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21:th March
15:00
Mazher Xaleqi
xaleqi.com
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News |
Kurdish Writer Laleh Khadivi Wins Whiting Award
Kurdistannetwork - December 14, 2008
Laleh Khadivi, part of the Emory University's Creative Writing Program, has received a 2008 Whiting Writers' Award. The $50,000 award, which annually recognizes 10 young writers, was presented to Khadivi in New York City.
Khadivi was honored for her first book, -The Age of Orphans,- a historical novel set in Iran during the first Shah's ascent to power. Born in Esfahan, Iran, Khadivi is of Kurdish origin.
-The Age of Orphans- follows the life of a Kurdish boy whose family is killed by the armies of the Shah as part of a -modernizing effort.- The boy is then adopted into those same armies and taught to kill his own people.
Ironic, beautifully written, brutal and ugly, Khadivi's ambitious debut novel follows a Kurdish boy who is tragically and violently conscripted into the shah's army after his own people are slaughtered in battle. He is orphaned in the massacre by the armies of Iran's new shah, he is taken in by the very army that has killed his parents, renamed Reza Khourdi, and indoctrinated into the modern, seductive ways of the newly minted nation, careful to hide his Kurdish origins with every step.
Assigned the name Reza Pejman Khourdi—Reza after the first shah of Iran, Pejman meaning heartbroken and Khourdi to denote he's an ethnic Kurd—the boy suppresses all things Kurdish within him, fueled by a sense of self-preservation and self-loathing.
Channeling fear and hate into brutal acts against the Kurds, Reza makes a quick climb up the military career ladder, eventually gaining an appointment to Kermanshah (Eastern Kurdistan), a Kurdish region in the north of Iran. There, as overseer of his own people, Reza promotes Kurdish assimilation and the budding nation of Iran while mercilessly silencing voices of Kurdish independence. Here Reza is policing, and sometimes killing, his own people.
This is a story of a Kurdish boy forced to betray his people in service of the new Iranian nation, and the tragic consequences as he grows into manhood.
When still a child before following his father into battle, he had been like any other Kurdish boy: in love with his Dayek (Mum), fascinated by birds and the rugged Zagros Mountains of Kurdistan, dutiful to his stern and powerful Baba (Dad).
As he grows old with his Iranian wife, Meena, Reza's internal conflicts simmer, and then boil over with unexpected and terrible results.
This difficult but powerful novel, the first of a trilogy, introduces a writer with a strong, unflinching voice and a penetrating vision. The Age of Orphans follows Reza through his meteoric rise in rank, his marriage to a proud Tehrani woman, and his eventual deployment, as a colonel, back to the Zagros Mountains and the ever-defiant warrior Kurds.
Told with an evocative richness of language that recalls Michael Ondaatje or Anita Desai, the story of Reza Khourdi is that of the twentieth-century everyman, cast out from the clan in the name of nation, progress, and modernity, who cannot help but yearn for the impossible dreams of love, land, and home.
This first book is part of a trilogy that follows the lives of three generations of Kurdish men and will be published by Bloomsbury in March. -The award gives me more time to work on the trilogy,- says Khadivi, adding that when her teaching stint at Emory ends, she is considering taking a year off to work on the next book.
Khadivi, who has lived in a variety of countries, is a graduate of Atlanta International School and now calls the United States home. Previously, she was a documentary filmmaker and directed -900 Women,- a film about incarcerated women in Louisiana. She has produced a number of other films that focus on the criminal justice system.
She holds an undergraduate degree from Reed College and an MFA degree from Mills College. Khadivi is currently the Fellow in Fiction at Emory, a two-year appointment for those holding a graduate degree in creative writing and who have a manuscript underway.
Sources: Emory University and Amazon.com
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