Book: The Cypress Tree: A Love Letter To Iran
Kamin Mohammadi
Bloomsbury
272 pages
Rs499
The language of loss and longing, distressingly familiar today, often risks drowning out individual voices. For the author of The Cypress Tree, the challenge to make her own heard must have been particularly daunting, with the benchmark already set by fellow Iranian Azar Nafisi for tales of survival and exile emerging out of Iran in the wake of its Islamic Revolution. That Kamin Mohammadi’s memoir defies comparison with Nafisi’s own critically acclaimed story, Reading Lolita In Tehran, is due, partly, to their divergent perspectives. But it is Mohammadi’s area of focus — the large extended family she inherited from her Kurdish-Iranian parents — that lends her book its unique dimension. For her, “Iran will always be about the people whom I love.”
Torn from them in 1979, as the Revolution swept Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power and forced her family into exile in Britain, nine-year-old Kamin understood little of her plight, sensing only the “rich smell of fear” that hung over the country she wouldn’t see again for 18 years.
By the time she did, she had learnt what exile was all about and the meaning of alienation in a Western milieu that regarded the Islamic Republic of Iran with hostility and tarred all Iranians with the same brush. It would, moreover, take her years to recognise that “underneath the Western laminate” she had acquired to gain acceptance from her English peers, she was Iranian “through and through”, a fact that has kept drawing her back to her native shores ever since.
If the journalist in Kamin feels impelled to lend gravitas to her narrative through an attempted analysis of Iran’s evolving status since its glory days under Cyrus the Great, touching upon landmark historical and socio-political developments under subsequent regimes, as co-author of the Lonely Planet guide to Iran, she can’t resist taking us on a cultural voyage of discovery, capturing for us the rich flavours and fragrances of her land. For avid Iran watchers, however, of greater interest is the parallel society Kamin discovers on subsequent visits to Iran, operating in contravention of the strictures imposed by the autocratic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-led government. Clever hackers and cellphone users conspire to facilitate the forbidden — banned websites, clandestine film screenings or “hook-ups between the sexes”.
Iranian women are willing collaborators in such subversion, slyly tweaking the austere mandatory dress code in their favour. “The colour,” evidently, “is back in Iran.”
The soul of this memoir is, nonetheless, Kamin’s family, a motley bunch so entertaining and endearing that to quibble over her romanticised portraits of them would seem churlish. It is in the segments dedicated to them that she flings off European decorum and surrenders to Iranian sentimentality, seasoning it with candour, wit and a piquant charm. Here, among these irrepressible people who lend her prose its lyricism and spice, is the author’s “lost paradise”. Its undisputed diva is Maman-joon, her maternal grandmother. Adamant, in her final months, that her passing be mourned in the best traditions of Shia Islam, she warns her progeny, “When I die, I want rivers of tears… and don’t think I won’t be watching…” She certainly deserves her star status in a family album replete with joyous, vibrant images, faintly tinged with melancholy.
It is on the strength of those unforgettable images that Mohammadi is likely to be forgiven some self-indulgence, including her occasional need to adopt a feminist stance or assert with disarming optimism that resilient Iran will survive anything, including a threatened nuclear strike by US-backed Israel. The Cypress Tree is, after all, her impassioned “love letter to Iran”. And much, surely, is permissible in matters of love.
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