Customer Reviews

Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran

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Journalist Roya Hakakian's beautifully written memoir of growing up in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran makes a striking contrast to another journalist's Iranian memoir, Azadeh Moaveni's "Lipstick Jihad," a contemporary portrait of Tehran from the viewpoint of a Californian-Iranian, looking for identity. While Moaveni battled her mother over Madonna's music, Hakakian rioted against a fanatical headmistress who found sin in a strand of female hair.

Hakakian describes a rather idyllic childhood in a quiet house in Tehran's "Alley of the Distinguished." She is the only daughter of a Jewish schoolmaster and scholar, beloved baby sister to three brothers. Her closest friend, Z, is a Muslim neighbor girl and her first inkling of the stirrings abroad were the political speeches Z's older sister and her devout Great-Uncle listened to in secret.

Though one by one her three older brothers are sent out of the country, Hakakian finds herself caught up in the heady togetherness of revolution. "Within weeks, Tehran seemed to have matured by years. Even drunkards stopped ranting about their personal misery. Neighbors did not fight. Cars honked constantly, but not in gridlock, only to announce the advance of the uprising, or the fall of another barracks."

She explores the child's perceptions: the jangly scariness of her parents' tense arguments and distressed uncertainty contrast unfavorably with the liberation let loose in the streets. But almost immediately anti-Semitic slogans appear on walls. The Hakakians sell their home and move into an apartment. Islamic dress is imposed and then the Jewish headmistress vanishes one day, and her Muslim replacement asks Hakakian why Jewish men customarily deflower their daughters.

Still, politics remains a youthful focal point and the young intellectuals exercise their idealism in dissent. Another moment of startling clarity comes when the group is caught with incriminating papers, and dismissed as irrelevant as soon as they are discovered to be Jewish.

As idealism fades and repression casts a dark gloom over daily life, Hakakian discovers that her old friend Z has grown grave and distant, Z's older sister, the fervent revolutionary, jailed and tortured, her mother's spirit broken.

Hakakian's story is a layered, nuanced remembrance of one girl's awakening to adulthood, a Jewish view of Iran's upheaval, and a chronicle of a country's nightmarish descent from liberation into a maelstrom of repression and fear.

Portsmouth Herald, March 27, 2005

The somber cover, the title, and the reference to prison abuses at the opening of this book are a little misleading. This memoir is not especially dark or grim, and the journey it recounts is an internal one, more from the land of "yes" than "no." It captures that particular youthful optimism that buoys up children and adolescents in the worst of times. And the Islamic revolution in Iran becomes the worst of times for the community of 100,000 Jews living in Tehran in the late 1970s, as the monarchy is toppled and the Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile to assume power.

Hakakian's book is a vividly and wonderfully remembered account of her coming of age in these tumultuous years. The equally gifted younger sister of three precocious brothers, an admitted "class clown," she happily plays her own growing self-confidence and self-awareness against the reader's knowledge of coming events. Through her, we experience the almost universal public euphoria that followed the fall of the Shah, and while she chooses to discount its significance, we see mounting evidence of the approaching political and social forces that will finally drive her family to join the Jewish exodus from Iran.

This is a fine, well-written book, often entertaining and sometimes starkly moving. The parallels Hakakian draws to Orwell's "1984" illustrate the gradual erosion of self that occurs when the state attempts to control individuals' thoughts and desires. In this and other ways, it's an excellent companion to Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran."

This book opened my eyes like nothing I've read since "Midnight's Children." And it is all the more powerful for being a woman's story. Do we have many books like this? I don't think so. It's the story of the convergence of the peak, rapid-fire events of the writer's dawning adolescence with the historically definitive crises of her country of Iran, her city of Tehran. I agree with Salman Rushdie that the health of a culture can be measured by its treatment of women. JOURNEY follows a trail of blood--the blood of the lamb slaughtered for a wedding feast, the blood of a disgraced female cousin's questioned virginity, and finally the blood of the martrys of the revolution. And then there is the writer's own blood--her first menstrual blood at 13. On the threshold of womanhood, she wonders at the shame assigned to women, the glory to the martyr's sacrifice: "No matter how young or old, that bleeding head was venerated. And not my blood?"
A wonderful thing in this book is the chapter about the character of Mrs. Arman. The female schoolteacher, mother and muse of women writers. (Like a Eudora Welty schoolteacher heroine.) She gives her students a sense of solidarity in their exile under the Muslim regime; her touch restores them to their bodies. And it's the moment when Mrs. Arman proclaims--you're a writer! you're a writer! Don't ever forget it! Don't let me down!--that is the decisive one in the author's story, that baptizes her and sanctifies her coming journey out into the world.
Because the story's about her emergence as a writer as well. It's only when the map of her beloved city (which her writing traces) is no longer recognizable and the notebooks she's filled with her poetry have been burnt, that her journey from the land of No is inescapable.
The writing is breaktaking. The metaphors flow effortlessly. I think this is a major book by an important writer.

Often articles and books written about the 1979 revolution in Iran are partial. Most are written by people who claim to have foreseen the catastrophic consequences of the revolution and never supported it. Few writers are bold and introspective enough to acknowledge their excitement about the possibility of a democratic change at the time, followed by sobering disenchantment during the immediate post-revolutionary years. Roya, using an exquisitely vivid language, becomes the voice of a generation as it underwent this latter political and personal maturation. She opens a window into the minds of Iranians circa 1979, and follows the dreams of a hopeful nation as they turn into nightmares. Incorporated into this mosaic of politics and family life are images of the private lives of Iranians living in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society. If you want to learn more about the complexity that is Iran, this book will be a reliable and an entertaining guide.

Roya Hakakian has written the most beautiful memoir I have ever read. Only a poet could tell her life story - and the upheavals of the Iranian culture around her - with such perfect rhythm and nuance.

I used this memoir as one of three core texts for an intensive summer course and my students loved it. It is beautifully written, poetic and very honest. I lived in Iran from 1983 to 1993 and I believe this is the most accurate memoir of life in Iran that I have read.

This is a beautifully written book that makes you feel like you are in Iran at the time of the revolution. Ms. Hakakian's prose brings to life the sounds, smells and feel of life in revolutionary Iran, through the eyes of a young girl.
Not only is it an enjoyable book to read, but educational as well, especially for Americans whose view of these times was tinted by the media, offering us a singular view of Iran. Ms. Hakakian offers a beautiful mosaic of her life in Iran and the emotions of becoming a stranger in your own land. Read it and enjoy!

This is a beautiful and unusual book. It is the story of a young Jewish girl's passage to and through puberty while her home is in the grip of violent forces. Fortunately it ends better than Anne Frank's life ended.
Generally when we hear of turmoil in a distant land we cluck our tongues and feel pity for a few stereotypical unfortunates -- but unfortunates are not stereotypical. Each one has her own story to tell.
A subtext is the price of the unholy alliances that our leaders make -- and the prices we all have to pay for them. The revolution in Iran was largely the doing of young people who were seeking independence from the dictator imposed by the United States and Great Britain on Iran. But they made an unholy alliance with the ultra-conservative Muslims who turned on them to impose a tyranny harsher than that of the Shah. This is something American Jews who are supporting the hard Christian conservatives might want to think about.
Readers who enjoy this book might be interested in
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
a blog by a young Iraqui woman that is also beautifully written and informative. I hope her story turns out as well as Roya Hakakian's has.

This well-written book reads like a novel. A novel set in revolutionary iran as seen through the eyes of an observant, somewhat idealistic teenager, told in the polished prose of a crafted writer. It is a porthole in to the journey of an adolescence, of the juxtaposition of a minority group within the larger society, of a popular resurrection for a better society (and the eventual wrong turn!), and of a woman finding her voice. I've read many books on iran and the revolution... mostly from academics, journalists, or historians. This memoir (like Satrapi's Persepolis) re-tells the experience from a very personal, boots-on-the-ground! vantage that is also pertinent to understanding our current troubled times.

With Hakakian's writing one feels as if on a streamlined yacht sailing gently through the turbulent waters of her time. Each chapter is a well-crafted essay - there isn't a strenuous sentence in the whole book. I savored reading each section, then closed the book, sunk into it, absored it, and left some for later, as you might do with a rare delicacy.

In all my reviews here in Amazonia I have rarely given 5 stars. I can do so without hesitation to Journey. I would venture that this book marks a watershed in new iranian-american writing, from plain memoirs to crafted story-telling.

Roya Hakakian comes from a secular Jewish family who identifies with Iran. The family is integrated into Iranian life and Roya looks forward to the wonderful changes that will come with the Revolution. This is the story about the changes that came to the ordinary people of Iran. The dying of hope, the hopelessness of change. The story covers the lives of the Hakakian family, singled out for being Jewish, and the lives of the Moslem and Jewish families they know and who are their friends. This is not a happy story. It brings down to the indiviual level the failure of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.