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

Table of Contents

BETWEEN 1982 AND 1990 AN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF IRANIAN WOMEN POLITICAL PRISONERS WERE RAPED ON THE EVE OF THEIR EXECUTIONS BY GUARDS WHO ALLEGED THAT KILLING A VIRGIN WAS A SIN IN ISLAM.

This book is dedicated to the memory of those women.

Praise for JOURNEY FROM THE LAND OF NO

[Hakakian is] a lyrical storyteller... Her moving narrative swings from funny to sad, capturing idyllic scenes of her parents, aunts, and uncles picnicking and interacting with Muslim friends.

Washington Post

[A] spectacular debut memoir... Only a major writing talent like Hakakian can use the pointed words of the mature mind to give the perspective of the child.... She tackles ideologies of assimilation and oppression with poetic aplomb and precision.... Hakakians tale of passage into womanhood lacks nothing.

Boston Globe

Hakakian, irrepressible, brave, and strong-willed, watches in dismay as the country she loves disappears, to be replaced by one that views what Roya most valuesan insatiable intellectwith profound contempt. Like Anne Frank, she is a perceptive, idealistic, terribly sympathetic chronicler of the gathering repression.

Baltimore Sun

Hakakians intimate anthropology opens a window on one life during turbulent times in the Middle East.... This book does us the service of removing some of the regions mythical stereotypes... and illuminating a real contemporary culture we would do well to know better.

Seattle Times

Hakakian successfully blends an adults ripened awareness with a childs nave optimism to make this journey well worth taking.

Entertainment Weekly

Hakakian is an irrepressible, at times hilarious, character in her own book, so much so that the reader is buffered from the tales dark undercurrents of sorrow and betrayal.... Her remarkable memoir will surely prove to be one of the most vivid testimonies of the time, not merely because of the writers perspective as a non-Muslim Iranian, but because of her qualities as a narrator.

St. Petersburg Times

Both the universal puzzlement of the transformation from childhood to adult life and highly specific and fascinating recent events are evoked here. This is a lovely book.

Washington Times

Journey from the Land of No is an immensely moving, extraordinarily eloquent, and passionate memoir. Its author begins what one may prophesy as a major literary career.

Harold Bloom

In language of breathtaking poetic beauty, Roya Hakakian tells the enthralling story of a unique and tragic time in the history of the family and the ancient country she loves. We visit a place and people we have until now only seen from a distorted distance, and we come to understand them through the eyes of a gifted young girl living through her own intellectual awakening. To read this bittersweet elegy to Iran is to witness the emergence of a major new talent.

Sherwin B. Nuland,
author of How We Die and Lost inAmerica

An adolescent memoir of remarkable vividness and narrative grace, Hakakians account of her life as a Jewish girl in revolutionary Iran sounds uncanny echoes from todays headlines in the Middle Eastand the prose is gorgeous to boot.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin,
author of Three Daughters

Roya Hakakian has written a stunning and courageous memoir.... With a lyrical intensity matched by her sharp command of detail, she gives us an indelible portrait of a time and place rich in personality, humor, and tragedy, while offering at the same time a meditation on the unquenchable human desire for dignity and freedom.

Elizabeth Frank, author of Louise Bogan: A Portrait

An amazing, moving debut. Hakakians words of lost innocence and experience sing out from the pages. A heady mixture of Islamic fundamentalism, revolutionary politics, and the pains of growing up in Tehranperfectly and lyrically expressed.

Ahmed Rashid,
author of Jihad: The Rise of MilitantIslam in Central Asia

Political upheavals like the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism may be analyzed endlessly by scholars, but eyewitness accounts like Hakakians help us understand what it was like to experience such a revolution firsthand.... Her story, reminiscent of Jews in Nazi Germany, is haunting.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Roya Hakakian presents a lyrically poignant account of her coming-of-age years in revolution-beset Iran.... She is able to offer a unique perspective on the search for spiritual sustenance in a rapidly constricting society. It is both a joy and a privilege to bear witness to one young girls remarkable emotional and artistic metamorphosis within a stunningly repressive culture.

Booklist

Hakakian debuts with an effulgent memoir of her girlhood in the shadow of the Iranian revolution.... A moving recollection of lost innocence with vivid political reportage... A somber reminder from an accomplished writer of the unexpected consequences and costs of the revolution.

Kirkus Reviews

The fact that Roya escapes the veiland decades later produces a book like this oneis the greatest triumph of all. Her tale is a metaphor for dreams, for hope, even beauty.

The Advocate

This fascinating, intimate book written in Hakakians elegant words will move readers with an interest in this time and place. It is also an essential read for the younger generation of Iranian Jews who want to know what really happened from someone who lived it.

Jerusalem Post

Journey from the Land of No offers a rare glimpse into a particular moment in history. The books poetic language is wonderful; Hakakians recollections evoke the full complexity of growing up amid the chaos that surrounded her.

Globe and Mail

Roya Hakakians Journey from the Land of No manages to convey the best of memoir and the best of history. She poignantly describes the repression under the shahthe euphoria when Reza Shah Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979, and the slow and horrifying realization that his replacement was worse than the shah ever was.

Jerusalem Report

As a child, they could not keep me from wellsAnd old pumps with buckets and windlasses.I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smellsOf waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.I savoured the rich crash when a bucketPlummeted down at the end of a rope.So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditchFructified like any aquarium.When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulchA white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own callWith a clean new music in it. And oneWas scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tallFoxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some springIs beneath all adult dignity. I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

PERSONAL HELICON, Seamus Heaney

God is not only a gentleman and a sport, he is a Kentuckian too.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY, William Faulkner