70 years of Iranian history through the eyes of five women in Sanam Mahloudji's The Persians

“What about the women? The women are forgotten,” says Bita, as she flips through a history book written about her family and lands on a page of black-and-white photos.

She sees groups of men, individuals, young, and old men. This is history’s great blind spot — to read and often wonder, as Bita does, where the women are.

In The Persians, that course is corrected in a fictional account encompassing 70 years of history from the eyes of five Iranian women spanning three generations: Elizabeth, the matriarch, her daughters Shirin and Seema, and their daughters, Niaz and Bita.

We follow them through their childhood insecurities, first loves, unfulfilling marriages, and the relationships they have with their daughters. Here they are, the women.

It's a triumphant debut for author Sanam Mahloudji and has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in Fiction, lauded for being “rich in Persian history and old-world glamour, while at the same time depicting modern life across two nations.”

Sanam Mahloudji has said the book is one she “had to write” as an Iranian and American who chose neither of her identities.

In an interview on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, she explained how these feelings come from not growing up in the country of her ancestors and the loss of leaving one’s history and culture behind in another place.

I cannot help but empathise with Mahloudji’s position as someone who shares it, and admire how she’s created an Iran to return to in the absence of the real thing. Such is the beauty of fiction and imagination.

But I am wary of this fixation on an Iranian homeland and portrayals of diaspora, which fix themselves to the experiences of the elite. Particularly those who long for an Iran where they had money, power, and prestige, and look upon it with nostalgia. I think most would admit this is also an Iran that no longer exists.

Reading the book, I found myself returning to Hamid Dabashi’s Iran Without Borders, where the scholar harshly  — maybe justifiably  — calls out “abused terms such as ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’ [that] have now emerged as the coded master terms of bourgeois nostalgia.”

Yes, there is a universal tragedy inherent to the condition of exile – and for that, it doesn’t matter if you are a real estate developer in Beverly Hills, a beauty salon owner or a delivery driver. (In this book, the latter two serve as a kind of furniture to tell us about other types of Iranians, or the morality of our main characters.)

But to get to the heart of anyone’s feelings, we need characters who feel fully formed, whom we can like, empathise with, understand, feel surprised by, or at least understand on a meaningful level.

Flitting through five narratives leaves the characters sounding similar at times, with only the perspective changed to match the archetype they bring to the table: rich mid-life crisis exile, lonely housewife who didn’t reach her potential exile, second-generation daughter removed from her culture and cringed out by her family’s wealth (is she also an exile?)

The narratives work best when Mahloudji delves deep into the inner lives of these women, rather than lamenting how good they had it in Iran and how oxymoronic it is to think of refugees with more money than Americans.

Like when Seema, a once-journalist at a communist newspaper, turned Beverly Hills housewife, struggles to make lasting connections in her new life.

Writing from the afterlife (“I can only talk like this, be so honest, because I’m dead”), she recalls the suicidal feelings that accompanied her early years in a place where she had no one.

America’s promised land was really just a place of wide, empty streets, with no family to visit and where she had little in common with the mothers at her daughter’s school. In the rare friendships she forged, they’d expire in circumstances beyond her control.

When her father dies in Iran, she can’t go.

Her mother, who stayed in Iran, considers how a life like that would feel on a trip to New York: “She couldn’t look into the eyes of a stranger and expect that he had tasted her favourite foods, visited her most loved sites.”

These particular human sentiments are where the writing brings the reader along and leads them to the heart of anyone who has felt the loss of a homeland.

While politics foreground the book, they aren’t explored with the depth they could have been afforded.

In one exchange, Niaz, the daughter who grew up in Iran, says she fantasises about “running past a [mullah] and toppling his turban.” (Though we’re in the early 2000s, this became a trend in 2022 during the country’s Woman Life Freedom movement.)

She’s scolded by her Iranian-American cousin, Bita, for being “Islamophobic” and “childish” in her desire.

“You with your Western liberal perspective. You want to be so tolerant of everyone that you can’t make distinctions,” retorts Niaz.

The exchange feels trite, like two talking points running past each other rather than fully formed people.

Like other mentions of history and politics in the book, it has a superficial sheen, scratching at the surface of something bigger and not quite reaching it.

The same goes for describing CIA coups “as American as apple pie” and giving a half-baked explanation of the 1988 executions so they can serve as a plot device. 

Mahloudji doesn’t owe us a history book, of course. But when a story is rooted so deeply in real historical events and their repercussions for these fictional characters, it’s worth wondering what gets explained – and how.

Is the reader expected to enter the book with enough knowledge to fill in the blanks, or are these details insignificant enough to be waved away in a few sentences?

There is also the question of language. Namely, the author’s choice to use Persian words in an English text at times, while making literal translations from Persian to English at others.

“Those father dog mullahs lied,” says Kian after the revolution, a very literal translation of the Persian insult pedar-sag (father-dog), which really means nothing in English.

At other times, Mahloudji runs the risk of confusing non-Persian speakers by writing whole phrases like “Mageh divoneh-shodi?” when a clear English equivalent is available: “Are you crazy?”

Ultimately, the stories of these women are at their most compelling when politics meet the actions of ordinary life, like when a young Niaz rebels in the schoolyard and breaks free from her mandated “wet and smelly headscarf” – throwing it into a dumpster and screaming from the top of her lungs.

When her grandmother, Elizabeth, comes to her rescue, we are reminded of the quiet strength held by older women who can become loud when called upon.

These women, who themselves grew up in an Iran without the rules and restrictions of the Islamic Republic, might appear harmless to authorities in their older age and take it upon themselves to stand up to power, often in the protection of younger generations.

Towards the end of the book, as all five women sit around a table in Aspen – punctuated by a distracting maybe-Trump reference – Niaz reflects on how she is the only one of them to have grown up under the theocratic regime: “I’m the only one who has grown up forced to cover her body in public under risk of imprisonment, flogging, or death.”

She wants to share her observations with the others, but doesn’t know how.

I find myself wanting to know more about how she feels and what it means to be that singular member of a family, alone in her experience.

Is it something the others think about? It’s an obvious point yet a profound one when you consider we have been following the lives of five Iranian women from the 1940s, to the revolution, and the years since the Islamic Republic’s founding.

Mahloudji’s storytelling achieves so much by covering so many years of life that I don’t know where the time went.

And so just as soon as these questions arise, I realise their answers won’t be found here.

Rosa Rahimi is a journalist and researcher based in London, where she works on conflict, human rights, and culture