The Heart’s Desire by Nahid Rachlin
Ah, Love! Could thou
and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry
Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter to
bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to
the Heart’s Desire!
Omar Khayyám
The Iran-Iraq War lasted
from September of 1980 to August of 1988, making it the longest conventional
war of the 2oth Century. The death toll was staggering: more than a half a
million Iranian and Iraqi soldiers were killed, and at least that many
civilians, not to mention the millions of dollars in economic and structural
damage incurred by both sides—and for what? Not only was there no winner in the
war, and thereby no reparations, but there was no appreciable change in either
the much-disputed national borders or the regional status quo. Yet the war was
significant—gravely, even monstrously, so. In fact, of all the consequences of
that bitter and miserable little war, arguably the most important, at least the
most far-reaching in it implications, was the aggressive, nakedly mercenary role
of the United States in staking its claim in the region. If you remember, long
before we toppled Saddam Hussein in the name of Justice and Democracy, in the
name of Women’s Rights and World Peace, he was one of our closest allies and
friends. Indeed it is likely that he would never have attacked the newly minted
Islamic Republic of Iran in the first place had it not been for his assurance
of U.S. economic and military support, support only recently transferred to him
and his megalomaniacal vision for the Middle East after the U.S.’s former
henchman and regional toady, the Shah of Iran, was violently overthrown by his
own people. While I risk of overstating the case, it is hard for me not to
trace the bulk of the region’s current instability (the rise of Al Queda, the
bombing of the World Trade Center, the U.S invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S
invasion of Iraq, the rise of ISIS, the Syrian Civil War, and the desperate
flight of Syrian refugees) to this, this iniquitous and barefaced ploy.
Nahid Rachlin’s novel, The Heart’s Desire, is set in Iran, in
Teheran, immediately following the Iran-Iraq war when the country lies in
ruins, the people are despondent, and anti-American sentiment runs high.
…everything in Iran was touched by the tragedy of the prolonged
eight-year war between Iran and its neighbor Iraq, which had ended only months
ago. Though the fighting had gone on mainly around the western border, bombs
had left their marks everywhere—you couldn’t miss the charred window frames and
boarded-up doors, the families camping in quiet backstreets, soldiers passing
by on crutches. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many of them mere teenage
boys…had been killed and wounded in the war. Black flags hanging on almost
every door designated that someone in the household had been martyred. On the
main square was a fountain with dark red water surging up from it.
Filtered principally
through the life and intelligence of an American woman, Jennifer Sahary, who
has traveled to the newly opened Iran with her Iranian husband and their young
son to visit his family and friends, as well as to give her husband the chance to
take stock of himself in own beleaguered land. While partly the story of her
husband’s struggles to come to terms with his guilt and longing for having left
his homeland for a life in the United States, the novel is first and foremost about
Jennifer’s own disillusionment as an American about Iran, about the husband she
loves, and about the deep-seeded differences that divide them.
Nahid Rachlin is an Iranian-American who had
written numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including Crowd of Sorrows, Foreigner: A Novel, Veils:
Short Stories, Married To a Stranger,
Jumping over Fire, and Persian Girls: A Memoir.
Peter Adam Nash
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