Journey From the Land of No - Roya Hakakian

Dear Roya Hakakian,

I recently attended your talk, “Journey from the Land of No,” at Scripps College last Tuesday and I wanted to thank you for an engaging presentation. As a Humanities Junior Fellow this year, I have been exposed to a variety of media portraying women and Islam in contemporary society. After reading your memoir of your childhood during the Iranian Revolution, I especially appreciated your lyrical depiction of life in Iran. Through descriptive literature and personal experience, you countered preconceived Western notions of Iranian society with your own memories of beauty and tranquility.

I was struck by the compassion that permeated your descriptions of the people and geography of Iran, despite the hostility you encountered as a Jewish-Iranian from a radical regime after the revolution. Even though you have faced injustice in the ruling regime, you were not confined by your experiences to write a “harrowing” memoir like many of the autobiographical accounts of life in Iran that you referred to in your lecture. In your memoir, you described how you have kept your memories silent for so long to “begin anew” in America. To move on in your new life, you imagine yourself as “a secondhand car whose odometer has been reset to zero by exile, the craftiest of dealers…Within you is all the clanking, hissing, and racket of previous rides. But you muffle it all and press on.” Despite your reluctance to speak about your past, you were able to capture the tranquility, humor, and poetry of daily life in Iran while still giving weight to the significance of the revolution.

As a first generation immigrant with memories of leaving another life behind, I sympathize with your reluctance to relive your memories of Iran by recounting them in writing. I have also struggled with the difficulty of communicating my painful experiences to loved ones, and I understand well that literature can be a liberating outlet for emotions. I admire your courage and determination to delve into your memories and create a work that bridges cultural barriers, despite your fear of reliving traumatizing events. I hope that one day I will also be able to confront and reexamine my past to understand how it has shaped the person I have become. I admire your determination to resist the confines of a Jewish Iranian identity to assume your own identity in the midst of a culture that seeks to categorize individuals into stereotypes.

Your work alerts us to the misconceptions of Iran in the West. The media promotes stereotypes of Iran as a mysterious and backward country where women are silenced and modern technology doesn’t exist. Therefore, Westerners may assume a condescending attitude toward women in the Middle East that essentializes all Muslim women as veiled, silent, and oppressed. In your memoir, you depict the individual experiences of Iranian women such as Farah, who was forced by tradition into an unhappy marriage, and Bibi, who fought actively against the Shah and was imprisoned by the Islamic regime. You paint a humorous caricature of Mrs. Moghadam, the radical Islamist principal of your school who neglected intellectualism. At the same time, you introduce us to Mrs. Arman, a former university professor who encouraged your curiosity and love for words. Through literature, you bring a myriad of perspectives from Iranian women that defy the narrow perceptions of them as powerless beings in need of Western salvation. Instead, there are women who hold strong convictions and act on their beliefs despite the barriers they encounter from society and the state. I was inspired by the beauty of your prose and how you conveyed the hope and courage that persists in an atmosphere of repression and uncertainty.

In difficult times, it may be comforting to lose oneself in another world crafted by words. Literature serves as both a means to understand one’s reality and to escape reality by sympathizing with characters in a book. Your stories of resistance through words showed the central role literature plays in engaging citizens with politics and society. Literature can serve as a subversive medium to communicate secret messages and galvanize a group of people to rise up against injustice. Your description of the symbolic story “The Little Black Fish” especially captured the power metaphors may exert over citizens. Even though “The Little Black Fish” seems like an innocuous children’s story, the government banned the book for its message of grassroots disobedience. While some may view literature as an escapist avenue, you show the ways literature can build community and empower the powerless.

Thank you again for speaking at Scripps College and participating in the Humanities Institute program. In so many ways, your work has been incredibly inspirational for me as a writer and an individual.

Sincerely,
Heidi Hong SC’12