Journey from the Land of No

Journey from the Land of No is a 2004 memoir by Iranian-American author Roya Hakakian. It reflects on Hakakian’s formative childhood and young adulthood in Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Casting her family as starkly opposed to the efforts of the Iranian government to squelch intellectual flourishing and women’s autonomy, Hakakian credits her parents, as well as their Jewish cultural heritage, for salvaging her from a life path that might have otherwise been quite bleak. At the same time, she highlights the beauty of her native country. Hakakian extols the virtues of writing about urgent subjects such as cultural memory and the political world, believing that it can empower even extremely marginalized people to disrupt and undermine the injustice they see around them.

Journey from the Land of No is semi-chronological, recalling memories in groups that often are connected over decades, and staking ideological claims that took Kakakian years to develop before they bore fruit. Born in Iran in 1966 to a formerly wealthy Jewish family, Hakakian recalls internalizing familial and cultural anxiety, which she would only come to realize much later was the sensation of impending revolt. This anxiety culminated when the Shah, Iran’s religious and political leader at the time, was forcibly deposed. When the revolution went into full swing, Hakakian tragically lost virtually all of her books and writings in a fire. Power was later reconsolidated under Ayatollah Khomeini, a Muslim autocrat who is considered, even today, legally “inviolable” in Iran; insulting his name results in severe punishment.

Hakakian relates how her discovery of the power of language originated and ultimately guided her through the wake of political unrest in Iran into the present day. Now known as a Persian poet and translator of English poets, including Emily Dickinson, she learned early on that stories are ways of encoding meaning into images, metaphors, and allegories. The story, she argues, is essentially neutral, like any tool. Some stories are meant to harm; for example, the proliferation of the rhetoric of the “Johoud,” or “dirty Jew,” which she saw all over Iran and even once marked on the side of her family’s home. Anti-Semitic rhetoric grew so strong during the revolution that the family felt extremely unsafe in their country. Hakakian’s three brothers left Iran one by one as their opposition to the Shah and his policies endangered their lives.



Hakakian’s intense fear that language could be weaponized was tempered by a teacher she met while young, Mrs. Arman. A Marxist ideologically, Mrs. Arman showed Hakakian that literature could create sanctuary just as it could upend it. Thereafter, Hakakian used her gift for language to speak out against her school’s principal, an extreme Muslim fundamentalist. Her caricatures of the woman were a hit with her classmates and helped the young pupils fashion a sense of political solidarity, if only a momentary one with respect to the country’s unrest.

Hakakian also reflects on her journey towards realizing that she deeply valued her Jewish identity. She acknowledges that she was far from just a girl from a secular Iranian family. Rather, it is impossible to understand her family without paying attention to their values for education and community that stem from Jewish traditions. Though her family observed few high holidays, they believed strongly that Jews should be allowed to assimilate into Iran, and that Iran was not tolerant enough of diversity. She reflects ambivalently on the legacy of Israeli politics, especially the Zionist movement in relation to the Iranian revolution, which itself sought to redefine statehood. Finally, Hakakian recalls moving to America in adolescence and the hope that America seemed to offer for this assimilation. Journey from the Land of No is a compelling profile of one young girl’s experience in the fraught political state of Iran and of her dreams to find belonging in a more tolerant world.