Childhood in a changing nation

The epigraph to Roya Hakakian’s memoir is a poem by Seamus Heaney in which he likens the act of writing to that of staring into a bottomless well: Through the darkness, the face that stares back at the writer is invariably his own.

That everything we write is about ourselves is not a novel idea. The only difference between a memoir and other forms of fiction (I use that word here intentionally) is the writer’s claim of truthfulness -- given, of course, the caprices and limitations of memory. Ultimately, though, a writer’s challenge is to speak not only of herself but to the reader: to establish, through that sometimes magical, often elusive process, a connection with the reader that transcends you or me and that arrives at a larger, more universal, understanding of us.

If held to that standard, “Journey From the Land of No” is a work in progress.

An acclaimed poet and a former producer for “60 Minutes,” Hakakian has set out to recount her experience as an Iranian Jewish woman through the Islamic Revolution and under the reign of the ayatollahs in Iran. That she promises an account more authentic, perhaps more accurate, than the myriad others that have been rendered throughout the last 23 years, is both touching and unfair.

“What you once witnessed,” she says early in the book, “is the story that brought journalists to your doorstep, but they left without the scoop. What you once witnessed is what scholars sought in the archives but did not find. What you once witnessed is what biographers intended to write.” The many writers and directors of memoirs and documentary films about Iran and Iranians in the last three decades may feel, not without justification, that witness has indeed been borne and that archives have been fed even before Hakakian decided to speak.

Still, it is true that every person’s experience represents a different version of the same truth, and Hakakian does have a wonderful gift for defining certain telling subtleties. She manages this admirably when speaking of her mother’s generation of Jewish Iranian women, or when she paints the lonely desperation of a middle-aged neighbor at the crossroads of life: “In that dim light, in the corner of the couch, barely blinking, not reading, radio silent, the television rarely on, she was an old spider, stuck to her own web.”

Given Hakakian’s strengths, therefore, a reader may not mind her sometimes overblown self-image (the many references to herself as “a genius” or the lengths to which she goes to establish that she was the smartest, most gifted student in her grade year after year). The reader may also overlook some failed attempts at lyricism (using the literal translation of the word Roya, her first name, in English, she says, “[T]hroughout 1984, Roya, the dream, had only nightmares”) or even forgive the instances where that lyricism has degenerated into bad poetry. (Having described a cousin’s act of applying makeup as “the operation of a lone goddess,” Hakakian takes us through the entire process only to warn that the girl’s one limitation was with eye shadow: “Shadows were her only weakness, as she sometimes had trouble applying them without having them dust her eyelashes. Shadows, alas, the shadows!”)

No doubt the Western reader, still largely unfamiliar with the daily rhythms of life in the East, can find pleasure simply in watching that world through the window provided in this book. Nevertheless, there is one essential element sorely missing here, and its absence glares like the white face in Heaney’s well: It is that of personal and political perspective.

Beginning with her childhood, Hakakian describes in great detail her family and early surroundings. She spends an entire chapter recalling her handsome, Westernized Uncle Ardi, his baby blue BMW and his scandalous love affair with a Muslim girl. When his mother forbids him to marry the girl, Ardi storms out of the house and, in a blind rage, drives into an elderly man in a village somewhere between Tehran and the Caspian shore. What follows in Hakakian’s account is astonishing by default: Bailed out of jail, Ardi escapes to Israel, where he will not only avoid facing his victim but also forget his Muslim lover in favor of a Jewish wife. The family, we are told, misses him terribly, but no one -- including the author -- seems to question his escape or recognize it as the act of cowardice that it is. Having treated us to no less than 21 pages worth of Uncle Ardi’s attributes, Hakakian provides one sentence to justify his escape: “A Jew had run over a Muslim.... Would there be justice, especially if the old man died?”

Justice for whom, one might ask, but Hakakian doesn’t. The fact is, the Iran of Uncle Ardi’s era was a place where the wealthy -- Muslim or Jew -- owned the poor, but Hakakian is too preoccupied with the child’s image of Uncle Ardi to offer an adult’s perspective of him. With him gone, she grieves; the baby blue BMW would sit “without a driver, all the solidity that was left of that solid, solid man.”

Elsewhere, she talks about the relative who brought to their house bags of gold and jewelry, poured the contents on the dining room table and let the women play with them as they wished. The treasure, we are told without dwelling on the obvious moral implication, had until recently belonged to wealthy Iranians who died or had escaped the revolution. And she describes how, in the early days of the revolution, she celebrated the summary executions -- sometimes with a bullet in the back -- of government officials under the shah’s reign: “Along with a cup of tea, we took in images of their corpses in the morning papers.... I, too, believed those dead to be lesser people, if they were people at all.”

The question here is not whether the writer has managed, so many years later, to see the horror of those executions and of her own reaction to them. One assumes, or at least hopes, that she has. The question -- if an account of that violence and of the people welcoming it is to possess any kind of universal significance -- is how it was that a nation of literate, freedom-loving men and women, a generation of young people willing to give up their lives for the sake of democracy, would sit by and watch, even applaud, the treacherous form of justice that has marked every failed revolution since the first heads began to roll under the guillotines in France.

Later, Hakakian does a fine job of describing the changes brought to the country by its Islamic rulers, the many ways in which they humiliated and diminished everyone subjected to them. She speaks of her own sense of betrayal when she realized, along with millions of other Iranians, that the mullahs intended to run as tight a ship as the shah had. But if this is the journalistic scoop she promised to deliver at the beginning of the book, she has fallen terribly short.

We have, for 20 years now, heard the laments of the women who marched in the streets of Iran screaming, “Long live Khomeini” only to find themselves imprisoned by his orders inside their head scarves and Islamic dress, suppressed and raped and murdered by his agents. We know, because we have heard them bemoan it, that the men who helped engineer the mullahs’ ascent to power later realized that they had ushered in a dictatorship much worse than the one they had overthrown.

What we don’t know is why those freedom-loving, democratic-minded men and women picked up the banner of Khomeini and of Islam in the first place, and why they imagined for a minute that the mullahs would behave, in 1979, any differently than they had in the previous thousand years. The mullahs’ claim to Iran’s leadership had never been a secret. Their views on women, government and general social and human interactions had been written and pronounced for centuries. The fanatical believers who thought they could see Khomeini’s face carved on the surface of the moon might have been only too happy to give up their human rights in exchange for living in his shadow, but why did the well-informed, secular opposition -- the young Jewish girl, say, whose family and community had been saved by the shah from the mullahs’ rage, who must have (which one of us didn’t?) heard the stories of the horrors inflicted by the mullahs upon the Jews for centuries -- why would that segment of society think that by joining forces with the mullahs it would usher in anything but a new Shiite terror?

In the end, “Journey From the Land of No” is a mostly lyrical account of a young woman’s experience of loss. But for one person’s lyricism to serve as a mirror to the rest of the world, for the American reader to see, in the story of an Iranian Jewish woman, how easy it might be to give up one’s freedoms and at what cost, how mindlessly a nation might surrender to the rhetoric of its leaders -- how each of us is accountable for every inch of ground we surrender -- for that to happen, a writer needs to ask questions that have not been posed here. *