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Places have an identity, a personality of their own. While some engulf you in sweeping warmth, home away from homes may force you to adapt to alien conditions by denying your true identity. Forced to emigrate out of Iran under the autocratic rule of a despot, the author arrives in London at the age of nine. Devoid of the closeness and warmth of her family, she tries to adjust to her new surroundings and culture by rejecting everything about Iran and remaking herself as an English girl. She struggles to find her real self, stitching new identities on top of one another as she shuttles between her birth place Iran and her "acquired" home London.
She intertwines the personal history of her family, the love and marriage of her parents - Bagher and Sedi, who represented the new Iranian middle-class, educated and affluent, thriving on petro dollars - and the turmoil they faced in their lives; and the history of Iran during the 20th century. As the spectre moved from the hands of liberal monarch Reza Shah, who announced the formal name change from Persia to Iran almost announcing to the world "the orientalist dream is over", to religious fundamentalist Khomeini, gunshots had replaced "the night-time song of cicadas". The novel captures the soul of Iran through the shifting lenses -the eyes hidden behind a veil. Whereas Shah’s dress reforms had forced women out from under the veil, now the women were themselves politicising the Islamic hijab. Under Khomeini’s leadership, the protesters went on to overthrow symbols of the Western cultural imperialism like banks and cinemas. Newspapers were shut down, books were burnt, praying became a public act to display loyalty to the regime. Many respectable families were wiped off without a trace for following liberal, western lifestyle. Bagher was blacklisted too and to protect his family from death, he left Iran and settled in London deciding never to visit the country he loved so deeply. Once in London, the sense of unease, the shattering of her world was hard to shake off and she always felt out of place. The author, being a journalist, not only chronicles the history of Iran as an outsider, rather she brings out the pathos of what it means to be caught up in a whirlwind where not only personal security is threatened but also the romance of Persian poetry, the feeling of being scattered in the world; yet reminiscing about the lamb in the backyard. Iran for her was a place of kindness and love, an abundant paradise of mountains and deserts and turquoise seas. In a seamless yarn, she weaves the web of her story - personal and political, past and present, outside and inside, rejection and acceptance, of finding her true identity. Her prose flows like calm waters though telling of the storms that rocked Iran. The thread of the narrative, like the Cypress tree, bends and sways to tell of another story, another digression, yet maintains its organic unity. Strong imagery is the hallmark of the book where freedom is expressed as "the return of colour" in Iran as opposed to monochrome during Khomeini’s regime.
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The novel is narrative of
a woman coming to terms with her own individuality, freedom to speak,
study, work and vote and dress according to her choice. She views
freedom as "a short skirt or have pink hair, holding hands in the
street with a handsome dark-haired boy". It is an attempt to tell
the world about Iran, "a place of golden memories of building
sandcastles by the Caspian Sea, the place of poets and
nightingales"; and the Iranian soul, symbolised by the leitmotif
Cypress tree that bends with the ways of the world, but doesn’t break.
In the process, she reclaims her identity by shedding the mask of
Englishness.