Remembering Childhood in the Middle East: Memoirs from a Century of Change

Nahid Rachlin (Iran)

iran Nahid Rachlin Nahid Rachlin was born in Iran, came to the United States to go to college, married an American, and stayed on. She has been writing and publishing short stories and novels in English since 1978, when Foreigner, her first novel, was published by W. W. Norton. Her stories have been reprinted in many recent anthologies such as Arrivals, CrossCultural Experiences in Literature, and Stones from the American Mosaic. Awards include the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. As I sit in a room in my apartment in Manhattan I clearly see myself coming back from high school in Ahvaz, a town in southern Iran. I am looking for my older sister, Pari. “I wrote a story today,” I would say as soon as I found her in one of the many rooms in our large, outlandish house. I would sit next to her on the rug and read to her or tell her about the rigidities at school or some shocking scene I had encountered on the street. (Walking by the lettuce fields early one morning , I saw a half-naked woman lying among the bushes, her blouse torn and blood flowing out of her face, which was so badly beaten that it was barely recognizable; then police appeared on the scene.) Pari always responded not to the story itself but to the anguish that the story expressed. She listened not so much to my story as to me. I remember the intensity of my desire to express my feelings and reactions to what went on around me, and my equal eagerness to hear her reassuring voice. I was also an avid reader and searched for whatever I could find in the town’s single bookstore: novels and short story collections , mostly translations into Persian of American and European writers such as Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, and Balzac . I would read some of the passages to her, and she would say, “You could do that.” She loved movies and the two of us would go to see whatever was shown in the two movie houses in town, again mostly American and European movies dubbed in Persian. She had vague aspirations to one day become an actress. If I close my eyes, I can still vividly see her standing on the stage oftheauditoriumatourhighschool,whichwasforgirlsonly; a similar high school for boys was in another part of town. would i have become a writer without my sister? Nahid Rachlin ^ Wearing striped pajamas and a mustache, she danced and sang with similarly dressed girls in an imitation of an American musical. I would watch her and dream about writing something that one day would be put on a stage, with her acting in it. I can hear my father’s voice saying to her scornfully, “Don’t you have any sense? An actress is just a whore.” About my writing, he would say, more respectfully , “You’re just a dreamer.” In those days, I wrote about my immediate experiences; now, as an adult, I find myself mostly writing obsessively about the faraway past, people and cities I knew growing up. It is as if that period of struggle has much more meaning for me than what is occurring in the present. How could my stable, predictable married life compete with the turmoil of those days? (I have been married to the same man for twentysix years, and we have one daughter who attends law school and has a clear vision of her own goals.) Though I have written various versions of the same events so many times, I still haven’t managed to diminish the feelings raging behind them. . . . When I was six months old, my grandmother took me from my mother, who already had four children, to be raised by my aunt, my mother’s older sister. My aunt had been unable to have children herself even though she had been trying for years. My mother had promised her, even before I was born, that the next child would be hers. This was in response to my aunt’s repeatedly begging my mother to let her raise one of her children. “God has enabled you to have so many of them, so easily,” she kept saying to my mother. So early one morning, my grandmother bundled me up and, carrying a bottle of my mother’s milk with...