andre (Dubus III),author of House of Sand and Fog, and In the Bedroom

“This poignant, beautifully told story of an Iranian-American family is both a great read and a fine introduction to a land and a culture about which it is imperative we Americans inform ourselves as much and as quickly as possible.”— Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and For Rouenna.

“In this new novel, Nahid Rachlin's powers as a writer and storyteller blaze at their fullest, like the Norooz (New Year's) bonfires that the title alludes to. In an era when fear of Middle Eastern terrorism holds the West in thrall . . . it is refreshing to encounter a genuine and truly multicultural voice, able to speak both from within Persian culture and the American society in which Rachlin now lives and writes. Jumping Over Fire presents the sort of nuanced voice that must be heard if Iranians and Americans are ever to understand one another.” — Carolyne Wright, author of Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Blue Lynx Prize, American Book Award)

PERSIAN GIRLS (available in paperback)

FOREIGNER (Available in paperback)

MARRIED TO A STRANGER (available in paperback)

THE HEART'S DESIRE (Available in paperback)

WHERE OUR HEARTS ARE (Complete Story)

An Interview with Nahid Rachlin
Sheila Bender
The Writer’s Chronicle, May/Summer 2008

Sheila Bender: What prompted you to be a writer in a male-dominated culture that didn’t value women’s self-expression?

Nahid Rachlin: I was always asking questions about why I was “given away” by my mother to my aunt, and why me in particular. My aunt, Maryam, whose husband was twenty-five years older than her and died soon after they married, yearned for a child. My mother was very fertile (she gave birth to ten children). Maryam always begged her sister if she could adopt one of her children. So when I was six months old, my grandmother took me to Maryam who lived in Tehran, faraway from Ahvaz, where my parents lived. But when I was nine years old, my father came and forcefully took me back from my aunt. In his eyes, I was a woman now, and he felt I needed his supervision. I couldn’t accept my aunt’s explanation that it was destiny that I was given to her. I reached to books for answers. I read everything I could get hold of, hoping for some insights. That interest in reading led to a need to write myself. As an adolescent, I went into a room and wrote sketches and short stories. The process of writing and giving shape to what seemed puzzling and chaotic had a calming effect. I was most at peace when I was writing, even if what I wrote wasn’t necessarily cheerful or relevant to my own situation. One of my composition teachers in high school liked the pieces I handed in for assignments. She was unusual in that she believed women should have a voice and not settle for prescribed roles. She was a big influence on me, both in her encouragement of my writing and my development as a more independent person. And of course there was my older sister, Pari, who I became close to when I came back to live with my birth family. She was full of praise for my writing. She too, like the teacher, didn’t accept the limited prescribed roles for women. She wanted to be an actress and, like me, didn’t want to give in to the idea of arranged marriage at a very young age and settle for domesticity. Even though my parents were modernized Muslims, they still believed education was for their sons. Their daughters should aim for marriage as soon as they found a suitable man. We wanted to use the arts to escape what we felt deeply as the oppression of our beings.

The students I have taught come with such a variety
of goals and motivations. Some of them write for
the glory of it… Some want to express themselves
in reaction to certain figures in their lives—a father
or mother or husband or boy friend they hate…
There are some who write because they feel they
have a message, political or cultural… Then there
are some like myself who find it “necessary”
to their happiness to write.

Bender: A girl in one of your stories is strongly attracted to the writing of an author in a current magazine. Were there early influences on your own writing?

Rachlin: When I was in high school, I found a bookstore with books by European and American writers in translation. I read almost everything I found in translation—work by Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Hemingway, Balzac. Of course, I also read books by Iranian writers. I probably absorbed some of the techniques used by the writers I read. I can’t say I was influenced by a particular writer.

Bender: In your newest work, the memoir, Persian Girls, you describe how stories you heard about women and their children and questions you had about your mother and her life as a younger woman inspired you and led to stories you kept hidden under your mattress. You also write about your father searching your room for material that could get the family in trouble with the Shah’s secret police.
Reading your stories to your sister Pari was important to retaining your identity as a girl who could find the freedom to use her imagination and stay true to her goal of getting from Iran to America. There, lack of censorship meant you could read and write the literature that you had to keep under wraps in Iran.
Now that you teach others who are writing, do you have some thoughts about the need for a special audience?

Rachlin: Not really. I write what comes naturally and is important to me, and I give the same advice to my students.

Bender: But it seems that knowing Pari would want to hear your work meant a lot. Having someone for whom our writing will be a treasure is rewarding as we begin. Have you ever found yourself encouraging your students to think of an audience they would like to share their work with as a way of honoring its importance?

Rachlin: The truth is I haven’t done that. The students I have taught come with such a variety of goals and motivations. Some of them write for the glory of it—expecting to make a lot of money, their name becoming known to everyone, movies being made of their work. Some want to express themselves in reaction to certain figures in their lives—a father or mother or husband or boyfriend they hate—and want to reveal these significant figures’ evil in their writing. There are some who write because they feel they have a message, political or cultural, to give to the world. Then there are some like myself who find it “necessary” to their happiness to write. Some of them have a sister or a boyfriend or someone close to them they get pleasure out of showing their work to.

Bender: Do you believe that childhood trauma and unhappiness are important components in making a person reach out to writing, to becoming a writer?

Rachlin: I think they are helpful because such experiences make a child more introspective and therefore, perhaps drawn to writing. But then there are writers who have had other influences to motivate them to write, such as growing up in an environment that values and encourages writing.

Bender: In what ways was becoming a writer symptomatic of being an outsider, a foreigner, a woman looking for her place?

Rachlin: I always felt like a foreigner in my own country, and then I felt that way in the small, provincial, all-women college I attended in America. The process of writing helped me understand my situation.

Bender: After so many years of writing short fiction and novels spun from your experience growing up in Iran, of longing to come to America and then once in America longing for some of the texture of life in Iran and for the connection disrupted by oppressive rules, revolution, and war, what freed you to write nonfiction?

Rachlin: For many years I wanted to write a memoir, straight from my life and with a particular emphasis on my sister, Pari, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I had too many conflicting feelings and unresolved questions about my family, and too much grief about losing Pari, the sibling with whom I was closest. She was the victim of a supposed accident. Knowing how depressed she was about her life, I suspected suicide. I went to Iran to talk to those who had been in close contact with her towards the end of her life. But for years it felt too raw to write about her. Finally, I managed to put it all on paper—I just needed the passage of time to be able to do that.

Bender: Can you describe what you mean by “too raw”? What is prose like when it is “raw”?

Rachlin: What I mean by “raw” is that the pain I felt was too intense and the wounds felt too open. It took a long time for me to digest the pain of being torn away from my aunt’s home (and her falling into deep depression that lasted for over a year), and witnessing tragedies in Pari’s life, and then learning about her death from falling down the staircase in her house. Gradually, I managed to put those experiences in perspective, among other, more positive life experiences.

Bender: Is it hard to see shape in real life experience without distance? If so, then why?

Rachlin: Yes, for me only the distance of time enables me to see shape and have perspective on various, hard to explain, events and experiences. When things have just happened, it is hard to see them in the wider context of all life experiences. For instance now, after many years, I can see that Maryam led a life that was still rewarding, even after the trauma of my father taking me away from her. She was very close to her sisters, women friends, other nieces, and also she still had contact with me and knew I loved her. The same with Pari. True, she had many tragedies, but she also experienced rewarding times and had joy—she appreciated going to movies, plays, and good restaurants. She had a winning personality and made friends easily. She knew I loved her, and we stayed in contact throughout her life, though much of it long distance by letters and occasional visits.

Bender: What is the opposite of “raw” for writers?

Rachlin: The opposite is not to “gush,” or ramble on, but to understand the nature of what we are trying to convey and put it in scenes that make it interesting and meaningful to the reader. With some distance, we understand better that we aren’t writing a diary to just record things for ourselves, but we are trying to create something for the reader, in terms of story line, emotions, meaning, and point of view. It is hard to do all this when things have just happened. We don’t have the perspective that time gives us to select and shape.

Bender: You have succeeded in shaping a memoir that allows me to enter your experience. I feel that the shape of your life was to be one of exile from the moment your grandmother carried you to your aunt’s house. You began evaluating words and experiences early and gave full voice to the idea of going to the U.S. to study. In reading your fiction about young women who return to Iran to reconnect with loved ones but suffer because husbands, the state, and roaming crowds all want to enforce strict religiously motivated codes, I am haunted by the injustice done to women while you were growing up. I was worried about Jennifer, a woman married to a man from Iran in The Heart’s Desire. She encourages him to take her and their son to visit his family and she is caught up in difficulties. Does it take a lot out of you to write from these kinds of experiences?

Rachlin: I find that writing, even about difficult situations, gives me satisfaction in that it gives them meaning for my readers and myself. I hope that the more such things are exposed, the greater the possibility will be for a change for the better. Growing up, I witnessed women I was very close to being subjugated by discriminatory laws. For instance, when Pari decided to leave her abusive husband, she automatically lost the custody of her son and all rights to any money she had brought into the marriage. She went home penniless and childless. By law, if a woman initiated divorce, she lost everything. If the husband initiated the divorce, he kept the children and all the money. He was only obligated to give what the wife had brought into the marriage as a dowry. Girls inherited half as much as their brothers when their parents died. These are only a few examples of how women were, and still are, considered second class citizens in Iran.

Bender: What advice do you have for those writing from painful political and family backgrounds?

Rachlin: My advice is that they should give themselves time to understand it all and not be in the state of grief with open wounds or anger before they attempt to write about such situations. Otherwise, the tendency would be to just pour out words without sufficient shape for the reader. To be able to write effectively about a situation, it is better to be somewhat calm about it.

…such experiences make a child more introspective
and therefore, perhaps drawn to writing. But then
there are writers who have had other influences
to motivate them to write, such as growing up in
an environment that values and encourages writing.

Bender: Most often, and certainly in Persian Girls, your characters, whether oppressed or oppressors, do come off as individuals, fully drawn. What helps you find that dimension?

Rachlin: In both my fiction and the memoir, I tried to understand my characters well—what makes them act and behave the way they do—that helps me become aware of all the dimensions of their characters. An example is my father. I was afraid of him because of his authoritative nature and was angry that he made Maryam and Pari and myself suffer in one way or another. But after hearing certain exchanges between him and my brothers, I realized he was conscious of social issues, had the capacity to empathize—with workers being underpaid, for instance—and was capable of great generosity. So he had both a good and bad side. Another example is my aunt Maryam—she was a staunchly observant Muslim, and a rigid follower of Islam’s rules, and yet she didn’t impose her set of beliefs on me. She let me go my own way.

Bender: In Married to a Stranger, your protagonist is a woman who can’t believe her good fortune in marrying her teacher, a writer she admires. Once home in his city, she finds that he is carrying on a long-term affair with the wife of a doctor, who’d been his friend in college. The protagonist puts out a literary journal, gains confidence, and wins a divorce from her husband, including funds to start her new life. In your sister’s life, divorce was finally granted but with no funds and with the loss of her baby son. The terrain for women in Iran seems very slippery. Yet, many of your female characters want to return. In Foreigner, the married Iranian-born, American biologist protagonist visits her estranged family in Iran, locates her biological mother, and decides to stay because she feels at home and wants to awaken the self that connects with Iran.

Rachlin: Though these women come here to escape all the limitations and oppression in Iran, they begin to miss what they can’t find in this culture. There is the richness of certain sights and sounds unique to Iran—gurgling of water in joobs, the vendors selling hot beets and corn roasted on braziers in front of them on sidewalks, the ancient historical sights such as gardens, palaces, and mosques. There is the richness of human interaction. People have great curiosity about each other, which allows intimacy and closeness. Also, the fact that men and women are forbidden to mingle before marriage draws the members of the same sex closer to each other. People are less focused on work and don’t value privacy as much as people do here. They are more interested in endless daily interaction with family and friends. All day long people knock on friends’ and families’ doors and come in. Tea is always brewing on the top of samovars, and fruit and pastries are on platters ready to serve to guests. Women sit together for hours and talk; confiding and sharing news. There is a sense that you can always reach out to friends and family members, and their doors are wide open for you.
When I was attending a small, all-woman college in the U.S., I was shocked by the fact that the students would cancel plans with a girl friend, if a boy asked them out at the same time. They had such definite commitment to the idea of having dates with boys that their girl friends became secondary to them.
In my own case, that yearning for Iran is only an abstract, in that I would never choose to live there. I feel that the oppressiveness of the system overwhelms all the advantages.

Bender: By abstract do you mean something you can write about and feel but something you wouldn’t act upon?

Rachlin: That is right. I yearn to return to Iran to experience the richness of the culture, but when I am there I become aware of all the limitations. The moment I am on the plane coming back to America, I feel a sense of relief and liberation. For instance, I can immediately take off the mandatory headscarf; more importantly, I can make critical remarks about the American government without the fear of being thrown into jail, as I would be if I openly criticized the Iranian government.

…for me only the distance of time enables me to see shape and have perspective on various, hard to explain, events and experiences. When things have just
happened, it is hard to see them in the wider
context of all life experiences.

Bender: Do you enjoy reminiscences of home as part of an expatriate group?

Rachlin: Not really. I don’t have a community of Iranians around me, so I rarely have the chance to reminisce. The only time I do that is with some family members, such as cousins I was very close to as a child. Then we reminisce about our childhood experiences with nostalgia.

Bender: I understand that leaving one’s homeland means great loss. I am wondering, though, how a woman might overcome fear of oppression to return for the sake of a relationship with family. I know from Persian Girls that you have made many trips back to Iran and discovered much about your family and the fate of so many loved ones. How do you muster the courage to enter a country that you have written has rules that change continually and rules that endanger a woman’s ability for legal recourse concerning her right to speak, be seen, and keep her own children?

Rachlin: Each time I go for a visit, I am apprehensive that I may be detained there and not be able to return to America. However, my desire to see certain loved ones enables me to overcome my fears and go there. I am willing to take the risk.

Bender: Have you worried that your reputation as an author will endanger you?

Rachlin: Yes. So far, nothing like that has happened, but I feel it could. I am not sure if any of my work has been translated into Farsi. Iran isn’t a part of international copyright agreements, so people can translate any book without asking permission from authors or their publishers. They do have to get permission from the censorship committee in Iran, to be able to publish any book there. I saw a little article in an Iranian newspaper about my novel Foreigner having been translated and published there but when I asked my friends to go and find it, no one could. So I am not sure what happened. If it was translated, I am sure it has changed a great deal in order to pass the censorship.

Bender: Do government officials look for writing about Iran to translate? Do they do anything beyond just not translating work they feel is anathema?

Rachlin: I am not sure about that. But I do know that individual people decide to translate certain books. They submit the translated versions to the authorities, and a censorship committee decides if they can be published in Farsi. Sometimes, the committee gives permission but only if the translator agrees to do a lot of cuts and changes so that taboo subjects can be avoided. Under the Shah, the censors were sensitive to anything that could be construed as a criticism of the government. The new regime is sensitive to that too, and, in addition, to anything they consider to be immoral. For instance, men and women can’t be described as kissing or holding hands. They can’t be drinking alcohol.

I yearn to return to Iran to experience the richness
of the culture, but when I am there I become aware
of all the limitations. The moment I am on the
plane coming back to America, I feel a sense
of relief and liberation.

Bender: When you write about the American wife Jennifer accompanying her son and husband to Iran, she is in trouble—her mother-in-law kidnaps the American born grandchild to have him attend religious instruction, her husband becomes easily swayed to spend the night with a prostitute, which is okay in male Islamic eyes since an aghound marries them for one night, and Jennifer is at one point jailed in a village because her makeshift chador falls away exposing her hair; later she is held captive by the Iranian doctor who helps her and doesn’t want her to leave for America. Does this portrayal of the Iranian culture draw criticism, not just by the Iranian government, but also by the average Iranian reader?

Rachlin: Many Iranians identify with my characters. But some are sensitive to the negative image that Iranians have in this country. They believe my mission as a writer should be to correct that. I can understand their sensitivity, but on the other hand, I am writing about what I perceive as truth. In all my books, there are both positive and negative aspects to the situations and characters I present, real to life. The characters in Heart’s Desire came to me because I wanted to demonstrate how an American views the Iranian culture and how an Iranian views the American culture; how each deals with problems in cultures that aren’t their own. It fascinates me how people interpret cultural cues and situations. I also wanted to show how the husband in this novel, because he had felt prejudiced against in America during the hostage crisis, is eager to embrace his own culture, which he had left behind. He is even able to accept the temporary marriage to the woman (who isn’t really considered to be a prostitute because becoming a sigheh, marrying for a brief period of one hour, two hours, or a few days, is sanctioned by the government as a way of avoiding prostitution).

Bender: How has the experience of being a pioneer of Iranian American writing—a term which didn’t exist until very recently—both give you a niche as a writer and also perhaps peg you in a certain way? Are there advantages/disadvantages you see?

Rachlin: The only advantage is that it makes it easier for others to reach to me for certain, specific reasons, finding out about Iran, or just another culture. The disadvantage is that people then come to expect certain things from my writing that may not be there. Having lived in the U.S. more than half of my life, I have created many American characters, and the Iranian characters I have created are painted with the somewhat objective eye of an “outsider.”

Bender: How can someone tell if they might be better off writing fiction than a memoir? What are the differences to the writer?

Rachlin: I always thought I preferred to write fiction so that I would have the freedom to base each character on a conglomerate of several characters, and each situation on a combination of many incidents. I wouldn’t have that freedom in memoir. But at the same time, I began to have a desire to tell the story of my life and those of other women I grew up with as they were. It was like I had to tell it all and get it out of my system and to bring such situations to life for others. Another problem I anticipated about writing a memoir was that my family members wouldn’t agree with the way I viewed things. But then I decided to take that chance.

Bender: One similarity I see in all of your work, fiction and nonfiction alike, is the sharing of Persian poetry among characters and the prominence of song lyrics they listen to, all incredibly romantic and incredibly inflammatory for women in a culture that arranges marriages—sometimes of girls less than ten years old. Though their destiny is in their father’s hands, the young girls you portray are very romantic and hopeful. The men they marry use romantic words to coerce them into thinking they will be well loved and cared for when they are later emotionally and mentally and sometimes physically abused. How do you explain romanticism in this culture?

Rachlin: The ancient Iranian poets such as Omar Khayaam, who still have a great deal of popularity there, weren’t influenced by the Muslim religion, which prohibits romance before marriage. In addition, Iran has always had Americans, the English, and other Westerners living there because of the oil business, and spreading their values. So people are aware of romance and falling in love, and they experience it, though they are forbidden to act on those feelings unless the object of their romance happens to be someone they will marry.

Bender: Speaking of romance, Jumping Over Fire is a novel that’s stayed with me. The plight of a girl who falls in love with her adopted older brother and the ways in which that effects their young adult lives moves me. How did this particular plot occur to you?

Rachlin: In this novel, as in Heart’s Desire, I was interested to see how a girl like Nora, who views herself as an American, copes in Iran and then how Jahan, so all-Iranian, copes in America when they emigrate with their parents here. Nora, with her American looks and inclinations, blends well in America, and Jahan is treated like a foreigner and is unhappy. Their situation was the reverse when they lived in Iran. I also wanted to show how a girl like Nora feels the limitation of the Iranian culture particularly when she is an adolescent. She has no freedom to go out with boys so her fantasies all get attached to her brother, and when she finds out he is adopted, something they didn’t know until he was fifteen and she fourteen, she can justify her attraction.

Bender: I empathize with Nora; her honest nature, the agony of keeping a secret, the worry about her parents’ and her brother’s feelings, her desire to find the right life for herself, and her ability to work hard. I think Nora and all of your female characters embody qualities and concerns all women are familiar with. When you bring a character to life in a book, what are you aware of in their nature?

Rachlin: I believe people aren’t aware of what they are capable of doing or not doing until they are put to the test. And so I put my characters in difficult situations and see how they will behave, how they survive and overcome obstacles. I never know the outcome myself until I have gone through several drafts. For instance, in Foreigner, Feri, the protagonist of the novel, doesn’t realize how much she had missed about her own culture until she actually returns to Iran. Only when she is there and is looking back at her life in America, does she realize how sterile it was, how unhappy she was with her cold husband and her work. Iran is a place she had always wanted to get away from and come to the “free” America. But when in Iran, she realizes that the circumstances of her life in America made her a prisoner. By the end of the book, she isn’t even sure if she wants to return to America. But the realization and awareness become possible because she is actually in Iran and is put to the test about how she really feels and what she is capable of doing.

In all my books, there are both positive and negative aspects to the situations and characters I present,
real to life. The characters in Heart’s Desire came
to me because I wanted to demonstrate how
an American views the Iranian culture and how
an Iranian views the American culture; how each
deals with problems in cultures that aren’t their own.
It fascinates me how people interpret cultural
cues and situations.

Bender: Devising tests for your characters leads to plot and character development. What else helps you do that?

Rachlin: Ideas come to me as I go about my life. I might be taking a walk or looking out of the window and suddenly a solution comes to me about a character’s choices or directions and how to create scenes or a plot that would best represent the characters’ personalities and capabilities.

Bender: Your stories are set against political events in Iran. How much research do you do? How much is staying in touch with events in Iran a part of your work?

Rachlin: I do very little research just for the sake of my writing. I regularly read Iranian magazines and newspapers, as well as any news about Iran in American ones. I talk to Iranian friends and relatives who pass through New York. The Iranian newspapers and magazines report details, not just about the large political issues but also the daily events—certain publications closing down, others coming into existence, art exhibitions, movies and plays, restaurants opening up or closing, crime, prices of certain things going up. So I get glimpses into the texture of life there.

Bender: Do you have advice for those writing fiction or memoir that involves knowledge of world events about how to keep the story from having too much exposition that might take the reader out of the story?

Rachlin: I think character development should be the emphasis, and the political situation should be in the background, used to the extent that that the characters’ actions, choices, decisions, can be put in context. For instance, in Foreigner, I focus on Feri’s personal dilemma rather than the political situation around her in Iran or America. She has begun to sense certain sterility about the American way of life, and sees Iran as a spiritually richer culture. People find out about world events in broad terms by reading or listening to news. Only in fiction or memoir do you have the chance to get into the complexities and nuances of a culture and people living in it.

Bender: After reading your work, I see Iranian culture as complex, its people and families diverse in their ways of connecting with the dominating culture, and the state of humanity. There is a lot of sadness about how life turned out from the ’70s to today. There is contradiction in the way so many love worldly pleasures, others shun them and feel their values are compromised, and still others seem to have a foot in both worlds—not practicing religion, but adhering to traditional roles for women and men. How do you think things are going now for the people of Iran?

Rachlin: Most young Iranians are particularly unhappy about all the restrictions imposed on them—the widespread censorship of everything. There are few sources of entertainment for them—boys and girls aren’t allowed to mingle, to drink, to dance; nightclubs are closed down; most movies deal with limited subjects. What happens is that they are forced to lead an underground life—they obtain things from the black market and carry on many activities covertly. When I visited Iran last, my relatives’ young children watched American movies on videos, listened to American music on tapes, and drank alcohol; all these were obtained from the black market, which is practically as large as the legal market. They went to parties with boys taking place in far away houses where the “moral” police weren’t as much on the look out. The more modernized older generation is also unhappy about some of those rules. But then there are people, the younger as well as the older generation, that approve of those restrictions because they are religious themselves and their values are similar to ones the government is imposing on people. Iran has always been a mingling of traditional and westernized, religious and nonreligious—values that create contradictions and complexity.

Bender: Are there themes and/or topics you want to explore in fiction and nonfiction based on what you know about Iran today?

Rachlin: For my next project, I am planning on writing a novel set in present day Iran. I will mainly focus on identical twin sisters and how their lives are affected and how they go in different directions as they reach adolescence and they have more complex interactions with the outside world. In it, I want to catch all the nuances of the “double” life people are forced to lead, often with tragic consequences.

Bender: Is it hard to begin something new after succeeding at finishing so many stories? How do you allow yourself to feel comfortable getting back to unknowns again?

Rachlin: Writing is a necessity for me. I get depressed when I take too long a break from it. I am happiest when I can spend several hours a day writing. It is as if experiences don’t have full meaning unless I channel them into scenes in fiction or memoir.

Bender: We haven’t discussed your teaching life. How does teaching affect your writing?

Rachlin: I find interaction with students stimulating—we have similar interests and questions. I also learn from them in that pointing out what works and doesn’t work in the pieces they hand in helps me to look at my own writing the same way. I become a better editor of my own work because of teaching.

Bender: Are there trends you are seeing in the work of today’s young writers that excite you? Any that irritate you?

Rachlin: What excites me is to see students being willing to write openly and honestly about their experiences, not afraid to reveal themselves. What irritates me, mostly when I teach at the undergraduate level, is the limited range of the students’ preoccupations. They can be overly concerned in their writing with subjects like dating, grades, and such matters. Older students have wider range of experiences and that reflects in what they choose to write about.

Bender: Are there any words of advice you find yourself giving frequently?

Rachlin: I tell students that they should write what they are passionate about rather than trying to calculate the market. I have found that calculations rarely work. If they write something that interests them, they will be more willing to work hard on it, shape and revise, face and overcome obstacles.

EXCERPT

from Persian Girls: A Memoir
by Nahid Rachlin

At the end of the evening Manijeh and Javad left for a hotel. The next day they would go on a week-long honeymoon in Shiraz. After that they would settle in Abadan, where Javad had his practice and was affiliated with the oil refinery’s hospital. They would live in a modern apartment in a modern area, where many of the American employees of the hospital and oil refinery lived as well.
“Next is your turn,” Father said to me at breakfast. His smile was hesitant, as if he was unsure if he wanted to be gentle with me.
“I don’t want to get married.”
“Do you want to be an old maid?”
“I want to go to a university in America,” I said.
As if my not wanting to give in to marriage signaled to him other kinds of trouble from me he replied by saying, “Are you careful about what you say in public? SAVAK is tightening up its grip. The Shah is afraid of the mullahs. He can’t count on the CIA again if he’s forced out.”
Though Father was preaching at me I was flattered that he was talking to me the way he used to with my brothers. Was he seeing me differently? Would he soon change his mind and let me go and join my brothers?
That flicker of hope was rudely extinguished a few days later. I was sitting in a shady corner of the courtyard and reading the novel, Mother, by Maxim Gorky, another white-jacket book, I had bought from the Tabatabai Bookstore. I was usually careful to do my reading alone, but because Father wasn’t home, I was sitting in the open with it. I saw a shadow pass behind me, then Father standing over my shoulder, looking at the book.
“Let me see that,” he said. I handed it to him. “Where did you get this communistic book?”
“I found it in an empty classroom,” I said, not wanting to give away the bookstore man. I had been drawn to it because of its title, preoccupied as I was by the issue of motherhood.
“Don’t you know communism is outlawed?” he said. “Your brothers never gave me trouble like you do.” His voice escalated as he said, “If I’m caught with that book in my home I’ll lose my license and be sent to jail. Three years for owning that book.” Like an interrogator investigating a crime, he asked, “What else have you been reading?” Without waiting for an answer he began to pull out the pages from the book and tear them into pieces. He was in a frenzy. He collected the pieces that fell on the ground and walked away with them. I remained frozen in the same spot I’d been when he’d appeared.”

PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin) AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
REVIEWS:
BOSTON GLOBE:
"Persian Girls, reads like a novel -- suspenseful, vivid, heartbreaking. In "Persian Girls, Rachlin chronicles her choices and those made by her sisters, her mother and her aunts, throwing the door to her family's home wide open. Readers who follow her through will be wiser, and moved."

NPR: THE WORLD
Slected by Christopher Merrill, the Director of Iowa International Writing Program as one of the best four books of the year. "If you want to know what it was like to grow up in Iran this is the book to read. Rachlin, the author of five previous works of fiction, including the much acclaimed Foreigner, begins her story at the age of nine, when she was taken away from the only mother she had ever known—her aunt, as it happens—and returned to a family in which the prospects of her becoming a writer were, at best, dim. But her portrait of the artist in an Islamic country on the verge of dramatic change is filled with light."

Publishers Weekly:
"This lyrical and disturbing memoir by the author of four novels (Foreigner , etc.) tells the story of an Iranian girl growing up in a culture where, despite the Westernizing reforms of the Shah, women had little power or autonomy... Exuding the melancholy of an outsider, this memoir gives American readers rare insight into Iranians' ambivalence toward the United States, the desire for American freedom clashing with resentment of American hegemony."

Washington Post:
"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..."

The Charlotte Observer:
"Iran again looms large on the world stage. Rhetoric conjures fear of radical Islam and flashbacks to the Ayatollah Khomeini-- images that obscure Iran's rich cultural history as Persia and ignore ordinary people torn between old and new, secular and sacred. In her bittersweet memoir, Persian Girls, Iranian American novelist Nahid Rachlin fills in the blanks."

Jonathan Friedlander, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies:
“Rachlin’s most powerful work to date. A riveting memoir of separation and reunion and the diasporic life and times of this prolific and beloved Iranian-American author.”

Matt Beynon Rees, author of The Collaborator of Bethlehem and contributing editor, Time:
“Through the touching, tragic story of two sisters, Persian Girls unfolds the entire drama of modern Iran. It’s a beautiful, harrowing memoir of the cruelty of men toward women, and it paints the exotic scents and traditions of Tehran with the delicacy of a great novel. If you want to understand Iran, read Nahid Rachlin.”

Abbas Milani, Director, Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies, Stanford University:
“In elegant, beguiling, supple prose, Nahid Rachlin has chronicled the traumas and triumphs of a Persian girl, fashioning for herself a persona that is at once global and quintessentially Persian.”

Salar Abdoh, author of Opium and The Poet Game:
“In Persian Girls, Nahid Rachlin tells her own story with sincerity—speaking for countless lives in many lands where survival is as exceptional as being buried under the dead weight of tradition is not.”

Dona Munker, coauthor of Daughter of Persia:
“Riveting and beautifully observed, Persian Girls recounts Nahid Rachlin’s family epic with the same quietly mesmerizing power that makes her novels and short stories linger in the mind years after we’ve read the last page.”

Patty Dann, author of Mermaids and The Baby Boat:
“Rachlin’s remarkable memoir sheds light on an intimate world that is at the center of the world’s stage. With a deft hand, she writes of a life so honestly that it is has all the facets of a great novel.”
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CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION
“Rachlin shows us not only the tranquil inner ourtyards with sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending for primacy in the streets outside...”
—The New York Times Book Review

Praised by V.S. Naipaul, Anne Tyler, Tama Janowitz, and other writers, Nahid Rachlin has spent her career writing novels about hidden Iran—the combustible political passions underlying everyday life and the family dramas of ordinary Iranians. With her long-awaited memoir, Persian Girls, she turns her sharp novelist’s eye on her own remarkable life.
Given to her childless and widowed aunt by her mother when she was an infant, Rachlin lived a blissful Iranian childhood with her mother’s sister, Maryam. One day, when Nahid was nine years old, her father kidnapped her from her schoolyard, and the only mother she’d ever known, and returned her to her birth family—strangers to the young girl.
In a story of heartache, ambition, oppression, hope, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin’s childhood and coming of age in Iran under the late Shah—and her domineering father—her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soulmate, Pari. Both girls refused to accept the prescribed traditional-Muslim roles for them and dreamed of careers in literature and the theatre (both considered unthinkable for respectable girls in Iran); they devoured forbidden books and had secret romances.
But then things quickly changed. Pari was forced by her parents to marry a wealthy suitor, a cruel man who kept her a prisoner in her own home. Maryam, heartbroken and alone, lived a solitary life in her old Tehran neighborhood, dreaming of the day when she would be reunited with Nahid.Manijeh, Nahid’s middle sister, hoped for nothing more than to become a good traditional-Muslim wife and mysterious Mohtaram, Nahid’s birth mother, helped her husband to arrange her daughters’ marriages.
Eventually, Nahid narrowly avoided become a young bride to a man of her parents’ choosing and came to America. As Nahid found literary success in the United States, Pari’s dreams fell to pieces. Her ambitions quashed by her husband, Pari’s hopes dissipated. When news came to Nahid in the middle of the night that her sister had died after falling down a flight of stairs, her world was turned upside down. She traveled back to the country where she had grown up, now under the Islamic regime rather than the Shah, to say goodbye to her only friend. It is there she confronts her past, and the women of her family.
This moving and beautifully written memoir offers the reader a rare glimpse into the secret lives of Iranian women. A story of promises kept and promises broken, of dreams and heartache and, most important, of sisters, Persian Girls is a gripping saga that will change the way anyone looks at Iran and the women who populate it.
***

JUMPING OVER FIRE (available in paperback)
"If, as Aristotle reminds us, we are our desire,
then who are we if the object of our desire is
forbidden? What becomes of us if we are born in one world yet long for another? These are just two of the
complex and difficult questions Nahid Rachlin explores
and ultimately illuminates in this brave, engrossing,
and timely novel. I recommend it highly!"--Andre (Dubus III),author of House of Sand and Fog, and In the Bedroom

“This poignant, beautifully told story of an Iranian-American family is both a great read and a fine introduction to a land and a culture about which it is imperative we Americans inform ourselves as much and as quickly as possible.”— Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind and For Rouenna.

“In this new novel, Nahid Rachlin's powers as a writer and storyteller blaze at their fullest, like the Norooz (New Year's) bonfires that the title alludes to. In an era when fear of Middle Eastern terrorism holds the West in thrall . . . it is refreshing to encounter a genuine and truly multicultural voice, able to speak both from within Persian culture and the American society in which Rachlin now lives and writes. Jumping Over Fire presents the sort of nuanced voice that must be heard if Iranians and Americans are ever to understand one another.” — Carolyne Wright, author of Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Blue Lynx Prize, American Book Award)

FOREIGNER (Available in paperback)

MARRIED TO A STRANGER (available in paperback)

THE HEART'S DESIRE (Available in paperback)

VEILS (Short Story Collection)Available in paperback

WHERE OUR HEARTS ARE (Complete Story)