Homecoming after exile is an exercise fraught with mixed emotions of nostalgia, memories, anguish, fear, suspicion and reconciliation. Kamin Mohammadi is a journalist and travel writer who has written for international press including Times, Financial Times, The Guardian and co-authored the Lonely Planet guide to Iran. She would know best, as someone born in Iran and exiled after a decade, along with her family, in the UK during the 1979 Revolution as a nine-year-old. The Cypress Tree is a detailed and vivid memoir of a journey to rediscover roots, family ties and coming to terms of dual identities and loyalties of nation and self.
Mohammadi’s account reveals the familiar problems of migration and exile alongside the growing pains a young girl would find in a western society transported from a traditional one. She recalls the anxiety and desperation to fit into the western world while growing up as a teenager in Sussex in England and embracing boarding school boisterousness and thrill of night clubbing. She describes in detail a sense of shame about her native land as a naive teen, her inability to reconcile traditions that seemed unsuitable in Britain, a place that made her conscious about being different even as she made all attempts to fit in.
Mohammadi’s roots are both Persian and Kurdish so she is very much Iranian. However, she remembers it took her long to come to grips with her heritage, to call herself Iranian with a sense of pride and dropping the alternative to appear exotic to call herself Persian before Western acquaintances. Settling into adulthood she realised her juvenile rejection of her heritage, language and literature and sought to appreciate the beauty of a rich and varied land, its ancient heritage, the magnificence of its art and architecture, its poetry and literature that seemed to connect and enliven the generation of her parents.
The author returned to her homeland at 27 to understand her roots at her grandmother’s sprawling home in Abadan. The journal seems like an endeavour to sink her feet into the country fraught with political oppression and the nurturing warmth and affection of her large clan and the circle of the tribe that bound her history and self to them inexorably.
The narrative comes alive when Mohammadi describes the personal details of stories and tales of members of her large family over three generations. The reminiscences of picnics and festive occasions, the tales of aunts and uncles and cousins – both urbane members of family living in Tehran, educated aunts and cousins free to choose and exercise their rights, and homey cousins and families still settled in Kurdish villages – offer a closer glimpse into Iranian privileged families.
As an ancient clan with a tribal heritage that embraced modernity and cosmopolitanism the political troubles in Iran changed and tossed the members of Mohammadi’s family to different directions. The memoir logs the times of Khomeini’s rule, the political autocracy, the brutal sentences of the Ayatollah Khalkhali as many of the reasons that led to violence and brutality in the society that divided families out of fear and coercion. The book details how families and even the best of Iranian society had fallen prey to the growing trouble between Islam and religious fundamentalism and Iran’s glorious heritage of art and culture and expansive spirit. Mohammadi bemoans the dangers of religious extremism defaced the beauty and diversity of an ancient culture of Iran.
The lifestyle and customs of leisure and splendour that marked the shared histories of ancient clans and their modern educated families like Mohammadi’s seemed unacceptable under the new laws of Iran and its Revolution. Families such as hers who observed religious vows and practices as part of tradition alongside education and modernity now stood threatened by the wave of religious control of the people by the Basij or moral police. Mohammadi’s father and elders of her family who were prominent and contributing members of the community found the country’s principles of democracy under threat from political and religious coercion. The change of Iran into an Islamic Republic, Khomeini’s autocratic rule and anti-Americanism and fear of selective extermination of dissident members and their families lead to the “exodus of Iran’s finest brains to the West” and Mohammadi’s family was no exception and was forced to flee seeking political asylum.
The book chronicles Iran’s testy relationship with Iraq and the ensuing bloody war of over eight years, the struggle to bring about religious temperance and political order in the country, and the challenges faced by Ahmadinejad. While the political history reads like a quick recollection for a background to Iran’s troubled past, Mohammadi’s book reads better in the chapters on personal narratives. The unsettling and trauma of the fractured family and social eminence in the face of exile does not hit the reader with a sense of the terrible and hence the empathy for the individual’s trauma is mitigated in the reading.
The Cypress Tree is best read as a memoir of longing and love for a homeland that is relived in memory written with affection and nostalgia.
THE CYPRESS TREE
Kamin Mohammadi
Bloomsbury
288 pages; Rs 499