Nilofar Shidmehr’s Divided Loyalties

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Astoria - House of Anansi, 2019)

Neither a camel nor a barbarian to be seen: Nilofar Shidmehr’s stories correct what Lila Azam Zanganeh identifies as “endless misconceptions about Iran, some humorous (think camels), others less so (uncouth, Indiana Jones-caliber barbarians).”*

Actually, a single camel: only one, in a proverb recited by a young girl. From a class-aware Cinderella to a self-aware mother, these stories are populated by revolutionary women.

Divided Loyalties reflects decades of Iranian women’s experiences, spanning from 1978 – through and beyond the 1979 revolution – to 2008. These nine stories highlight aspects of women’s lives which are often overlooked, and they subvert traditional expectations in both small and large ways.

In “Butterflies on the Bus,” readers travel with a young sister into spaces that are traditionally hidden and follow her through a series of events that redraw the lines between agency and resistance. Another writer might have written the story of her brother, but, here, he remains off-stage; instead, readers consider how women possess and wield power in positions where they could be perceived as powerless, and how their emotional state can create or abdicate a position of power.

Each story challenges conventional roles of perpetrator and victim. Sometimes, the symbolism is clear, as in the sister’s story, with her name Parvaaneh (‘butterfly’). Sometimes, statements are direct, as in “Let Go of My Hair, Sir!”: “I, Sima Ghafoorzadeh, am not a victim – a ghorbaani.” Sometimes, characters outwardly challenge social norms, like Pari in “The Gordian Knot,” who contradicts a female neighbour who advises her to accept a pending marriage proposal. More often, however, there is no outward demonstration, only a silent and subversive decision.

Nilofar Shidmehr dedicates this volume of stories to her daughter, Saaghar, “with new hope for unification.” Shidmehr views “Iranian women as being “at the forefront of struggle for social and legal change, individual and public freedom, and democracy.”** In their personal decision-making processes, her characters strive for self-expression that will lead to broader change.

These women acknowledge their own needs and often manage to prioritize them, not only over political and religious systems, but also over the needs of friends and family. In “Divided Loyalties,” for instance, Maana has been living and working as a realtor in British Columbia, when she returns to Iran: “I’m sure if I told people that the reason for my immigration to Canada was to escape my family, no one would believe me.”

Maana’s decision to live apart from her family is a quiet but revolutionary act.  Even more remarkable, in “Family Reunion in the Mirror,” is Homa’s decision to divorce and emigrate to Canada, leaving her ex-husband in Iraq to raise their daughter: “The myth of what makes a good mother was made by men.”

Mostly, these women experience difficulties that are expressed directly, but occasionally a figurative flourish adds to the tension, with images of repression or trapped energy, such as steam rising from hot asphalt or heat built up behind a closed apartment door that “jumps at her like an armed enemy.” Voices crackle and anger boils, but Shidmehr’s prose is clean and her language is matter-of-fact.

Some structural decisions do, however, add a degree of complexity to the storytelling. In one story, there is a clock on a wall, which outwardly measures time as it moves toward a scheduled event, while the action in the story circles between memories and impossible futures as time passes. In another instance, a character waits in line for a transaction and experiences a small epiphany before the transaction concludes. In another, a character listens to a message left via telephone and makes a decision while the recording plays. “Butterflies on the Bus” begins and ends with a bus ride, and, in “Yellow Light,” a character reaches a conclusion while crossing an intersection and moving through a streetscape. These measured timelines allow the author to control the pace at which readers receive information and, thus, their engagement with the stories.

In her 2008 memoir, Things I've Been Silent About, Azar Nafisi (best known for her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, which described her work with female students who persisted in studying Western classics forbidden under growing Islamic fundamentalist rule) writes about the things in Iran that her parents concealed, even from their children:

It is such a strong part of Iranian culture to never reveal private matters: we don’t air our dirty laundry in public, as Mother would say, and besides, private lives are trivial and not worth writing about. Useful life stories are what matter, like the memoir my father finally published, a cardboard version of himself. I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.***

With this in mind, Nilofar Shidmehr’s stories are not only engaging and challenging, but truly revolutionary. Not only does she insist that private lives are worth writing about, but the narrator of “Sign Language as Second-Language” declares, “I view my writing as my most subversive act,” and she directs the words that lose shape in her mouth onto the page as an act of protest. Here, every character who writes the ending to her own story, who reaches beyond cultural norms and expectations, is changing the cultural landscape she inhabits.

Not only does Nilofar Shidmehr air what Azar Nafisi calls the dirty laundry of private matters in her fiction, the opening story in Divided Loyalties revolves around literal dirty laundry, specifically a pair of underpants stained with menstrual blood. The central characters in “Sakeen” are the collection’s youngest, but the game played by the three young girls with the housemaid, a girl only three years older and a highly desirable playmate when her official duties are complete, is one of the most outwardly challenging stories.
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It seems like an innocent idea, acting out the “Cinderella” fairy tale, but when the young cousin, Naazi, insists that a housemaid never has to scrub blood out of a pair of panties, her family’s maid, Sakeen, is angered by the other girls’ ignorance and brings a fresh layer of reality to their play-acting. When the game begins, the young girls are concerned that the step-sisters and step-mother are not acting cruelly enough, not placing rigorous enough demands on Cinderella, but Sakeen’s inside knowledge of a servant’s responsibilities takes the game in an unexpected direction when she provides a prop:

My stomach turned at the sight of Sakeen’s [bloody] panties. The filthy maid had gone too far, asking my cousin to do something so disgusting. Who did she think she was to act like a real mistress? This was more than a role-play. Her treatment of Naazi was outrageous, meant to offend our whole family.

Sakeen’s actions are significant because they change the way that the narrator sees herself and her family. Throughout the collection, there are scattered references to mirrors and reflections: it matters how women see themselves, but how others see them is equally important. Sometimes there are distancing elements, something to peer through, like a pair of thick-rimmed glasses or a car’s windshield. Sometimes the glass not only illuminates but reflects other realities, like a TV screen or a mirror presented as a wedding gift. In one case, a character observes that a mirror seems to be positioned inside a photograph, creating a reflection where there is none. And in another instance, stage lights and traffic lights transport readers between memories of college years and present-day expressions of nostalgia for a lost love.

It is a woman’s gaze into a mirror in one story that affords her the capacity to make a life-altering decision to forge ahead, to thrive rather than merely survive. The rapid series of reflections between her family’s needs and her own, between ‘them’ and ‘her,’ coalesces into an emergence of selfhood. (This story will remain unnamed so that readers can independently discover this character’s destiny, which is filled with promise where another character might have opted for despair.)

​There is a mirror in Pari’s story too, in “The Gordian Knot.” Her name means ‘like a fairy,’ so readers are intended to conjure up archetypal images, while considering the different ways in which women reconcile the gap between societal expectations and personal realities:

Unlike other women whose husbands were missing, husbands they hoped would be found one day; unlike women whose husbands were martyred, women who remained unmarried and raised their children; unlike women who married war casualties, men without limbs; unlike women whose husbands were captured by the enemy, women who remained faithful to their marriages, she was a disgrace to society. This knowledge created a scar, a knot in her heart, in his heart, in their relationship. Pari’s promise to herself is to see him face to face, to tell him the truth, and to apologize. She hopes that if Anoosh learns why she divorced him, he will help her undo the knot.

Pari’s decision to meet with Anoosh, face to face, without either a window or a mirror to change the perception that each has of the other, is a small choice with broad consequences.

Nilofar Shidmehr’s decision to tell Pari’s story seems small, but reading about the process of knots being loosened – of women’s worlds widening – has broader repercussions, too.

In Mavis Gallant’s short story “Varieties of Exile,” Linnet muses on the importance of writing in the emergence of selfhood and the emergence of an artist: “Anything I could not decipher, I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots.”

​The stories in Divided Loyalties may occasionally situate readers in the position of exile, but ultimately they invite readers to join her characters in a small but grand revolution, in a delicate but monumental untangling.

* Lila Azam Zanganeh, Ed. My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006) xiv.
** Trevor Corkum. “The Chat with Nilofar Shidmehr.” 49th Shelf. January 22, 2019.
*** Azar Nafisi. Things I’ve Been Silent About (NY: Random House, 2008) xv.

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Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples - Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit - land still inhabited by their descendants.