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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Revolutions & coups
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Journey from the Land of No - A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Paperback, New edition)
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Journey from the Land of No - A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran (Paperback, New edition)
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List price R406
Loot Price R380
Discovery Miles 3 800
You Save R26 (6%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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From the Hardcover
"We stormed every classroom, inscribed our slogans on the
blackboard . . . Never had mayhem brought more peace. All our lives
we had been taught the virtues of behaving, and now we were
discovering the importance of misbehaving. Too much fear had
tainted our days. Too many afternoons had passed in silence,
listening to a fanatic's diatribes. We were rebelling because we
were not evil, we had not sinned, and we knew nothing of the
apocalypse. . . . This was 1979, the year that showed us we could
make our own destinies. We were rebelling because rebelling was all
we could do to quell the rage in our teenage veins. Together as
girls we found the courage we had been told was not in us."
In Journey from the Land of No Roya Hakakian recalls her childhood
and adolescence in prerevolutionary Iran with candor and verve. The
result is a beautifully written coming-of-age story about one
deeply intelligent and perceptive girl's attempt to i^?nd an
authentic voice of her own at a time of cultural closing and
repression. Remarkably, she manages to re-create a time and place
dominated by religious fanaticism, violence, and fear with an open
heart and often with great humor.
Hakakian was twelve years old in 1979 when the revolution swept
through Tehran. The daughter of an esteemed poet, she grew up in a
household that hummed with intellectual life. Family gatherings
were punctuated by witty, satirical exchanges and spontaneous
recitations of poetry. But the Hakakians were also part of the very
small Jewish population in Iran who witnessed the iron fist of the
Islamic fundamentalists increasingly tightening its grip. It is
with the innocent confusion of youth that Royadescribes her
discovery of a swastika--"a plus sign gone awry, a dark reptile
with four hungry claws"--painted on the wall near her home. As a
schoolgirl she watched as friends accused of reading blasphemous
books were escorted from class by Islamic Society guards, never to
return. Only much later did Roya learn that she was spared a
similar fate because her teacher admired her writing.
Hakakian relates in the most poignant, and at times painful, ways
what life was like for women after the country fell into the hands
of Islamic fundamentalists who had declared an insidious war
against them, but we see it all through the eyes of a strong,
youthful optimist who somehow came up in the world believing that
she was different, knowing she was special. At her loneliest, Roya
discovers the consolations of writing while sitting on the rooftop
of her house late at night. There, "pen in hand, I led my own
chorus of words, with a melody of my own making." And she discovers
the craft that would ultimately enable her to find her own voice
and become her own person.
A wonderfully evocative story, Journey from the Land of No reveals
an Iran most readers have not encountered and marks the debut of a
stunning new talent.
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