BackThe nomadism of Sahar Delijani
The Iranian author born in a prison to revolutionary parents speaks of her need to constantly displace herself
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It’s a little difficult to hear the soft-spoken Sahar Delijani. Her delicate lilt reflects two of the countries in which she’s lived—Iran and Italy—and if she acquired any rolling ₹ from her adolescence in California, US, there is no hint of it. She moved there from Tehran at the age of 12, and then to Turin at 22, with her new husband. At the time, she didn’t speak a word of Italian, and knew no one in the country. “It was traumatic," she laughs. I’m not sure whether she said “traumatic" or “dramatic", so I ask again. “Both!" she says.
This cosmopolitan nomadism, and the accompanying excitement and anxieties of resettlement, have now come to characterize Delijani’s life. She is constantly on the move, whether with her husband, a globetrotting professor of semiotics, or in order to promote her own book, Children Of The Jacaranda Tree. She was in Jaipur earlier this year to attend the literature festival.
The novel opens with Azar, pregnant in Evin, and considers the perspectives of Parisa and Firoozeh, women in similar situations who make wildly different decisions. There is the 20-something Leila, who must care for the young children of her sisters, and then, years later, the children themselves—Forugh, who moves to Europe; Omid, who remains at his family home in Tehran. Several other characters are sewn in as well. The structure of the novel presents a continuum of lives linked and made alike by history.
As Delijani says: “I wanted to give the idea that this happened to so many people, thousands of people, and the experience was so similar. I wanted to start with one child’s story, but continue with another, as if this child continues that child’s life—all going through the same sort of experience."
Delijani spoke to her parents, who live in California, about their experiences in order to lend realism to her characters’ lives in Evin. She began by writing the story of a bracelet of date stones that her father had made for her in prison. In the book, a character named Amir does the same for his daughter, Sheida, using the brief moment he gets to see his wife and daughter to slip the bracelet into a fold of the child’s clothes. Delijani inhabits the perspective of each character in this situation: Amir, with his fear of never being reunited with his family, longing to produce a tangible object that will tie him to Sheida; his wife, Maryam, and her separation angst; and, years later, Sheida herself, receiving the bracelet from her mother, feeling the care with which the date stones were tied tightly together.
Delijani’s narrative is most visceral when describing her character Azar’s pain and apprehension while pregnant in prison. She does not paper over the physical details: blood, swelling and soreness are as crucial as feelings of isolation and loss to understanding what dozens of women went through.
Having never been pregnant herself, Delijani says she “tried to imagine the hardest pain possible—and being alone". She observed the experience of friends who had recently had children, noting that they were “so worried, so possessive of their child. This is a natural reaction, they’re all doing the same thing—what happens to you when you have no control?" A great part of that loss of control is not knowing what will happen to your child in the hands of others, even if they are trusted family members (Delijani herself was raised by her grandparents until her parents were released from prison).
Even if the characters are outside Iran, however, the country never leaves them. They keep returning to their pasts. Echoing William Faulkner’s contention that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past", Delijani says of her decision to have her characters’ memories return frequently to Iran: “I wanted to show how the past never leaves you. It’s always with you, it’s always present. It’s almost as if it’s now—you carry it with you."
Delijani did not just leave California for Turin: She and her husband move cities and countries every year. They spent half of the last year in France, and will spend half of the next in Japan. Given the strife her characters undergo when they are uprooted from their homes, I ask her about her decision to continually displace herself. “For some strange reason, it seems I keep asking for it. Sometimes I think I just want to be in one place and be surrounded by people I know, but at the same time I think that as writers we always have to be observing, we always have to be, in some ways, not too comfortable. I do have a comfortable life—a home, a kind husband—but it’s good for me to keep a pin under my seat so I don’t sit too comfortably, so I think more," she says.
The inclusion of scattered Iranian diaspora in the novel, and their struggles to retain a connection to the homeland, is not just autobiographical, but a reminder of the reality that millions of Iranians began to face from the 1980s onwards. “Modern Iranian history is, in some ways, unfortunately, a history of immigration," says Delijani. Yet there is also the generation of men and women who have grown up in Iran after the revolution, and remained there—among them, the thousands that protested against then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.
Delijani says she consumes more of their culture than that of her fellow members of the diaspora. “I’m always optimistic, because this generation is incredibly brave and sophisticated, curious and talented—in touch with all of the world despite whatever limitations there are. It is a popular culture that is carrying the weight of everything on its shoulders."
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