On Exile from “The Neighbour” – Short Story by Goli Taraghi

A collection of her short stories was given to us over the holidays by a family friend. She captures very well the experiences of many before and after the Iranian Revolution, but my favourite paragraph is the following on exile:

All of us – my children, the friends who occasionally visit us, I myself – are scared stiff of the downstairs neighbour. Our lives as foreigners in Paris are full of hidden anxieties. To begin with, we feel guilty for having taken up space that rightfully belongs to the natives, yet hidden beneath our apologetic smiles and submissiveness lurks an anger that stings and lies in wait for revenge. Humiliated, we painfully swallow our pride – a pride that has been instilled in us over the past two and a half millennia, a confidence that we descendants of Cyrus the Great, even in defeat and despair, are superior to the rest of the world (why, God only knows), and if we have fallen on hard times if little is left of our past glory and splendour, you Western exploiters are too blame.

While different exile communities may describe their experience somewhat differently, there are some universal experiences of exiles, and coming to terms of their fate. My mother’s family left Russia shortly after the 1917 revolution, and likely had some comparable feelings (although they likely did not blame Westerners!).

Book review: ‘The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons,’ by Goli Taraghi