Acclaimed author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani offers a poignant satire about migration, one of the vital issues of our times. It also highlights how "we" can become "them" at any moment, for our true exile is alienation from others.
It is a story both familial and familiar in its generational tensions and misunderstandings, its push and pull of obligations and expectations. Only their Persian half-sister in Iran and the Westernized granddaughter of the family have the courage to face up to the answers, and only when Bibijan finally relinquishes the past can she remember the truth.Ī story mirrored in fragmented lives, Us&Them explores the ludicrous and the tragic, the venal and the generous-hearted aspects of Iranian life away from home. But once they begin to "share" the old woman, sending her back and forth between Paris and Los Angeles, they start asking themselves where the money might be coming from. They disagree about her finances too, which remain blocked as long as she insists on waiting for her son-still missing but not presumed dead yet-to return from the Iran–Iraq war. (Sept.Lili and Goli have argued endlessly about where their mother, Bibijan, should live since the Iranian Revolution. Nakhjavani's anachronistic style reads as if she were adapting 19th-century folktales rather than writing original fiction, and this quality, rather than its vaguely didactic raison d' tre, sets the novel apart from the bulk of contemporary literary fiction and adds immensely to its charm. The novel's Baha'i message is beautifully rendered in these tales of multiple paths leading to one destination, and its characters connect through encounters reminiscent of those in Michael Ondaatje's tales of unlikely soulmates whose unions bridge vast cultural divides. As this Indian and the other sojourners experience the outward horrors of the day, Nakhjavani shows how God uses their respective religious orientations and the secrets bundled in a saddlebag to reveal life-changing truths to each of them. For example, a sleazy Indian money changer, who would have remained a caricature in a lesser novel, becomes in Nakhjavani's hands a brave figure with a heartrending backstory. Each chapter recounts these events from the perspective of its title character, a device Nakhjavani uses skillfully not only does she avoid the tedium that could result from multiple retellings, but she also turns the bit player in one narrator's story into the complicated hero of another. Though they come from a wide variety of religious, national and socioeconomic backgrounds, all find themselves in the same caravan when it is beset by a sandstorm and a brutal bandit attack. Nakhjavani chronicles a day in the life of nine 19th-century characters traveling between Mecca and Medina in this engaging first novel.
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