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Oakland: Novelist chronicles struggles of Iranian
women to find seeds of a new life SFChronicle
In the end, the story is one of hope as the heroine leaves her homeland for a new life in America and fulfills her dream to enjoy the same choices as any man. The heroine must make the journey not only to be true to herself but so that generations of women before her will not have suffered in vain. She claims what had always been denied them. Bidgoli isn't a political writer. But at a time when the United States' credibility is at a low ebb in the Muslim world, it's interesting to see how enthusiastically this author speaks out for the humanistic principles whose expression in America changed her life: equal opportunity and equal justice. There is real emotion when, at the climax of the plot, one of her characters draws a sketch of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of freedom. The feelings and experiences Bidgoli explores in the book had been stored up since she was a little girl. Bidgoli, 56, who moved to the United States in 1978, raised two daughters and created a successful real estate business. She organized her material into a novel as a result of a shock she received on a trip to her home village in 2003. "I decided to go and visit the house that was in our family for generations, and when I went to visit, that house was demolished and a huge mosque was built in its place," she said. "And when I looked at the mosque, that hurt me so deeply. "Why not another hospital? That community still didn't have another hospital. Why not a school or library? Why another mosque?" Bidgoli grew up in a village near Kashan, a city that had a thriving carpet industry when she was a child. On her visit she found that in almost every way the community had declined. It appeared that all anyone had left to hold on to, she said, was prayer. "When I saw the mosque," Bidgoli recalled, "tears came to my eyes. I went to the car and just cried." "I decided to keep the memory of the house," she said. "And in keeping the memory the only thing I could do was write about it." Set in Iran in the two or three decades before Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the shah, the book tells the stories of two 13-year-old girls a generation apart. The character of Mina, with minor changes, is autobiographical. Fati, a generation older than Mina, is fictional but incorporates what Bidgoli learned of the ordeals of the older women in her culture. Mina develops a sense of self-worth as a small child and struggles to nurture it without disrespecting her parents and the world they inherited from their ancestors. But as much as Mina wants to be the dutiful daughter, the radical disparity between her self-image and the social reality around her sets her up for permanent rebellion. Bidgoli's choice of words reveals how Mina feels about a society where widows are forbidden to remarry and girls have to cover their bodies from the age of 9 and work making carpets from the age of 4 while men spend their days in the alleys "gabbing and eating watermelon seeds." The bathhouse is a revelation. The girl sees women choosing wives for their sons even though their bodies display the marks of spousal abuse. "I learned that when the body is bruised, the heart feels bruised as well," Mina says. "At first I thought that the heart must be a layer under the skin: After a beating, the woman feels pain first where she was hit and later in the heart underneath." Mina desperately wants to go to high school. But she's about to turn 13 and her father will want to see her married. She knows her birthday is approaching when the pomegranates on the trees begin to crack and show their seeds. It's usually a celebratory time but now Mina goes to the attic and prays for a way out. She's lucky: An angel appears in the form of an uncle, who invites her to live with his family and attend high school in the city. The helpers in her uncle's household tell Mina stories. One of them concerns Fati, a woman who had married at 13 and hoped to live a contented life, only to be violated and accused of adultery by the religious leader of her village. Bidgoli seems to be writing with suppressed rage as she tells how Fati narrowly escapes being stoned to death. Fati undertakes to enlist Mina in a quest. She urges the younger woman to go to America to reclaim "the freedom that has been stolen from us." Mina is afraid but accepts the responsibility. As her plane lands in America, she is sad to be alone but comforted as she recalls Fati's parting words: "As long as you are free, you will never be lonely. Use your freedom." In real life, Bidgoli feels she has done right by Mina. After leaving Iran in 1978 on a student visa secured with her husband's support, she not only finished high school but earned a bachelor's degree and then a master's in economics. She also formed a real-estate company and raised two daughters: Tandis has a master's in geology and works for an oil company, and Rochsana just finished law school. "The first third of my life was physically to get out and free myself," said Bidgoli, who was divorced from her husband in 1986. "The other one third was to financially and emotionally free myself. Right now I feel like I'm close to those freedoms. "I just want to have other women free themselves from the guilt and shame of motherhood and of being a daughter because they reached for something." |
