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An Iranian novel that resonates politically by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali is a timely read, a coming-of-age story by the author of The Stationery Store, which also draws on her Iranian background.  Dedicated “to the brave women of Iran,” it is told in the first person, primarily by its chief protagonist, an Iranian girl named Elaheh or Ellie, from a well-off background whose mother’s vision for her life is to socialize with the “right” people and marry advantageously.  In 1950, at the age of seven,  Ellie meets a child from a family of very limited means, Homa, whose home and family are nonetheless welcoming and full of warmth.

Homa’s father’s Communist affiliation led to his becoming a political prisoner, incarcerated for most of the novel.  Homa remains spirited and adventurous. She aspires to go to college to study law and become a judge. Marriage of any sort is of little to no interest to her. Occasionally the writing is from her point of view. Their friendship stretches over decades against the backdrop of Iran’s volatile, often violent politics.

When Ellie’s father dies and leaves their finances strained, Ellie and her mother must move to a small apartment in a low-income neighborhood. Her mother retains her sense of dignity by clinging to her family history, including unspecified royal ancestors. Pressed for money and desperately insecure, she gets married again, to Ellie’s father’s brother, and they return to affluent surroundings, including an elite school for Ellie.  Homa shows up at the same school, apparently  being subsidized, and their friendship deepens. Ellie is swayed by her mother’s vision for her future, the goal being to marry well. Homa prefers to become a political activist, following her father’s path and becoming a Communist, organizing protests against Shah Pahlavi’s regime,  and joining actions supporting human rights.

The Shah had been maneuvered into position in 1953 by the U.S. and U.K. governments, which overthrew parliament member and Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The Shah unsurprisingly tilted to the West and  loosened his tight grip on Iranian society, but he still used the SAVAK secret police to crack down on critics and political opponents.  Among them were the Islamic extremists, who eventually deposed the Shah, led by the exiled religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned to Iran in 1979, when his fundamentalist followers seized hostages at the American Embassy.

The treatment of women worsened, including restricting what they were allowed to wear, how they could socialize, what their demeanor in public could be, – virtually every aspect of their lives.  More important that her Community sympathy, Homa gets swept up in the larger fight for women’s rights and Iranian democracy, which has bubbled up intermittently in Iran. Increasingly, some men have supported the demonstrations, and sought to protect women who burned their hajibs to protest the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman brutally arrested and tortured for not wearing her hair covering precisely as the morality police dictate.

Ellie and Homa are together in college, but, over the years. their relationship becomes strained as the story twists and they take different paths. Yet their friendship endures in a profound and very touching manner.  Each in her own way becomes a shirzan, a lion woman in Persian language.

Marjan Kamali’s writing attempts to capture details of Iranian life, the colorful markets, their culture, their foods, their celebrations, their superstitions. But her use of language in this sweeping historical novel seems less sophisticated than in the more intimate The Stationery Store and sometimes feels written for the young adult market. She does excel in driving the narrative, and we are drawn into Homa’s and Ellie’s decades-long and compelling bonds.  The fight for women’s rights goes on, getting stronger and stronger, in the novel and in real life.

Readers of The Lion Women of Tehran may also appreciate the recent movie The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a marvelous Iranian movie that covers the same dangerous and paranoid period surrounding the death of Mahsa Amini we learn about in Kamali’s book.

This Novel is a Challenge by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald has a little bit of Marcel Proust, something of James Joyce, a dose of Freud and a lot of post-WWII PTSD. The landscape is usually desolate, the lighting dark; the often-abandoned buildings are old, dank and soot-stained, all reeking of imagined history. Even when there are crowds, there is loneliness, setting the tone for the ruminations of the character, retold by an anonymous narrator.

The source of the stream-of-consciousness ramblings is the character Jacques Austerlitz, struggling to discover who he really is. As the Nazis closed in on Eastern Europe, his parents in Prague had put him on a train to the UK, part of a large children’s transport.  He was subsequently adopted by a stern Welsh minister named Elias, and the child knew himself as Davydd Elias.  Years later, Austerlitz remembers his loneliness as that child in boarding school, but there’s a gap in his memory that he will later struggle to clarify.  As an adult, he becomes a historian of architecture, and his life is measured by his writings and black-and-white photographs of buildings, which are included here in Austerlitz’s accounts, presented by the narrator.  Each building that Austerlitz describes to the narrator triggers for him a whiff of memory of somewhere else. Railway stations are particularly evocative, though Austerlitz isn’t certain why.

He met the narrator in a railroad station in the U.K. A friendship develops, and, over several decades the narrator meets up with Austerlitz and becomes the repository for his stories. Austerlitz becomes obsessed by minutiae as he recounts things his mind randomly fixates on: the sights and smells of villages he has walked through, ancient city fortifications, dead moths, homing pigeons, almost any subject to which his meandering mind takes him.

As he ages, he retrieves shreds of his own history and travels to Prague and its Jewish ghetto, where he locates a woman who had babysat for him before the German invasion. She helps him probe the story of his parents and what happened to them during the war. He scrupulously details life in Terezin (Theresienstadt to the Germans), the Prague ghetto, the brutality, the deaths, the fake milieu the Germans created to demonstrate to the Red Cross the “benign” nature of their treatment of Jewish prisoners.

Another poignant sequence is a trip to the Marienbad spa with a female friend. It echoes the 1961 “Last Year at Marienbad” book by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s and the equally enigmatic Alain Renais avant-garde movie by the same name. Published 40 years later, Austerlitz is about a search for oneself, buried memories, the need to be heard, the loneliness deriving from the struggle, the resulting inability to enter meaningful relationships.

Sebald’s style is idiosyncratic – no paragraphs, an inordinate number of run-on sentences, infinitely detailed descriptions becoming a vortex of images and partial recollections. The style comes to reflect the increasing derangement of Austerlitz himself, who ends up in long-term confinement in a mental hospital.

This is definitely not a beach read. Sometimes I found it a puzzling and pretentious literary abstraction and, at other times, an authentic plunge into the many-layered depths of life’s experiences and a continuing discovery of new truths about the universal human experience. Still, I’d characterize my feeling of reading Austerlitz more as a task accomplished than a pleasure savored.

Lowell Politics: February 16, 2025

The highlight of Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was a presentation by City Manager Tom Golden titled “2024 Year in Review.” There is no written version that I can find online, but the LTC YouTube recording captures the full presentation starting 38 minutes into the video.

After watching the comprehensive talk, here are four things that I thought stood out along with my commentary on each. I confess to being a tough grader but keep in mind that it is the city council that sets the direction of the city and hires and fires the city manager, so when you have a council prone to micromanaging city operations, as this one is, it makes the city manager’s job much more difficult. That said, here are my four takeaways from Golden’s presentation:

First – The talk was a celebration of all things infrastructure from road and sidewalk repairs to upgrades to city parks. This is all good, but the challenge is how to pay for it. From week to week there’s an attitude, especially from some councilors, that past city councils were woefully negligent in not paying enough attention to these things. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. Every council wants more streets paved, but that costs money and there is always competition for funds. Among all city councils in my (long) memory, this council and its immediate predecessors have been the beneficiaries of an unprecedented stream of federal funds to the city. But that stream has been abruptly cut off so the challenge for the council will be to navigate that new fiscal reality.

Second – Golden stressed that “strong fiscal management” is key to the success of city government, adding that 2024 “was financially a very strong year.” He cited the increase in the city’s bond rating by Moody’s Investors Service and the very transparent city budget that’s fully available online. Knowing where the money is coming from and where it is going is critical and from all evidence, the city seems to be in good shape in that area. In the (now distant) past, the city got itself into trouble with overly optimistic revenue projections that were intended to support higher spending and to keep city councils from making politically difficult cuts to services. That always led to disastrous results down the road so it’s essential that the current administration guard against that temptation.

Third – The volume of cultural and culinary events sponsored by the city was cited as a highlight. Festivals are nice and they do play a valuable role in highlighting things the city has to offer and drawing in niche audiences that might not otherwise come to Lowell. But annual festivals, no matter how many you have, are not a substitute for day-to-day activity, whether that be in the downtown or in neighborhood shopping centers. Stand on any downtown sidewalk someday and the vibrancy you feel in other communities is absent. Perhaps the most important ingredient that’s missing is people. There aren’t enough of them walking around, doing things. A higher population of pedestrians would not only provide more customers, but it would also create a sense of activity, cohesiveness and security that would then build upon itself. There’s long been a belief that if someone visits Lowell for an event like the Folk Festival and has a good experience, that person will just morph into a regular visitor to Lowell. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The leap from a person attending a festival to that same person just coming to downtown Lowell to hang out is not something that happens organically. It must be aggressively encouraged and nurtured.

Fourth – Golden also listed the many housing developments that arose in the past year. I won’t list them here but in the aggregate it’s impressive although much more housing is needed to help make the city a more affordable place to live. The challenge of doing that was illustrated by the brief discussion on an Erik Gitschier motion for a report on parking and traffic plans for the new housing development at 463-473 Gorham Street. That’s the site of the former Hynes Tavern, a one-time Lowell institution that is just a few dozen feet from the end of the Lowell Connector.

An article in Friday’s Lowell Sun, “Development Drives Parking, Traffic Questions,” reported that the proposed five-story structure will contain 39 studio or one-family apartments but will contain just 13 onsite parking spaces. If you’re familiar with that area, you know that Gorham Street from Elm/Highland Street to the Connector routinely has bumper-to-bumper traffic in both directions so you might label a 39-unit housing development midway through that stretch insane, or something like that, because how will vehicles get into or out of the development? But that misses the point that there will be no vehicles going in or out because there is no parking onsite, or hardly any.

At the urging of the city solicitor who pointed out that this matter was still pending before some city regulatory boards so adverse comments about the development by councilors could lead to litigation against the city, Mayor Dan Rourke cut short the discussion, but not until after a few councilors expressed their dismay with this situation, although none seemed to acknowledge that it was an amendment to the zoning code that they put into place that allows this development with its scarcity of parking. In fact, the zoning code does not require any parking so the 13 spaces could be seen as a bonus for the city.

A recent trend in urban planning is to greatly reduce or even eliminate the requirements of onsite parking for urban housing developments. Part of the thinking is that requiring parking greatly increases the cost of a development which means some developments that would otherwise be feasible won’t get built if parking is required and those that do get built will be more expensive than they need to be. The theory is that the people who move into these places will rely on walking, bicycling or public transportation rather than privately owned vehicles. If they do have their own vehicles, they’ll just have to figure out where to put them.

That, of course, is no consolation to the existing residents who already face great challenges in finding parking since these developments are only allowed in densely packed neighborhoods with small lots, few driveways, and narrow streets and not allowed in the city’s suburban-style neighborhoods that have big lots, big driveways, and plenty of on-street parking.

Allowing housing to be constructed without any requirements for parking is not totally irrational although to be successful, or at least tolerable to its residents and neighbors, it needs to be part of a more comprehensive, neighborhood-wide plan that includes small businesses within walking distance, more robust public transportation, more acceptance of walking which includes the reversal of our prioritization of vehicles over walkers, and, as much as some may ridicule the idea, creating a local culture that promotes the use of bicycles.

Getting back to Manager Golden’s presentation, there were two last things I found encouraging. First, was his embrace of innovation in city government. “We have always done it this way” is no longer an acceptable reason for why something is done the way it is. Golden said he urges everyone to find ways to do things better and that he encourages employees to try to do things differently. Importantly, he added that when you make changes, mistakes will be made but rather than dwell on who gets blamed, everyone “owns the mistake and moves on.” This last part is especially important. In any bureaucracy, the safe approach is to do things the way they’ve always been done. The risk of being penalized when something new doesn’t work out is a deterrent to innovation. I have no idea how well this attitude has been communicated to the city workforce or how much the workforce embraces it, but the fact that the manager thought enough of it to say it out loud in this setting was a big deal.

The second bit of encouragement came in a brief mention of the long-awaited 311 system which I understand will be the quality of life equivalent of what the 911 system does for public safety. What I found notable was Golden’s statement that he plans to use data derived from the 311 system to drive city operations and, presumably, budgeting. Imagine city hall making decisions based on data rather than calls from city councilors! What an innovative idea.

Finally, Golden also teased a forthcoming formal announcement of Lowell’s selection as the first “Frontrunner City” in the United States. This is the initiative that Mayor Rourke encountered last year in Toronto and which I’ve written about before. It sounds like it will become a reality in Lowell sometime this year which is great news.

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On Sunday, February 23, 2025, at 2 pm, at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church at 8 Kirk Street in Lowell, UMass Lowell professor Robert Forrant and Jacquelynn Coles of the Black Lowell Coalition will present a program on St. Anne’s role in the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad. The program, which marks both Black Heritage Month and the church’s 200th anniversary, is free and open to the public.

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This week on richardhowe.com, Paul Marion wrote about the Lowell art scene in the 1960s; Rich Grady wrote a Jonathan Swift inspired satire of the US effort to make Canada the 51st state; and Louise Peloquin posted some Valentine’s Day related articles from L’Etoile in the 1920s.

Lowell Bohemians of the 1960s

Artist Richard Marion at his Gallery 21, Hurd St, Lowell, c. 1979 (photo by Kevin Harkins)

I’m posting this 2008 essay (later reprinted in 2018) for the benefit of visual artists and other folks in Lowell who have come to the city since the 1980s or later and may not know about the first stirrings of a cultural renaissance that still has a lot of energy today. Cheers to all the activists, advocates, and patrons who support this important movement. — PM

Here’s the essay with images.

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