Oindrila Mukherjee completed her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston this past spring. She is currently the creative writing fellow in fiction at Emory University. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in India, England, and the U.S. Imagining Iran           Laleh Khadivi's The Age of Orphans a review by Oindrila Mukherjee               Laleh Khadivi, The Age of Orphans.                    Bloomsbury USA, 2009. Hardcover, 304 pp, $24.00.        The most obvious challenge of writing a political novel about the Kurds in Iran from the American vantage point is how to avoid exoticizing the subject, and how to tell a story that is not didactic but moving on a very personal level. In her debut novel, which is the first part of a trilogy, Laleh Khadivi manages to weave together the political and the poetic into a compelling, breathtaking journey of a young Kurdish boy into adulthood and middle age.        The story is set in the Zagros mountains of what is now Western Iran, formerly Persia. It spans six decades of Reza Khourdi’s life, from his relatively carefree and protected early childhood to his conscription by the Shah’s soldiers and subsequent transformation into a ruthless, clinical cadet with apparently little human feeling. Towards the end of the book, Reza, together with his educated wife from Tehran, returns to his hometown of Kermanshah, where he is assigned, as representative of the Shah, the duty of suppressing Kurd revolts and uprisings.        The book deals with the issue of community, of being forced to turn against your own people. Tribal conscripts like Reza, orphaned at a young age and terrorized into submission, were forced to turn their backs to their people and head towards Tehran, the symbol of modernization, a process that the Shah took very seriously. In an effort to wipe out his violent and stained history, the Kurd—whose name, even, is not his own—marries a modern woman and attempts to start over. But how will he escape the ghosts that haunt him, the memories of the mother’s breast milk he used to drink until the day they took him away, the cries of his own people as they are raped and butchered?        The trilogy follows three generations of Kurdish men (loosely based on Khadivi’s grandfather, father, and brother) as they move far and away from Kermanshah to the United States. Khadivi says she wanted to investigate “what it means to be without nation, a migrant, in this increasingly nationalistic world.” In the next book, Reza Khourdi’s son leaves and moves to the U.S., walking most of the way.        The Age of Orphans is not a fun read. It is an extremely disturbing book, with graphic scenes of rape and murder, set against a bleak mountain terrain. Nearly all the Kurd characters are victims, beginning with the protagonist’s mother whose half-crazed state can be traced back to how she witnessed her parents’ death at the hands of the Shah’s armies. The fact that the boy has no name until he is captured is an indication of the complete anonymity and lack of historical identity of the Kurds. But Khadivi’s constant shifting of perspective—as we hear the story from the point of view of the boy, his mother, other orphans in the army, later his wife and child, and even the matchmaker who introduces them—allows us glimpses of the situation from so many different angles that it is at once fascinating and unsettling, mirroring the actual physical movement of the cadets through the land.        While the story itself is gripping, always urging the question of how and when Reza will be forced to go back and confront his demons and his tribesmen and women, it is ultimately Khadivi’s language that separates the book from any pedestrian attempts to represent the other at this time when Islamic communities are increasingly becoming popular subjects of potential bestsellers. Khadivi’s language stuns and breaks your heart at the same time. After a ritual raid on a village by the cadets, Reza partakes of his own ritual—that of suckling a new mother’s breast, just like he used to suckle his own mother when he was a little boy:             Reza cannot help himself. The cadets cannot help             themselves, famished as boys are famished, and they             are upon her, tossing the infant aside to squirm and howl             in outrage at the brazen theft. In Reza the shadow self             and soldier self dance in delight as the desire to love             oneself and hate oneself is now well fed and Reza is             allowed to punish and caress all at once. He sucks and             slaps and thinks with certainty that he is Reza Pejman             Khourdi, and he is the son of a yet undefined nation of             Iran, and the babe’s scream is music and he does today             and will tomorrow seek out its sound.                   What this passage does so effectively is to marry Reza’s deeply human and personal tragedy with what is essentially a political story. This is the story of the birth of modern Iran, under the Pahlavi dynasty, and the story of Reza Shah and his son’s authoritarian rule and oppression of the Kurds. Our protagonist’s marriage with the liberated Meena is an example of the systematic attempt to modernize Iran and assimilate the Kurds by wiping out their history. The Kurd uprisings that culminated in the establishment of the Soviet-backed Kurdish republic of Mahabad in the 1940s, although short-lived, tests Reza Khourdi’s resolve as captain where he is responsible for torturing and killing the rebels just like his own father and uncles were once tortured and killed.        Reza Khourdi is an intriguing and somewhat enigmatic individual whose handsome face and cold, militant exterior conceal unimaginable wounds, a hero to those he works for, a traitor to his tribe, but always, inside, the boy we first met whose innocence was destroyed but lingers in our minds. But this book is also about every Kurdish orphan boy, and every migrant who must wander from his homeland and return irrevocably changed, if at all.          Speaking of her influences and process, Khadivi says, “I grew up listening to stories from my father and his family about their childhoods. It’s a world that I have long been fascinated about and locked out of and I used fiction to explore it. Writing fiction is a particular kind of freedom, our imaginations, as writers, are always connected, to our lineages, the unspoken histories, etc., and I think that in many places here I was channeling my grandfather, my Kurdish ancestors, the Kurd in me.”