An Interview with Nahid Rachlin
This article originally appeared in the AWP Chronicle, May, 2008
Nahid Rachlin has published four novels, Jumping Over Fire, (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P.Dutton), The Heart’s Desire (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). Penguin published her memoir Persian Girls in Fall, 2006. Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, Shenandoah, and New Letters. Her essays have been published in Natural History Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series and in an anthology, How I Learned to Cook and Other Writings On Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships (Penguin). She has written reviews for the New York Times and Newsday.
Originally from Iran, Nahid Rachlin is an Associate Fellow at Yale University. She has held a Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). Other grants and awards she has received include the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has taught at Barnard College and at a variety of summer writers’ conferences including Centrum and those at Southampton College, Hofstra University, Iowa University, and Marymount Manhattan College. Presently, she teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y.
Sheila
What prompted you to be a writer in a dominant culture that didn’t value women’s self-expression?
Nahid
I was always full of questions about why I was “given away” by my mother to my aunt, and why me among her children. My aunt, Maryam, whose husband was twenty-five years older than herself and died soon after they married, yearned for a child. My mother was very fertile (she gave birth to ten children). Maryam always begged her sister if she could adopt one of her children. So when I was six months old my grandmother took me to Maryam who lived in Tehran, faraway from Ahvaz, where my parents lived. But when I was nine years old my father came and forcefully took me back from my aunt. In his eyes, I was a woman now, and he felt I needed his supervision. I couldn’t accept my aunt’s explanation that it was destiny that I was given to her. I reached to books for answers. I read everything I could get hold of, hoping for some insights. That interest in reading led to a need to write myself. As an adolescent I went into a room and wrote sketches, short stories. The process of writing, giving shape to what seemed puzzling and chaotic, had a calming effect. I was the most at peace when I was writing, even if what I wrote wasn’t necessarily cheerful or relevant to my own situation. One of my composition teachers in high school liked the pieces I handed in for assignments. She was unusual in that she believed women should have a voice and not settle for prescribed roles. She was a big influence on me, both in her encouragement of my writing and my development as a more independent person. And of course there was my older sister, Pari, I became close to when I came to live with my birth family. She was full of praise for my writing. She too, like the teacher, didn’t accept the limited prescribed roles for women. She wanted to be an actress and, like me, didn’t want to give in to the idea of arranged marriage at a very young age and settle for domesticity. Even though my parents were modernized Muslims they still believed education was for their sons and their daughters should aim for marriage as soon as they saw a suitable man come along. We wanted to use the arts to escape what we felt deeply as the oppression of our beings.
Sheila
A girl in one of your stories is strongly attracted to the writing of an author in a current magazine. Were there early influences on your own writing?
Nahid
When I was in high school I found a bookstore with books by European and American writers in translation. I read almost everything I found in translation– work by Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Hemingway, Balzac. Of course, I also read books by Iranian writers. I probably absorbed some of the techniques used by the writers I read. I can’t say I was influenced by a particular writer.
Sheila
In your newest work, the memoir, Persian Girls, you describe how stories you heard about women and their children and questions you had about your mother and her life as a younger woman inspired you and led to stories you kept hidden under your mattress. You also write about your father searching your room for material that could get the family in trouble with the Shah’s secret police.
Reading your stories to your sister Pari was important to retaining your identity as a girl who could find the freedom to use her imagination and to staying true to her goal of getting from Iran to America, where lack of censorship meant you could read and write the literature that you had to keep under wraps in Iran.
Now that you teach others who are writing, do you have some thoughts about the need for a special audience?
Nahid
Not really. I write what comes naturally and is important to me and I give the same advice to my students.
Sheila
But it seems that knowing Pari would want to hear your work meant a lot. Writing always feels like a gift, I think, to those of us who write, but to many, it also feels like a gift others might not enjoy as much as we’d hoped. So having someone for whom our writing will be a treasure is rewarding as we begin. What I mean is, have you ever found yourself encouraging your students to think of an audience they would like to share their work with as a way of honoring its importance?
Nahid
The truth is I haven’t done that. The students I have taught come with such a variety of goals and motivations. Some of them write for the glory of it– expecting to make a lot of money, their name becoming known to everyone, movies being made of their work. Some want to express themselves in reaction to certain figures in their lives– a father or mother or husband or boy friend they hate–and want to reveal these significant figures’ evil in their writing. There are some who write because they feel they have a message, political or cultural, to give to the world. Then there are some like myself who find it “necessary” to their happiness to write. Some of them have a sister or a boy friend or someone close to them they get pleasure out of showing their work to.
Sheila
Do you believe that childhood traumas and unhappiness are important components in making a person reach out to writing, to becoming a writer?
Nahid
I think they are helpful because such experiences make a child more introspective and therefore, perhaps drawn to writing. But then there are writers who have had other influences to motivate them to write, such as growing up in an environment that values and encourages writing.
Sheila
In what ways was becoming a writer symptomatic of being an outsider, a foreigner, a woman looking for her place?
Nahid
I always felt like a foreigner in my own country, and then I felt that way in the small, provincial, all-women college I attended in America. That feeling of being an outsider led to my desire to write, and the process of writing helped me understand my situation.
Sheila
After so many years of writing short fiction and novels spun from your experience growing up in Iran, of longing to come to America and once in America longing for some of the texture of life in Iran and for the connection disrupted by oppressive rules, revolution and war, what freed you to write nonfiction?
Nahid
For many years I wanted to write a memoir, straight from my life and with a particular emphasis on my sister, Pari, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I had too many conflicting feelings and unresolved questions about my family, and too much grief about losing my Pari, the sibling to whom I was closest. She died in 1982, the victim of a supposed accident. Knowing how depressed she was about her life, I suspected suicide. I went to Iran to talk to those who had been in close contact with her towards the end of her life. But for years it felt too raw to write about her. Finally I managed to put it all on paper– I just needed the passage of time to be able to do that.
Sheila
Can you describe what you mean by too raw? What is the prose like when it is raw?
Nahid
What I mean by raw is that the pain I felt was too intense and the wounds felt too open. It took a long time for me to digest the pain of being torn away from my aunt’s home (and her falling into deep depression that lasted for over a year), and witnessing tragedies in Pari’s life, and then learning about her death from falling down the staircase in her house. Gradually, I managed to put those experiences in perspective, among other, more positive life experiences.
Sheila
Is it hard to see shape in real life experience without distance? Why?
Nahid
Yes, for me only the distance of time enables me to see shape and have perspective on various, hard to explain, events and experiences. When things have just happened, it is hard to see them in the wider context of all life experiences. For instance now, after many years, I can see that Maryam led a life that was still rewarding, even after the trauma of my father taking me away from her. She was very close to her sisters, women friends, other nieces and also she still had contact with me and knew I loved her. The same with Pari. True, she had many tragedies, but she also experienced rewarding times and had joy– she appreciated going to movies, plays, and good restaurants. She had a winning personality and made friends easily. She knew I loved her and we stayed in contact throughout her life, though much of it long distance by letters and occasional visits.
Sheila
What is the opposite of raw for writers?
Nahid
The opposite is: not to “gush,” or ramble on, but understand the nature of what we are trying to convey and put it in scenes that make it interesting and meaningful to the reader. With some distance, we understand better that we aren’t writing a diary to just record things for ourselves, but we are trying to create something for the reader, in terms of story line, emotions, meaning, point of view. It is hard to do all this when things have just happened. We don’t have the perspective that time gives us to select and shape.
Sheila
You have succeeded in shaping a memoir that allows me to enter your experience. I feel that the shape of your life was to be one of exile from the moment your mother’s mother carried you to your aunt’s house. You began evaluating words and experiences early and gave full voice to the idea of going to the US to study. In reading your fiction about young women who return to Iran to reconnect with loved ones but suffer because husbands, the state, and roaming crowds all want to enforce strict religiously motivated codes, I am haunted by the injustice done to women while you were growing up. I was worried about Jennifer, a woman married to a man from Iran in The Heart’s Desire the entire novel. She encourages him to take her and their son to visit his family and she is caught up in difficulties. Does it take a lot out of you to write from these kinds of experiences?
Nahid
I find that writing, even about difficult situations, gives me satisfaction in that it gives them meaning for my readers and myself. I hope that the more such things are exposed, the greater the possibilities will be for changes for the better. Growing up, I witnessed women I was very close being subjugated by discriminatory laws. For instance, when Pari decided to leave her abusive husband, she automatically lost the custody or her son and all rights to any money she had brought into the marriage. She went home penniless and childless. By law, if a woman initiated divorce, she lost everything. If the husband initiated the divorce, he kept the children and all the money. He was only obligated to give what the wife had brought into the marriage as a dowry. Girls inherited half as much as their brothers when their parents died. These are only a few examples of how women were, and still are, considered second-class citizens in Iran.