TRAPPED in IRAN
TRAPPED in IRAN
A MOTHER’S DESPERATE
JOURNEY TO FREEDOM
Samieh Hezari
with Kaylene Petersen
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
© 2016 by Samieh Hezari and Kaylene Petersen
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hezari, Samieh, author.
Title: Trapped in Iran : a mother’s desperate journey to freedom / Samieh
Hezari ; with Kaylene Petersen.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016000919| ISBN 9780253022486 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780253022530 (pbk : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780253022615 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Women—Iran—Social conditions. | Custody of
children—Iran—Case studies. | Parental relocation (Child
custody)—Iran—Case studies. | Mothers and daughters—Iran—Case studies.
Classification: LCC HQ1735.2 .H49 2016 | DDC 305.40955—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016000919
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This book is dedicated to my daughters, Saba and Rojha— everything I have ever done has been for you— and to my parents.
TRAPPED in IRAN
PROLOGUE
Searing heat, unlike any I have ever known. Sweat runs down my face, soaking and pooling below. My skin burns, my throat aches for water from a bottle that has long been drained and discarded. I look down at my five-year-old daughter, Rojha, collapsed for the second time on the hard mountain face. “My legs hurt, Mummy. I can’t walk anymore,” she whimpers.
“We have to keep going, Rojha. It is not safe here,” I plead, pulling her up to her feet. Iran’s harsh Zagros Mountains had looked so enticing and magnificent from a distance, but close up they are covered with loose rocks and rise at a treacherous incline. As we climb, I deliberately keep Rojha to the right of me. One wrong step and we plummet to our deaths, but this desperate journey is the only way I know to get Rojha and me out of Iran. I’d rather we die than go back and subject my daughter to the lifetime of oppression that awaits her there with her father. We have to get out of here. We’re never going back to him.
Map of Iran. Map base © Daniel Dalet, http://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=105846&lang=en.
ONE
Finding out that your partner wants to be with someone else is difficult. For me, at the age of thirty-four with a broken marriage behind me and now a failed two-year relationship, I struggled to cope. I was living in Dublin, where I thought my dreams had come true. In many ways, yes—Iran, where I had grown up, happy but with limited freedom after the revolution, was behind me, and I cherished the liberties of my new country. But I had grown apart from Jabbar, the husband I had left Iran with. We had filed for divorce in 2003, and the relationship I then entered into with an Irish man had also floundered. Too much Muslim for him, too little for my ex-husband. For a year I tried to pull myself together, but I found myself increasingly unable to focus on my work as a financial advisor and I had very little interest in life. I was immensely depressed, immersed in feelings of failure about who I was and where I was going. I no longer knew where I belonged: in the traditional and conservative culture my ex-husband and I had come from, or with the freer way of life I had discovered on my own in Ireland.
Lost and alone.
I didn’t know where to turn, so I did what many people do in hard times—I went back to my parents. I returned to Iran. I was granted a month’s leave from work and, with my six-year-old daughter, Saba, traveled to my homeland. She was excited at the prospect of a trip to see her grandparents. She had loved our last trip there and reveled in the attention my family lavished upon her.
It was so good to see my family again at our home in the city of Rasht, near the Caspian Sea in northwest Iran. I am the eldest of four children and the only girl. My brother Sina is two years younger than me, and I am seven years older than Salar. My youngest brother, Sasan, is sixteen years younger. I love him as if he were my own child. While I was growing up, my parents had worked long hours in their restaurant, and responsibility for Sasan had often fallen on my shoulders.
So many S names! It was traditional at the time of my birth for children to be named by the father, although these days it is usually a joint decision by both parents. It was also traditional for all of the children born to a couple to be given names starting with the same initial. This created great confusion for my madar-bozorg, my grandmother, because not only did she have to remember our four S names, but also one of my aunts had named her three daughters Susan, Simin, and Sepideh! We were always greatly amused watching Grandmother trying to remember the names of her grandchildren. She used to call out the wrong name or tell us stories about our earlier days and get our names mixed up, resulting in much laughter and cries of “That wasn’t me” or “I never did that!”
My grandmother was a beautiful woman with a wicked sense of humor. She had the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen, and I would often gaze into them longingly, silently wishing I had inherited them. She doted on me particularly, for I was always polite and respectful. I always made time to listen to the stories she told about my grandfather, my pedar-bozorg, that my brothers and cousins dismissed as boring. I could sit for hours listening to her talk about my grandfather, watching her blink back tears as she reminisced about her lost love, who died of a heart attack when I was just five. Even as a young girl, I wanted to meet a man I could love as deeply as she loved him.
I was glad I had taken the chance to come to Iran to rejuvenate in the hometown I loved. As a child, when anyone