Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran by Roya Hakakian
“We stormed every classroom, inscribed our slogans on the blackboard . . . Never had mayhem brought more peace. All our lives we had been taught the virtues of behaving, and now we were discovering the importance of misbehaving. Too much fear had tainted our days. Too many afternoons had passed in silence, listening to a fanatic’s diatribes. We were rebelling because we were not evil, we had not sinned, and we knew nothing of the apocalypse. . . . This was 1979, the year that showed us we could make our own destinies. We were rebelling because rebelling was all we could do to quell the rage in our teenage veins. Together as girls we found the courage we had been told was not in us.”
This book wasn't required reading for school, but it was heavily suggested reading. The author, Roya Hakakian, was a speaker at my college this year and she came with some heavy hitting messages. I have to admit before this I knew NOTHING about Iran. Before last summer I knew next to nothing about Iran except where it was located geographically. This was one of those memoirs that you read and are left shaken and grateful for having found it in the first place.
