ZAN

Iranian and Iranian American women navigate the ways in which they are bound by their countries and by those who would curtail their spirits.

In Ehtesham-Zadeh’s debut collection, the Iranian Revolution exerts its massive gravity, like a giant planet at the edge of these narrative universes. In “Aab,” for example, teenage Minoo confronts the contrast between her grandmother—a downcast old woman—and the champion swimmer on the Iranian national team her grandmother used to be before Khomeini came to power. In “Coming Out, Going Under,” a young lesbian under her father’s thumb in Tehran is given access to an online network of other queer people in her country. In the stories set in the U.S., even Americanized characters experience a sense of shame and secrecy that makes them feel like outsiders in their own lives—as in “Her Revolution,” when Shireen, a middle-aged teacher, receives an unexpected email from a former lover from her pre-college years in Tehran that upends the quiet, stable life in which she guards the secrets of her past. In her preface, Ehtesham-Zadeh writes about the ongoing Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) movement in Iran, noting that it is her goal with her stories “to provide a lens through which [her] readers might view a complex reality, bring it close, and find it less strange.” Presuming that the reader finds it strange, though, leads to the stories often being information driven, rather than character driven, as if Ehtesham-Zadeh first chose the topic she wanted to educate her audience about and then wrote a story around it, rather than the other way around. This creates sometimes stilted narratives, though admiration and indignation for the women of Iran always shine through.

Plainspoken protest stories that balance head and heart in their attempts to evoke empathy.