American Studies Journal

Persian Girls

by Nahid Rachlin

Nahid Rachlin spent her childhood in Iran under the Shah regime. In the following paragraphs that are drawn from her memoir Persian Girls, she introduces the reader to a hidden and risky world of bookstores in Tehran during that very period. Hence, she openly describes how she was “drawn to books, hoping to find answers to what I could not make sense of.” Ultimately, the desire to read leads to a desire to learn and to write. Managing to attend college in the US, Nahid Rachlin, however, has to experience that in a society were books are freely available and writers are free to exercise their profession, people can yet be bigots, too.

One afternoon, as I was taking a different route home, I noticed a bookstore on a narrow street off Pahlavi Avenue. The street was lined with a few run-down and some closed-down houses and was very quiet. I walked in and looked for books. A few boys were there, but no girls. Among the boys was the one I had seen with the red kerchief. That day he wasn’t wearing it.

The store wasn’t large but it was brimming with books. On a table I found books by revered Iranian poets, Saadi, Hafiz, and Omar Khayyam. These ancient poets spoke to all strata of the population in Iran; each interpreted the poems in his own way. Hafiz’s poetry was often used to tell fortunes. The person would open the book randomly to a page and whatever was written there was interpreted to mean something about the person’s future.

On the same table were several books translated into Farsi, among them Pride and Prejudice, The Sun Also Rises, Crime and Punishment. They must have passed censorship, I thought. Operating under the Ministry of Information, the censorship authority controlled the publication of all manuscripts, original or translated. Books that either contained a political message or could be interpreted that way were banned. Sometimes a book passed censorship but, after some new meaning was found in it, was taken off the market and all copies destroyed. SAVAK was always on the lookout for anything even remotely threatening to the regime. Restlessness aroused in people by reading certain books could eventually lead to an uprising, they believed.

I picked out The Sun Also Rises. When I went to pay, the owner looked at me quizzically, as if wondering what a young girl was doing buying a book by a foreign writer. He was a thin, tall, sensitive-looking young man with grave dark eyes. As I was leaving the store he said, “Come back. I get new books all the time.”

At home I devoured the book. I began visiting the Tabatabai Bookstore weekly to buy more. The owner, Jalal, told me a little about the translated books he had in stock, which he ordered as soon as they were available. I liked reading those books; they gave me glimpses into other worlds, other lives, as American movies did.

Once when I came home, I found the door to my room wide open. Father was rummaging through my books. I stood at the door fearfully. Was he going to object to the books I was reading? What if he looked under the mattress and found the story I wrote about Mohtaram and the jeweler? I entered the room and just stood there silently.

“Nahid,” he said in a tense, agitated tone. “Be careful about the books you buy; some of them can get us into trouble. You never know who might be a SAVAK agent. It could be someone disguised as a handyman or an electrician.”

Then he zoomed out. I breathed with relief. He hadn’t mentioned my story. I shut the door and, just to make sure, looked under the mattress. The notebook was there as I had left it. I picked it up, pulled out the pages containing the story, and tore them into pieces. I put them at the bottom of my schoolbag to discard in the large garbage pail just outside of school.


One day when I was browsing at Tabatabai Bookstore, Jalal said, “I just got a new book I can show you.” It was as if we had an unspoken connection, trusted each other. There was no one else in the store at the time but he was whispering. His face, his voice were even more grave than usual. He reminded me of characters in Brothers Karamazov.

“What is it?” I asked, dropping my voice.

“Les Misérables. It was taken off the market. I managed to get a few copies before they shredded them. I tell you because I know you love books as much as I do and you hate many things about our society as I do.”

“What’s it about?” “A man who, out of starvation, steals a loaf of bread and is hounded by the police for the rest of his life. SAVAK thinks the book might mirror some things in our society?”

“I’d like to read it.”

Jalal pushed aside a thick curtain in the back of the store, revealing a stairway. He climbed down and returned within minutes holding a book. He handed it to me. It had a plain white jacket on it, revealing no title or name.

After I bought it he wrapped the book in gift paper and gave it to me. “Be very careful,” he said.

I put it in my schoolbag and headed home. His remark, “Be very careful,” rang in my ears, and I was tempted to turn around and say the same thing to him. Terrifying images of Jalal getting arrested, his shop being shut down, his being thrown in jail for years or even executed came before my eyes. According to rumors people were punished that way for just that “crime” he was committing. How strange that in our culture books were considered dangerous, that the written word was given so much power, that a person was thought of as a criminal for owning or reading certain books. I had actually taken a few steps back to the store, I realized. I stopped myself. He was older than me, had owned the store for three years, he once told me. He was cautious enough to have gotten away with selling such books. He knew instinctively whom to trust.

I stayed in my room with the door shut and immediately started reading the book like a child starved for food.


I wrote a story based on the plight of the woman who had been tempted to abandon her blind child, the story Maryam and Hamideh had spoken of that day in Tehran.


I showed the story to Pari, as I did all the stories I wrote. As important as it was for me to write, it was equally important to hear her reassuring, encouraging voice. After Pari told me she liked the story, I handed it in as my composition assignment at school.

“What do you think?” Mrs. Soleimani asked the class after I’d read it aloud.

“It’s too sad,” one of the girls said.

“It doesn’t sound real,” another girl said.

“But it is realistic; it captures the desperation of women all around us,” Mrs. Soleimani said. She was married with a son, thus having fulfilled conventional expectations, and in addition she had managed to have a career. She encouraged us to strive for more than just marriage and children.

At her comment the class fell into silence.

“If you had a choice, would you have been born a man or a woman?” Mrs. Soleimani asked.

I raised my hand.

“Yes, Nahid?”

“I would still want to have been born a girl, but I want to go to America and live there.” The idea of going to America had been in my fantasies ever since my brothers left.

A few others in the class of twenty raised their hands. One said she would want to be born a girl because she could become pregnant, something a man couldn’t do. Another said she didn’t understand boys, so she wanted to be a girl. Yet another said she thought life was harder for men because they had to be the breadwinners and be strong. Only one said she would want to be a boy so she could become a good soccer player like her brother and do other things her brother was allowed to do, like stay out late at night and take trips with his friends without parental supervision.

“Most of you are fourteen years old,” Mrs. Soleimani said. “Some of you have been promised to men who are much older and know a lot more about life than you do and will no doubt be able to dominate you. You must fight being in that situation.” Some of the girls looked at her with awe for saying such things. Others seemed vaguely disapproving, as if she were attacking them rather than giving them guidance. But of course she was absolutely right, I thought. It was the way Pari and I felt, too, that we had to fight against that situation.

After class Mrs. Soleimani stopped me and said, “You look sad. Are there problems at home?”

I nodded.

“Come, let’s talk in my office.”

“I’m so unhappy,” I said once we were in her office. I told her how abruptly I had been torn away from Maryam and now my mother was totally cold to me. How my father would force my sisters and me to marry whomever he chose for us, how he controlled every aspect of our lives.

“I’m certain if you were a boy your mother wouldn’t have given you away, even as a kindness to her sister,” Mrs. Soleimani said. “When something goes wrong with my car, male drivers honk and yell at me because I’m a woman. All the men in this school, and everywhere else, get paid much more than women. They’re breadwinners and we women are bread eaters, they say. I had a very authoritative father, too, Nahid, but I fought him and pulled myself out of his grip and managed to go my own way.” She pondered that for a moment, then added, “Within the limits?” The bell rang for the next class and we parted, but Mrs. Soleimani’s words had moved me deeply. Back home, I told Pari what Mrs. Soleimani had said about fighting her authoritative father.

“Father’s will is impossible to bend,” Pari said, despair coming into her face.

“Why don’t you ask him to send you to America to study? I want to do the same thing. Maybe he’ll agree if you insist that you won’t marry anyone?”

“He isn’t going to go along with such an idea. He said so many times that education is a waste on a girl.”

“If you had a choice, would you have been born a man or a woman?” I asked Pari.

“I don’t want to be a man, dictatorial,” Pari said. She thought about that. ldquo;There are exceptions. Some, like Majid, are different?”

“Parviz and Cyrus are different, too,” I said.

Pan nodded. “The world would be a better place if there were more men like them.”


I stood by the window of my room in Green Hall, one of the five dormitories that accommodated Lindengrove College’s four hundred students. It was as if years, not just a day, had gone by since I left Iran and only hours since Parviz picked me up from the St. Louis Airport and dropped me off on the campus in St. James. I was so remote now from my family and Ahvaz. The campus, with its colonial and Greek Revival architecture, wide old shady trees, flowers in bloom in rectangular beds, and sets of swing chairs in different spots, looked glorious in the pale, late-afternoon sunlight. I watched with fascination the girls walking about the campus or sitting on the swings. They reminded me of the women I had seen in American movies with Pari, or on the other side of the river. One girl with curly short hair and dimples was an older version of Shirley Temple. Another, with pale blond hair, the color of straw, and milk-white skin, reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t wait to write to Pari and tell her all about them.

I pulled out a photograph of Pari from my suitcase and put it on the desk. Then I spread the paradise tapestry, which I had brought without its frame, on the back of a chair until I could frame it and hang it on the wall. I didn’t have a good photograph of Maryam–only a small one with her hair covered in a black chador, only her eyes showing. After taking a shower in the common bathroom, I sat in bed and wrote a long letter to Pari and one to Maryam. I went to bed early, exhausted from the eighteen-hour flight from Iran. I fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke late the next morning and made my way to the college dining room. It was nearly empty. I took some food from the buffet and sat at a table with two other girls. I asked one of them, in broken English, what I had put on my plate.

She stared at me for a moment. “Grits,” she said, pointing to a white lump. Then pointing to a hunk of bread, she said, “Corn bread.”

In a moment they got up and left. I lingered in the large room by myself.

I registered for as many courses that didn’t require fluent English as possible–piano, swimming, home economics. In home economics, the professor taught us how to set a table and seat guests. She also taught us “charm”–not much different from taarof in the Iranian culture. We should always say, “Yes, ma’am,” she said, when addressing a woman older than ourselves; we should write a thank-you note to our hostess and it should be phrased in a certain way. At the required introduction to English literature, I could absorb only some of the lecture. The one English course I had taken in high school hadn’t prepared me adequately. Between classes I sat in my room or on a swing chair and tried to understand the assignments and make sense of my notes, poring over my Farsi-English dictionary.

After dinner I went to my room, leaving the door half open to create a draft with the breeze coming through the window. As the evening wore on other students began to come back, holding Cokes or instant coffee, cellophane-wrapped crackers, cheese, and cookies. Some of them stood in the hall in clusters and talked. When the weekend came most of the girls went out together or on dates with boys from nearby colleges. I stayed in the dormitory, studying.

My isolation felt like freedom at first. But soon the reality of the college and my separation from the other students began to hit me.

Beauty contests, mixers with boys the school invited from colleges in the area, sermons in the Presbyterian chapel at which attendance was required no matter what your religion–all just floated around me without meaning. The ideal young girl, one whom the staff and parents approved of and promoted, was a good Christian who dressed properly and was agreeable and sociable. If a student didn’t go on frequent dates with boys she was “antisocial” or “a loser:” If a student had plans with a female friend and then a boy called and asked her out at the same time, she would automatically accept the date and cancel plans with the girlfriend. If a student dated a boy from outside her religion it created problems. Smiling was compulsory. One girl in my dormitory said, “Smile,” every time we passed in the hall.

The pocket money Father sent me through Parviz shrank when converted from toomans to dollars. The other girls flew home often for family gatherings or to reunite with a high school sweetheart. They had their hair done in expensive beauty salons in St. Louis, then went shopping and returned with packages of hats, gloves, blouses, shoes. They often skipped dormitory meals to buy their own food. The girls who didn’t have cars took taxis everywhere, rather than buses, which ran infrequently on limited routes. They decorated their rooms with their own personal furniture.

I was out of the prison of my home, but I was here all alone. I didn’t have easy access to my brothers. I didn’t know a single other person.


One day toward the end of the semester I found a note from the dean in my mailbox inviting me, along with the three other foreign students on campus, to participate in Parents’ Day. She asked that I stop by her office. The dean was wearing a linen suit, her blond hair set in neat short curls. She greeted me with a warm smile. “I’m telling this to all the foreign students on campus,” she said. “You should wear your native costumes on Parents’ Day.”

I was silent, feeling awkward. I had no costume. She was waiting.

“In Iran, some women cover themselves in chadors, but they wear them on top of regular clothes, similar to what people wear here,” I said.

“Then wear a chador,” she said.

My awkwardness only increased.

“I never wore one in Iran,” I said finally, my voice drowned in the sound of laughter and conversation in the hall.

“I still want you to wear it for this occasion, to show a little of your culture to us,” she said, smiling cheerfully.

To me the chador had come to mean a kind of bondage, as religion had. It felt ridiculous to wear it in this American college. “Maybe I can think of something else to wear,” I mumbled.

“No, no, the idea of the chador is excellent. I’ve seen pictures of women in Islamic countries wearing them. It fascinates me. What is the point?”

“Well, in Islam, exposed hair and skin is considered to be seductive to men.” “I wish I felt my hair and skin were so seductive that I had to cover them up,” she said with a chuckle. But her attempt at humor only made me more insecure in this unexpectedly alien environment. I was realizing quickly how different this place was from my expectation of America.

That afternoon after classes I walked to St. Louis’s Main Street to buy fabric for the chador. On one side of the street was a pharmacy, a post office, a small department store, a small supermarket, and a diner. Several residential streets branched off it and led to the Mississippi River, a muddy and turbulent body of water, with traffic racing on the wide street running alongside it. I thought of standing on the bank of the Karoon River and looking at the Americans on the other side. Here I was among them and feeling cut off and insecure.

In the department store I looked at stacks of fabric in one corner. I wondered what to buy, a lightweight bright fabric like Maryam and other women wore around the house when a man was there, or the more somber black material they wore outside. Finally I decided on a few yards in blue with floral designs in paler blue. I also bought thread, scissors, and a needle.

Back in my room, I spread the fabric on the floor, cut it in the shape of a chador, and hemmed the edges. It was hard to cut it right; I went very slowly. Maryam used to have hers made by a seamstress. As a child, I chose not to wear the chador. Now cutting one felt almost like making a shroud, as I had seen Maryam and her tenants doing. My mind went to my grandmother telling me that Reza Shah, the father of the present Shah, had forbidden women to wear the chador. The police used to pull it off the heads of women who wore it outdoors. He wanted the world to see Iran as modern. Then the present Shah, who had the same idea of modernizing Iran, as a compromise to please the clergy made wearing it optional. Women like Maryam, who were totally observant, wore it; some, who were less religious, wore head scarves; more Westernized women like Mohtaram didn’t cover their heads. The whole notion of the chador was very strange to Americans; I could tell by the dean’s reaction, yet she wanted me to wear it.

On Parents’ Day I put the chador on and looked at myself in the mirror. I was reminded of the times I wore it to passion plays and to a mosque Maryam took me to. I didn’t connect to the chador and the realization had made me sad—at one time Maryam and I were so much alike. Now, here I was in this land of freedom and more or less forced to wear it. I tried to brush off my thoughts, to not be so easily dissatisfied.

I went to the room where the reception was taking place. Framed photographs of various benefactors hung on the walls. As I stood with Margarita, from Greece, who was wearing a full embroidered skirt and blouse; Rachel, from Turkey, in something similar; and Bharti, from India, in a sari, everyone’s eyes focused mainly on me.

“Isn’t that pretty,” one young mother said, with a Southern drawl. “But it must be difficult to move around in.”

“Does everyone dress like that in Iran?” another woman asked. “No,” I said, “it’s optional; only about half the women wear it.” “I can’t imagine wearing it.”

Though I didn’t accept the chador, I felt insulted, thinking of Maryam always enclosed in one, by choice.

After enduring more questions from mothers, the foreign students and I left together. Outside, sitting on facing swings, we talked among ourselves.

Margarita, dark-haired and plump, was a sophomore; she said she disliked the college and planned to return home as soon as the year was over. Rachel, red-haired and pale, with a quiet manner, said she was happy enough so far, this being her first year. On the plane ride to the United States she had met a man from her own country who attended a nearby college; the two of them spent a lot of time together. And Bharti, thin and dark and serious, was unhappy but intended to stay on until she graduated. I told her I also intended to finish, although I was beginning to feel the college wasn’t the right place for me and wasn’t what I had imagined it to be like.

“I think they gave us single rooms because we’re foreign,” Bharti said. “Everyone else shares rooms. They didn’t think anyone would want to room with us. I get strange glances from everyone when I say I’m a Hindu.”

“They’re narrow and bigoted,” Margarita said.

“No one has tried to befriend me,” Rachel said.

“I feel the same way,” I said. “But maybe it’s an illusion?” Rachel shrugged her shoulders.


“My mother asked me to ask you if you’re a Catholic?” Judy Conrad was a pretty blonde who lived on my floor. She had stopped me in the bathroom. I shook my head no.

“But my mother said you were wearing a habit.”

“That wasn’t a habit, it was a chador. Good Muslims wear them.” “Are Muslims Catholics?”

“No, it’s a different religion?”

“Are you a good Muslim?”

I just stared at her. When I didn’t answer she put her hand on her hip. “Well, in this college we’re all Christians,” she said coolly and walked away.

---

    Bookmark us on Facebook: