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Journey from the Land of No
Roya Hakakian
A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran
Crown
August 2004
On Sale: August 10, 2004
256 pages
ISBN: 1400046114
EAN: 9781400046119
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
“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 find 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 Roya describes 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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