***

When I first received my Iranian passport shortly after my twenty first birthday, I looked up our last name in the dictionary. The first definition for Ranjbar is proletariat. The second meaning is toiler.

Uncle Massoud, a renowned sports champion and successful business owner, is the only Ranjbar who physically toils. Massoud has recently developed a passion for organic farming and works daily on our family’s rice fields. Given our family history of khans and wealthy land owners, and the stringent classism that remains a normative part of Persian culture, it is a strange sight for most.

I am only visiting Iran for one month and, although social convention demand that I spend my time visiting relatives and attending frivolous parties, my uncle and I are unseparable. Every morning we eat a modest breakfast of bread and feta with basil, drink tea from the samovar, and set off at sunrise, leaving the other Ranjbars in the house to gossip amongst themselves.

We begin each morning tending to our small organic plot. It is not difficult to find; the growing sprigs are half the size of the surrounding fields. My uncle hands me a plastic bag and points out the weeds. I diligently follow him as he weaves through rows of green sprouting rice seedlings. I try to avoid stepping on the frogs and small water snakes that swim through the flooded paddies.

Every so often, a farmer approaches to greet us. This particular morning, three farmers call out to us from the nearest canal. I know instantly from their use of the vernacular that they are from the neighboring village. Massoud is their boss and, as a sign of respect, they begin the conversation in coarse Farsi, thick northern accents that are barely decipherable to anyone outside of the region. After obligatory greetings, the formality melts away, and we speak casually and warmly in patois. The three farmers invite us for tea. We choose an idyllic spot by a lily pond. Using burning embers from under the metal teapot, we light up a humble water pipe and pass around sugar cubes for the tea.

The latest round of economic sanctions is the first topic of conversation. Inflation is rising, and there are rumors of factory workers who haven’t received wages in months. The price of bread doubled this past week, and we wonder aloud how people will cope. Everyone speaks in the third person, but the worry on their brows is noticeable.

The talk then turns to the legal battle over our fields. One of the older farmers, Mr. Reza, comments on the irony of the situation. One Ranjbar seeks solace from working the land, while another family member tries to exploit it for personal gain. He is referring to my cousin Shideh, a lawyer who stole several hundred acres of our family’s land by convincing my illiterate grandmother to validate a property document with her fingerprint.

As the men become more animated in their discussion, I wonder to myself if these farmers themselves are exploited. Their wage is fair by Iranian standards. As sharecroppers, they are entitled to half of the rice harvested on this land. In a time of steep economic downturn – in large part due to the oppressive sanctions driven by the U.S. government – I wonder if selling the rice when it is harvested in late summer will be enough to cover the inflated cost of basic necessities. Times are hard and these farmers have relied heavily on credit to tide them over until the harvest. Their debts force them to sell their crops at the height of harvest season, when rice prices are at their lowest. My grandmother’s capital allows her to wait until winter, when the value of rice doubles. As the matriarch of the family, she too is worried about the impact of sanctions. With the exception of Iran’s elite, the punitive sanctions are having dire effects on the entire population. Even if she wanted to, I’m not sure my grandmother would be able to offer the sharecroppers more. If the value of the land collapses, she will be left with nothing.

***

The conversation continues and I excuse myself to collect my thoughts. As I walk through the fields that my family oversees in northern Iran, I hope that my love for this land doesn’t reveal a darker side of my nature, the need to control and dominate. I try not to refer to this land in the possessive tense because it cheapens my connection to it. To do so would also be fundamentally untruthful.

These rice fields are the site of ongoing legal battles spanning generations; this episode with Shideh is only the most recent. This land first came into my grandmother Batul’s possession during the White Revolution, a land reform initiative implemented by the Shah of Iran in the 1960s to check the power of the aristocracy and woo support from the peasantry.

This scheme worried my great-grandfather, a khan whose family had controlled vast swathes of fertile land throughout the Caspian Sea region. Once an infamous figure in the region, by the time of the White Revolution, he was only a semblance of his former self. In his younger years, at six foot ten, when he rode his massive black stallion, the ground literally shook. He had a penchant for bacchanalian celebrations and beautiful women. Those days of aristocratic power were over and, in an attempt to retain ownership of the land, my great-grandfather divided up his property deeds amongst his three wives and twenty-two children.

He did not anticipate that the value my grandmother’s land would triple a few years later. An important component of the White Revolution was developing new infrastructure, including highways to allow farmers to sell their goods to larger markets. Urbanization in the north soon followed, and the value of property skyrocketed as rich Tehranis scrambled to build expensive villas on the pristine Caspian seaside. Seeing an opportunity to add to his already considerable riches, my great-grandfather quietly and illegally forged my illiterate grandmother’s signature, claiming that she had sold the land back to him.

My grandfather, who was already wealthy in his own right, was furious when he discovered what the khan had done. Enraged, he gave my grandmother Batul an ultimatum and she was forced to choose between a relationship with her husband or her father. With eight children and enormous social pressure from the extended family, divorce was not an option. A lengthy lawsuit ensued and, although she won the case, it burdened her already strained marriage.

My grandfather was both a successful capitalist and a champion of various social justice causes, which resulted in intermittent imprisonment throughout his life under both the Shah and Khomeini’s regimes. My grandfather was a known philanthropist as well as a philanderer. When he snuck out in the middle of the night, it was usually to drop off a box of food to a neighbor experiencing hard times. It was always delivered anonymously at night so as not to embarrass anyone. It was equally likely that he was visiting one of his many girlfriends. Like my great-grandfather, he left behind an ostentatious reputation and a great deal of property. My grandmother Batul became a very wealthy landowner as a result, but at a great cost to her personal happiness.

Twelve years after my grandfather’s passing, the controversy over ownership of this land continues. Our once cohesive family splintered with greed and, with the most recent dispute involving Shideh, has resulted in even deeper divisions. Shideh’s hope is to sell the seized land and escape to Canada, leaving everything behind and never looking back. My family often blames these betrayals on the shifting economic and political happenings in the country, but I can’t help wonder if these transgressions are inherent to our family.

Following the long conversation with the farmers in the fields, I return home to find my cousins visiting from a neighboring province. We walk down to the Caspian seaside and look for a restaurant on the beach. They ask me about my favorite Persian dish and I reply anything but abgoosht, a traditional dish of smashed up beans and meat. They reply that it is a calorie-rich meal that farmers use to maintain energy throughout the day. After a few moments, my younger cousin Kayvan remarks that farmers today are probably even too poor to afford that, so they probably just eat rice three times a day. I think back to my afternoon with Mr. Reza and the other farmers and know, without a doubt, they can’t afford to sell most of the rice they take home.

The rest of the walk is markedly silent. We don’t know who is listening and everything is political these days, even bread. With the influx of tourists to the Caspian Sea, the area is filled with basij monitoring the area for moral transgressions. I shift my attention to our surroundings and, in an attempt to change the subject, comment on the rows of tents along the sea shore. My cousin replies that no one can afford the price of hotels. We all sigh despondently until he quotes a line from my favorite Iranian poet, Sohrab Sepehri. As long as there are poppies, we must live.

***

Every morning, I throw myself into my little plot, weeding, flooding, measuring the growing stalks. I find myself nostalgic for a past that I’ve never experienced and, as I hear more about the history of this contentious land, I’m gradually realizing that this utopian ideal has never existed. At the same time, this land is my escape and it gives me freedom from the impasse I’ve seen in every direction during my visit, which only seems to worsen as time progresses. It is a way to elude the excessive gossip and infighting that is the one constant in my family. It allows me to evade the state’s watchful eye. Miles from the city, there are no basij skulking in the fields, although I still involuntarily lower my voice when politics is the topic of conversation. After only a week, this Orwellian state is already driving me mad. I feel ashamed that it has already impacted me so strongly. Everyone I know here must cope with this reality daily. I pretend not to notice the looks of resentment in some of the eyes around our dinner table. That is how they control us – we turn against each other and then ourselves.

***

A few days later, Massoud and I head back to the fields. As we wind through the plots, synchronized in our work, I ask my uncle what the family thinks of his new passion for farming. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy. A respected Ranjbar tending the land? They joke that I’ve become a villager.” After a pause, he says that their opinions aren’t important. “This is how I cope with the world and where I find my peace.”

After a few hours of working under the bright sun, we return to the pond with our lunch basket. I unpack dates and he lays out a spread of yogurt and bread, and then we quietly read Sepehri.

***

Listen to Azita read her essay:

Rumpus original art by Rob Kimmel.

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 Twenty-five years in the making, The Colonel follows a former colonel in the Shah’s army through the ending of the Shah’s reign, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Those historical events and all the more personal upheavals that accompanied them hover as ominously over the colonel and his family as the rain clouds; and in Dowlatabadi’s rendering of the small town near the Caspian Sea where much of the novel takes place, it seems almost always to be raining.

Of course that is no mistake. The colonel has five children, and they are all undone, in one way or another, by revolution and war. The novel was originally written around the time that its primary narrative takes place, the early 1980s, in the midst of a crackdown on Iranian intellectuals. The air of impending doom—amorphous, imprecise, and perhaps more threatening for being so—that Dowlatabadi must have felt at the time pervades it. As the colonel muses: “Because you fear being spied upon, you end up believing that you really are being spied upon. But if this turns out not to be so, you still have to ask yourself why you can’t stop imagining that it’s happening. Where does this corrosive and exhausting feeling that constantly tells you that every eye is watching you come from?”

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

In the colonel’s case, his unsettled feeling comes from experience. He finds his eldest son, Amir, in prison, arrested by the Shah’s secret police for involvement with a Communist movement and left, ultimately, utterly broken by prolonged and vicious torture. Both of his other sons are killed, one “martyred” in the war against Iraq and the other dies during the revolution. One of his daughters gets by through a marriage with a deeply unscrupulous man who has no respect for his father-in-law and is all too adept at adjusting his political allegiances to maintain a position of provincial authority. And the novel begins with the colonel’s notification of his youngest daughter’s death, when two soldiers appear at his door and whisk him away in the middle of the night to claim and bury the body.

In the face of all of these grave events, what makes Dowlatabadi’s work shine is the complexity of his characters. The colonel is a study in contrasts. He prides himself on being fair-minded, having, for example, refused to carry out certain orders while an officer in the Shah’s military, and allowing his children to pursue their own interests and lead their own lives. Yet, we learn very early on, he has killed his wife in response to her adultery, which is what lands him in prison with Amir. His children’s choices, however reasonable and identifiable, are overwhelmed by the course of events that overtake them, and ultimately it is the colonel’s willingness to let them find their own paths (they pursue an array of different political and cultural allegiances) that leads to their ends.

The colonel himself is modeled after a historical figure, Mohammad Taqi Khan Pessian, a reformer with an inflexible moral code who led (and died at the conclusion of) a brief coup in 1921 (He is referred to frequently in the novel as The Colonel, with a capital “C”).  The novel is not, however, a simple retelling of Pessian’s story, although it is not without parallels. Instead, the narrative is fragmented, nonlinear, and often disorienting, but far from being off-putting, this approach seems to replicate disarmingly well the experience of so much upheaval—the disassociation and confusion, the gradual piecing together of the new order and the new rules which must be followed in order to navigate it.

The allegorical nature of the novel naturally invokes a great deal of Iranian history and culture, which translator Tom Patterdale handles deftly through an informative afterward and thorough footnotes. Patterdale’s decision to parallel Dowlatabadi’s removal of Arab vocabulary from the Persian prose by avoiding Latinate words in the translation may detract a bit from the lyricism of the novel, but the English rendition is nonetheless a pleasure to read.

That the regime in Tehran is unwilling to allow the novel’s release in Iran is unsurprising, but unfortunately it is also very fitting. The nature of authoritarians is not to learn from mistakes but to attempt to erase them. The Colonel is a very thorough accounting of those mistakes, and of their cost, and a demonstration of the necessity, for humanity’s sake, of overcoming them. Dowlatabadi is heralded as one of, if not the, greatest Iranian novelists, and The Colonel bears that out. That Dowlatabadi persists, despite having been at various times imprisoned, tortured, and censored, is a testament to the Iran that could be, and that can still be.

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Twenty-nine years later, I live an extraordinary life in Los Angeles, California. Just like my parents wanted, I am free. Free to pursue the career of my choosing. Free to travel. Free to walk down the street in a sundress or wear a bathing suit to the beach. Free to practice my religion openly. Free to sing and dance and revel. Free to love whomever I chose. I’m free in the broadest, most uncompromised, sense of the word.

But I’ve often wondered what would have happened if my parents had stayed. Who would I have become? How has circumstance affected my identity?

Watching the recently released film, Circumstance, by Iranian-American filmmaker Maryam Keshavarz, I discovered some of the answers. The film follows an upper class Iranian family in modern-day Tehran and touches upon the complex relationships between liberation and repression, religion and counterculture, and family and the individual. The film revolves around two teenage girls, Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), who fall in love as they bravely and shamelessly navigate Tehran’s underground. Although light in tone at first, the film soon becomes a brooding study in surveillance and sacrifice, as Atafeh’s brother, Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai), who is just out of rehab, joins the morality police and begins monitoring his own family.

The girls soon find themselves stuck between two worlds: a fantasy world where they are free to be together and live openly (a literal dream sequence where the girls are in Dubai), and their more conservative reality, which is steadily being encroached upon by Mehran. When Mehran begins to suspect the illicit relationship between Atafeh and Shireen, he commits an act of betrayal so intense it causes a shift in the film’s cinematography. Wide, open shots are replaced by claustrophobic imagery that makes the viewer feel as trapped as Atafeh and Shireen.

Despite the obvious impulse to broadly characterize this film as an Iranian lesbian movie, the film is far more nuanced. Circumstance takes viewers on a vivid journey across Tehran, from intimate family dinners to decadent secret nightclubs, mosques to mountains, and bedrooms to jail cells. Along the way, Maryam explores critical relationships as she tests the ties between father and daughter, brother and sister and among friends.

The film also reveals the interplay between a very conservative city and its strikingly liberal and Western-influenced counterculture. American music blares as teenagers dance at throbbing nightclubs, which appear straight out of Hollywood or Miami. At private celebrations, alcohol flows despite stringent rules to the contrary. When it comes time to make a political statement, Atafeh and Shireen help a friend overdub the movie “Milk.” In these private moments, we see glimpses of pre-revolution Tehran, which was a cosmopolitan mecca of culture, literati and revelry. Through her film, Maryam exposes audiences to an Iran that is much more complex and varied than the news coverage it receives.

Maryam’s personal story as a filmmaker is as compelling as her film. After studying film at NYU, Maryam was accepted into the prestigious Sundance Producers Lab where she developed the script for Circumstance. Maryam has described how she battled her own self-censorship while developing the film, realizing that if she made it she could never return to Iran (something her actors had to come to terms with as well, as Reza Sixo Safai explained in a recent Los Angeles Q&A). Due to its controversial subject matter, the film was shot below the radar in Lebanon over the course of 24 days (after getting approval on a version of a script that had all sexuality and politics removed). The production then smuggled the footage out of the country (much like I was smuggled out of Iran as an infant).

I like to believe that even if I had remained Iran, I would still be living a life defined by the things I love: relationships, music, art, travel. But watching Atafeh and Shireen, I realize what a luxury my way of life truly is. Remembering the sacrifice my parents made nearly thirty years ago, leaving behind friends, family, possessions and the only home they had ever known, I am inspired to live each day fully, taking advantage of the freedom my parents risked so much to afford me.

Circumstance is the Sundance Audience Award winner for Best Drama 2011.

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More images here.

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Eskander Sedaghi discusses where the Green Revolution has to go next.

Greg Scoblete asks how much would be different had the Green Revolution succeeded.

James Miller argues that the Green Revolution is ongoing, and important.

“But the veneer of calm masks what many here call the ‘fire under the ashes,’ a low-grade burn of cynicism and distrust.”

“Religion,” a poem by Amy Motlagh, at Splinter Generation.

“The Green of Iran,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Sholeh Wolpé.

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The Millions talks with Roxana Saberi, author of Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, about her time in Evin prison, the Green Movement, and her transformation into a spokeswoman for human rights.

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Twenty-eight year-old Paul Tusifale is too young for a midlife crisis, and with two years in San Quentin behind him, he’s way beyond coming-of-age. The hero of What We Are, a curiously obsessive first novel by Peter Nathaniel Malae, isn’t sure why he has such a bee in his bonnet, but he knows he’ll have to wait to figure it out until after dealing with the “suburban zombie on crystal meth” who spots him on a street corner at three in the morning and asks him for a handout.

In a roller-coaster series of nocturnal events, Paul fends off “the crankster,” who comes after him with a knife, then offers to treat his assailant to a burger at a nearby fast-food restaurant, where he defends a lady’s honor by shoving the burger in the crankster’s face. After passing out drunk at the feet of a statue of Jesus, Paul wakes to find “the clover-green eyes” of his old priest staring down at him; before he knows it, Paul has agreed to take part in a Cinco de Mayo rally. ¡Sí, se puede!

On its face, the novel’s title suggests both communal and individual aspects of identity. What defines Paul? If blood, he’s half Samoan, half white. If experience, his years in prison are counter-balanced by those spent at an elite all-boys’ Catholic prep school. As Paul says, he’s a tough guy who’s also smart. Raised in San Jose, CA, he’s torn between his old stomping grounds and the magnetic pull of his long-absent father in Polynesia. (Paul’s college-educated mom and working-class dad were divorced not long after he, at age nine, and his sister, at age ten, witnessed their first Filipino cockfight during a family party.) A man of dualities, the plural title could therefore refer to Paul alone.

Peter Nathaniel Malae

Right down to their saintly first names, Paul shares much in common with the author. Malae achieved literary fame early when nominated for the prestigious New York Public Library Young Lion Award for his superb short-story collection, Teach the Free Man. Paul Tusifale’s vocation is poetry, and we soon learn that he’s been “lionized” with a fellowship: his poetry has garnered him the financial support, and amatory attentions, of La Dulce, a wealthy Haitian who finds him irresistible. When Paul gets accused of a hate crime at the Cinco de Mayo rally and is sent back to jail, La Dulce bails him out; she then escorts him to Silicon University of the Valley—note the acronym—where he mingles with absurdly pompous literati until it’s time for his next fistfight.

Although What We Are has some of the qualities of a philosophical novel, I often felt as if I were reading it with my thumbs—as in playing Halo—as the plot incessantly enters its main character in hand-to-hand combat. Even a job shelving books at the Santa Clara Library leads Paul into battle. When Cyrus, an elderly Iranian immigrant who is Paul’s friend and co-worker, gets mugged, Paul nearly kills the mugger. He flees, gets caught, and is charged with attempted murder. The incident dramatizes this novel’s central concern with what we’re here to do. After befriending Cyrus, Paul longs to prove his love by means of some significant act. Ordinary social interactions seem insufficient; for a strong, healthy, young male inclined to fight, anything short of lethal combat represents soul-killing compromise. And so the novel demands: What are we to do with men? How do we start them up—and, once they’re started, how do we get them to stop? Is Ritalin the answer? Ritual combat culminating in human sacrifice, as the Aztecs practiced? For a nation at war with an all-volunteer army, such questions should be compelling. In fact, readers of literary fiction may find them all to easy to ignore.

Despite the serial nature of Paul’s adventures, to the extent that What We Are has a form, it’s less picaresque romp than a sustained archetypal encounter between Father and Son. Cyrus and Paul’s complex relationship is mirrored by that of Paul and his appropriately named Uncle Rich. Plagued by memories of the Vietnam War, Uncle Rich unburdens himself to his nephew. Most of these dialogs take place in bars, with the older man drowning his sorrows in Jack Daniels as he probes Paul’s heart and his own.

In jail and awaiting trial, Paul receives a visit from Cyrus. In a short but very moving scene, Cyrus tells him that their friendship is over. “I was leaving Iran because of men like you. Thank you very much. Good-bye.”

Behind bars, Paul laments:

There are still men out there—right?—digging holes and laying brick and pouring cement and driving truck and lifting weights at the gym not for the mirror or the Maxim recommendation on how to get women, but to—what’s this?—be brave and strong in the endurance of pain and to dispense their masculine anger in a socially acceptable venue. I mean, right? We’re still out there, us dying men, dying to die for our woman, our child, our cause, whatever it is, and if we can’t, then just being strong for them, being strong period, imperturbable in this storm of life.

The murder charge soon dropped, the novel follows our would-be hero as he goes to work in his uncle’s real-estate business. By imagining “the smoothness of vanilla milkshakes” Paul is able to get through the day without ending up in handcuffs. Various social issues are examined, from illegal immigration to contemporary child rearing, from walk-a-thons to sub-prime mortgages. Paul’s virility fails him when he attempts to pleasure an old woman who has had a mastectomy. Paul plays handball with Norteño gang members. Paul saves his white brother-in-law from getting beaten up (again.) Paul quotes Kerouac and Shakespeare. While going seventy on the freeway, Paul spars verbally with a Hummer driver who responds by cutting him off and… everything goes black. To Be Continued…

One of the novel’s final images is of Paul careening down a steep and treacherous path on his bicycle, “the gravity of the real fake world in which I live too strong to brake against.” That pretty much says it all.

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I’ve just got this hunch that things might be ok.

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Laleh Khadivi’s novel traces the history of Iran through the brutal journey of a young Kurd

It’s easy to forget, struck as we are with so many debates about national identity and international relations, that many of the world’s nations are relatively young. Many are also, as the 21st century continues to teach us, inherently violent impositions. This violence is the main theme of Laleh Khadivi’s first novel, The Age of Orphans. Opening in a recently established Iran, the novel spans the reigns of the Shahs, from the modernizing and “unifying” reign of Reza Khan in the 1920s to the eventual demise of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Khadivi begins The Age of Orphans by stressing unity. The central character is a young Kurdish boy who is obsessed with his mother and longs, always, almost pathologically, to breastfeed. Beyond this, we have the unified Kurdish tribe, who “sing one song… with one voice.” Unity is a persistent theme—later, “the distinction between everything and everything else dissolves;” later still, “all faces meld into one,” and “the men rise in unison.”

In The Age of Orphans, however, myths of unity are always violently undermined. We follow the Kurdish tribe into battle against the Shah’s army, only to read Khadivi’s brutal descriptions of their slaughter. The young boy watches the murder of his father by Iran’s modern soldiers, “already part man and part machine.” Khadivi’s horrifying repetitions describe him being brutally kicked to death, “boot to head… boot to head.” The boy, now an orphan, is conscripted into government service and a bureaucrat renames him “Reza,” after the Shah himself.

Laleh Khadivi

As a teenager, Reza is slowly indoctrinated into the ideology of the new Iran. Modernity is embraced, his language is forgotten, and he thrives as a soldier. At fifteen, he moves with his garrison to help quell the Kurdish insurgency. In a Kurdish village, he beats a boy who suggests they look alike; later, with three friends, he takes the young women of the village to a mountain cave, where he rapes them. These exploits gain him a reputation for brutality, and he is quickly promoted. By eighteen, he is living in Tehran, visiting brothels and smoking opium. An illiterate, Reza meets his future wife, Meena, the daughter of a bookseller. She is dedicated to the Shah and the new Iran, and imagines their marriage as an allegory of the nation itself—the sophisticated city dweller uniting with the ignorant Kurd. But this fantasy slowly dismantles—posted to Kurdish territory, Meena grows racist, while Reza becomes violent toward her—and midway through the book, they are broken people.

While the movement of the plot is always clear, Khadivi’s semi-experimental instincts tend toward lyrical strangeness. Reza’s captain “manipulates the guns like he would an injured bird.” Before he dies, Reza’s father says, “We follow the choruses sung to us by the wings of birds, the tick of rain.” As with Michael Ondaatje’s prose, Khadivi’s rhythmic, musical style is sometimes remarkably beautiful, but elsewhere comes off as bombastic and overly rhetorical. “The boy lives through a night forgotten by history,” she writes after the murder of Reza’s father, “the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers.” Elsewhere we read of “their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pull of victory and death.”

It’s when Khadivi gives voice to the people Reza meets—the woman he rapes, the boy he beats, his superior officer, his wife—that The Age of Orphans is at its best. The novel is full of intimate testimonies, brief snatches of alternative worlds that stand as small protests against the nationalist “we” of the modern state, making of Khadivi’s story a cry against the violence of drawing borders, of map-making, of the distortions and exclusions of the nation. We see this in Reza’s eventual nostalgia for pre-modern life, for the essential identity of the tribal Kurd who lives a life untouched by bureaucratic force. “He can give them streets and citizenship,” Khadivi writes of the young captain, “but never the freedom to travel the borderless land or the stable sensation of home.”

There is a violence, Khadivi suggests, to all unities, all communities. Her stance is similar to that of anthroplogists like Arjun Appadurai and Phillip Gourevitch, who point out that “Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community-building.” Named after the Shah, we are always reminded that Reza’s despicable acts are the direct result of the Shah’s project: the building of a nation. As did the Shah’s reign, The Age of Orphans ends with the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. The novel is the first of a trilogy, and Khadivi, we can assume, has not exhausted her theme.

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