IRAN

READ

There were so many books by Iranian authors I could have read for this blog post that I had a hard time choosing just one. I finally decided to do something completely different and read a graphic novel, written in comic book form.

The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is a largely autobiographical tale of the author’s life after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Born in 1969, Marji attends a co-ed French school in Tehran. Her parents oppose the government of Shah Reza Pahlavi, but appear to be caught unawares by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism after the Shah is deposed. Suddenly, Marji’s school is no longer allowed to have co-ed classes, and all the girls are required to wear the veil. The repressive government imposes draconian penalties on anyone caught in violation of the new morals standards, and political prisoners, including some known to Marji and her family, are summarily executed. To complicate things even further, Iraq invades Iran, and the terror of airstrikes and other horrors of war make living in Iran increasingly unbearable.

Marji is a very precocious and outspoken girl, and while her parents are exceptionally supportive of her, they begin to fear for her safety in a society where women have few rights. I would have expected the family to relocate to another country, as some of their relatives did, but instead, Marji’s parents send her to live in Austria at the age of fourteen. At first, she stays with a family friend, but before long, the friend moves her into a boardinghouse run by nuns.

As a strong-willed young person living in a free country without adult supervision, Marji predictably begins to do things that would have been unthinkable in Iran, often involving sex and drugs. She manages to graduate from high school, but a breakup with her cheating boyfriend sends her into a tailspin and she ends up living on the streets for a short period of time. She decides to return to Iran.

Iran has not changed for the better in her absence, however, and Marji is still as determined as ever to live life on her terms. She has a boyfriend, and the two of them attend the university. They decide to get married, since the law in Iran really doesn’t allow them to have a romantic relationship otherwise. It becomes increasingly clear, however, that a woman like Marji will never adjust to life under the fundamentalist Islamic regime.

Reading a graphic novel was a new experience for me, and I enjoyed it. While the stripped-down prose leaves little room for lyrical descriptive passages, the drawings help to fill in a lot of those blanks. The author’s use of this medium presented a very clear picture of her life.

After reading about Satrapi’s life in Iran, I decided to read Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, by Jason Rezaian. I had been meaning to read this book ever since I heard the author and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, speak at the Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference in Corte Madera last year. Rezaian was born in the United States to an Iranian father and a U.S. mother. He moved to Iran in 2009, where he became the Tehran Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. Three days before they were scheduled to travel to the United States in 2014, he and Yeganeh, also a journalist, were arrested by Iranian authorities and accused of espionage. The charges against them were never clear, although one particularly laughable accusation had to do with a Kickstarter campaign Jason had initiated to try to bring avocados to Iran. The Iranian authorities could not understand the concept of Kickstarter, and assumed that “avocado” was some kind of CIA code word. Eventually, Yeganeh was released on bond, but Jason was left to languish in prison in Tehran for about eighteen months before he was finally freed through diplomatic efforts in the midst of the Iran nuclear deal negotiations.

Read together, The Complete Persepolis and Prisoner offer a stark portrayal of post-revolutionary Iran and the dangers that are always lurking for those living under an authoritarian government.

COOK

Neither of these books gave me much inspiration with respect to Iranian cuisine. The Complete Persepolis barely mentions food at all. Rezaian is something of a foodie, and some of his articles for the Washington Post were about Iranian food. He and Yeganeh even hosted Anthony Bourdain during his visit to Iran for his “Parts Unknown” show. But since most of Rezaian’s dining takes place in prison, there isn’t much in the way of culinary highlights.

So I took to Google and found a vegetarian recipe on the Archana’s Kitchen website for Khoresht Fesenjan, a pomegranate, walnut, and vegetable stew. The only change I had to make to veganize the recipe was to substitute maple syrup for the honey. I didn’t have pumpkin, so I used butternut squash instead. There are a few problems with the recipe, so if you decide to make it, here’s what I did:

1.       The recipe’s instructions mention zucchini, but it wasn’t in the ingredient list, so I didn’t include it.

2.       The ingredient list calls for cardamom, but the instructions reference cinnamon. I decided to go with cardamom.

3.       The recipe calls for two bay leaves, but the instructions don’t say when to add them. I put them in with the pomegranate juice.

4.       It turned out more like soup than stew, so if I were to make it again, I’d probably use less liquid and more veggies than the recipe calls for.

      Served over saffron rice, this was a very good meal, with an interesting blend of flavors. In Prisoner, Rezaian says: “With Iranian food there was so much to ponder. It was the ultimate expression of the country’s identity: varied, resource rich, uniquely accented, sometimes pungent, hard to translate, and often unsightly. Persian food can be gorgeous and fragrant. But it simply doesn’t show well the way Thai, Japanese, or Italian food does.” That just about sums up this dish, and I’m using that as my excuse for why the food in this picture doesn’t look any prettier.

GIVE

Since I read two books for this post, I donated to two organizations. There were no Iranian projects at GlobalGiving, but in searching the Internet, I found the Center for Human Rights in Iran. According to their website, “The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to protect and promote human rights in Iran. Headquartered in New York, CHRI is comprised of award-winning journalists, researchers, lawyers, activists, writers, multimedia specialists and advocates based around the world who work to support the basic rights and freedoms of the Iranian people.” More information about CHRI is available at https://iranhumanrights.org/.

In honor of the Rezaians and the ordeal they went through in Iran, I also donated to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which was one of the organizations that advocated on their behalf while they were imprisoned. According to CPJ’s mission statement: “The Committee to Protect Journalists promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. CPJ protects the free flow of news and commentary by taking action wherever journalists are under threat.” More information about CPJ can be found at https://cpj.org/.

NEXT STOP: IRAQ

INDONESIA

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Many of the books I read for this blog are tedious and take me forever to get through. That was not the case for the book I chose for Indonesia. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Girl from the Coast arrived in the mail Friday morning, and I was finished with it by the following morning.

This novel features an unnamed girl, based on the author’s grandmother, living in a small fishing village on the island of Java during the time when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. Although her family and all the other villagers are very poor, the fourteen-year-old girl is content with her life there.

Everything changes, however, when word of the girl’s beauty reaches a wealthy aristocrat, known as the Bendoro, in the city of Rembang. He sends a representative to tell the girl’s parents that he wants to marry her, and they agree because they want her to have an easier life than they have. The girl would rather stay in her village, but her wishes don’t matter.

Life in the Bendoro’s house is very lonely for the girl, as she doesn’t see her husband very often. There are two children living in the house, and when the girl asks who they are, she finds out that her husband is their father, but their mothers have gone back to their villages. Since the girl is a commoner and the Bendoro is part of the aristocracy, she isn’t even recognized as his wife by members of his social circle. Instead, she is considered a “practice wife,” someone to fulfill the Bendoro’s sexual needs until he finds a mate suitable for his station in life. The Bendoro’s habit has been to take a practice wife, keep her until she bears him a child, then send her back to her village afterwards without her child.

At one point, the girl receives permission from the Bendoro to go visit her parents. When she arrives, however, she learns the truth of the old saying, “You can’t go home again.” Although she wants to slip back into her old life, at least temporarily, her parents and everyone else in the village no longer treat her as though she is one of them. They won’t let her do any work, and they are careful about how they speak to her. While she is happy to be outside again after having spent the previous couple of years in her room in the Bendoro’s house, she feels just as lonely as ever.

Shortly after her return to the city, she becomes pregnant, and her life changes again. Ultimately, the girl, who has never had any say in decisions involving her life, takes charge of her own destiny.

I don’t usually say much about the authors of the books I read for this blog, which is probably a serious omission on my part. In this case, I was interested to read that the author of The Girl from the Coast, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, spent many years in prison as a result of his writing. He was first imprisoned by the Dutch government from 1947 to 1949 during Indonesia’s War of Independence. Later, after Indonesia gained its independence, he fell afoul of the country’s second president, Suharto.  He wrote The Girl from the Coast in the years just before he was sentenced to hard labor in a penal colony from 1969 to 1979. At the time of the book’s eventual release, he was under house arrest for yet another political transgression.

The book ends with an odd little epilogue, which is explained in a footnote: “The Girl from the Coast was originally intended as the first volume in a trilogy of novels on the growth of the nationalist movement in Indonesia, with the story line based loosely on the life history of the author’s family. Because the other two novels in the trilogy were destroyed by the Indonesian military, this epilogue, which was not part of the original novel, was prepared by the author and translator specifically for the publication of this English-language edition in order to provide readers a greater sense of closure to the tale.” Personally, I was grateful for the closure that this epilogue brought.

COOK

No particular vegan or veganizable dishes were mentioned in The Girl from the Coast. However, rice was mentioned frequently. When the girl returns to her village to visit her parents, she takes many gifts from the Bendoro, who wants to ensure that the villagers hold him in respect. “Take with you a gunnysack of rice,” was one of his orders.

With that in mind, I found a recipe for an Indonesian fried rice dish called nasi goreng. The recipe, on the “Feasting at Home” website, includes options for making the dish vegan. I really enjoyed it, although if I were to make it again, I’d probably add a little more tofu.

GIVE

Reading a book about a time in Indonesia’s history when women and girls were little more than chattel made me want to give money to an organization supporting girls. On the GlobalGiving website, I found a project to help girls in Bali graduate from high school. According to the project description, “More than 4.14 % of people in Bali earn less than $1 a day. Often it's difficult to get enough money together to cover food and rent, let alone something as extravagant as a school. If a family can afford to send a child to school, the chosen child is almost always a boy. In Bali, 6.04 % of girls are forced into marriage before they turn 16 and teenage pregnancy is also one of the most common reasons for dropping out of school. Many girls in Bali get pregnant because of the lack of education.” Donations to this project will provide three-year scholarships to girls from impoverished families to cover “school fees, uniform, school supplies, daily allowances, and a workshop.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/support-15-girls-in-bali-to-graduate-highschool/.

NEXT STOP: IRAN