Iraq and Iran

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, March 2011; written by Lisa Pearson.

Being someone who reads primarily for escapism, I tend to avoid books about the Mideast, since they are usually focused on the plight of people who are caught between oppressive regimes and full-scale conflict. However, we have two new books on the shelf that bring the reader back behind the veil of newspaper headlines and desperate imagery into the daily lives of women in Iraq and Iran. Both of these books recount the experiences of the authors’ mothers and grandmothers, and they both manage to do this in a beautiful storytelling fashion that reads almost like a novel.

Author Tamara Chalabi actually states in her introduction to “Late For Tea at the Deer Palace” that her goal in writing her family’s story is to counter the image of Iraq as “a desert of tanks, screaming women and barefoot children”. If her name sounds familiar, it’s because she is the daughter of Ahmad Chalabi, a prominent opposition figure to the Saddam Hussein regime with a controversial past of his own. The Chalabi family first came to Iraq in 1638, when the Turks drove the Persians out of the area and Iraq (or Mesopotamia, as it was known then) became a part of the vast Ottoman Empire.

Chalabi’s book retells the last century of her family’s history in Iraq, years in which Ottoman control is crumbling, the influence of oil-hungry Western powers is growing, and the men of the Chalabi family become very influential players in an Iraq undergoing modernization. For decades, they were the political and social elite in Northern Iraq, until they fled to Lebanon in the 1960’s following the overthrow of King Faisal II.

Along with this political history, Chalabi also recounts the marriages, births and deaths of her extended family. She describes how young men and women came of age, their relationships with their elders, and their ties to each other. She offers the reader insight into the social responsibilities of tribal leaders and the intricate framework of religion, history and alliances upon which Iraqi culture was built.

Jasmin Darznik has a slightly more intimate, personal story. Following the death of her German father, she found an old photograph of her Iranian mother as a young bride…but the groom was a stranger. At first, her mother refused to answer questions about this other marriage, or to clarify her previous vague comments about “my good daughter”. A few months later, however, cassette tapes begin arriving in Darznik’s mailbox, each tape filled with her mother’s memories. “The Good Daughter: a memoir of my mother’s hidden life” is a compilation of those ten cassettes told in the style of a novel.

The story actually encompasses the lives of Darznik’s grandmother and great-grandmother, as well as her mom. It is a story of arranged marriages, bullying in-laws, abuse and coping. It is also a story about a woman who broke this cycle of anger and resentment by divorcing her abusive husband, going to college in Europe to become a doctor, and finding true love outside the confines of Iranian society before moving to America. Growing up, however, Darznik viewed her mother as stifling and old-fashioned, unwilling to let her act like a typical American teen. It wasn’t until she listened to her mother’s recollections on these cassette tapes that she appreciated how different her girlhood was from that of her mother and grandmother. She also discovered her sister Sara, the Good Daughter, the daughter that was left behind. This is a very poignant memoir that is just as much about mothers and daughters as it is about Iran, and it makes for a very beautiful story.