Zohreh Ghahremani has a cute, elfin face. When she leans over to sip her tea, it's like watching a hummingbird stop for a second, blink and then quickly flutter away. But don't let any of that, or her cheerful, charming demeanor, fool you. The La Jolla-based writer's poetic prose packs a powerful punch.
Sitting in a café, the Iranian-boGhahremani is merely pausing in what's shaping up to be a full schedule of activities surrounding her new book, Sky of Red Poppies, which is among this year's “One Book, One San Diego” selections promoted by KPBS. She has several events this week alone, the most notable happening from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Thursday, March 29, at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, where she'll read from her book as part of the museum's Persian New Year celebration.
Ghahremani's book is a solid member of a rising subset of literature—the novel / memoir written by Middle eastern-American authors set largely in their native countries. The voices of this emerging genre are fresh, speaking out without the mediation of a translator and giving witness to a region, and history, that had been largely ignored in mainstream literature.
Ghahremani's novel is set on and after the eve of the Iranian Revolution. Two girls, Roya, from a wealthy family, and Shireen, from a lower-class family, discover just what the new Iran holds for them. In the growing pre-revolution turmoil, Roya, a university student, cautiously keeps her head down while her close friend, Shireen, chooses the path of resistance to the Shah. Roya learns the price of dissent from Shireen's arrest and torture by SAVAK, the Shah's security police. Horrified, she, too, is drawn into the demonstrations and is sent abroad for her own safety. Despite their divergent paths and the distance that eventually separates them, Roya and Shireen discover that revolutions and the Revolutionary Guard are no match for true friendship.
Although the novel is set in Iran, Ghahre mani doesn't consider herself an Iranian writing in exile. She's been in the U.S. long enough to consider herself more of an American living in diaspora. She no longer goes back to visit Iran because she wants to remember her onetime home the way it was. And she carefully keeps the two languages, English and Farsi, separate to avoid drifting into “Fenglish,” as she calls it. She's to the point where she dreams in English, she says, but Farsi still manages to find its way back into her brain.
“Persian comes in poetry,” she says delightedly.
Ghahremani's book has been doing well. An informal canvassing of local bookstores reveals that it's been sold out in several places. To what does she attribute this rapid rise of a first novel? Ghahremani thinks for a moment, cupping her tea.
“Everyone finds a piece of themselves in it,” she says finally. “It's a universal story of friendship.”
Ghahremani considers herself a visceral, visual writer, penning what she feels is as close to reality as she can get. She's a painter, too, which she says has informed her inner eye, allowing her to see “beauty in ugly things” while her ear for dialog demands that she write what she herself would want to read.
The author says Sky of Red Poppies wouldn't feel right without the authenticity of certain settings such as her hometown of Mashad, an Iranian holy city east of Tehran, and the names of her family servants, which she uses as the names of the servants in the book. Ghahremani has mined elements of her own life for Roya and closely followed the events in a friend's life for that of Shireen, through letters and communication with mutual friends. Research for the book took more than 20 years and crossed several continents, she says; Ghahremani had already left Iran by the time the Iranian Revolution had broken out. As a result, the text expresses what she suggests is a combination of reality and fiction that attempts to convey authentic emotions.
Writing and painting have long been passions for her. Brought up in Iran as a member of an upper-class family, she was expected to be both a professional and to engage in artistic expression. She eventually settled in Chicago, where she practiced dentistry and taught at northwestern University while continuing to write and paint. Ghahremani moved to San Diego 12 years ago.
Her paintings have been shown in exhibitions and galleries around the world, and her stories and essays in English have appeared in numerous publications. But Sky of Red Poppies is more than a mere continuation of her creative pursuits.
“It was something I had to do,” she says.
The story kept pushing itself to the forefront of her thought, she says, overtaking other works. She describes it, in part, as a letter she needed to write to her three children about a place and time they'll never get to see.
The cover image of Ghahremani's book is one of her own paintings. She says she saw the image of a red poppy as a fitting metaphor for Iran.
Iran is “beautiful, vulnerable, tender, easily destroyed—a nation of hidden danger and yet resilient,” she explains.
Ghahremani's favorite part of the book is one of the heart-to-heart conversations between Roya and Shireen, most of which was based on her experiences.
The hardest part of the book? Ghahremani pauses. “The father's death,” she finally says, recalling the death of her own father.
“That's why people say reality hurts,” she says. “That is what you feel the most.”
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