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Getting to Know the Other: A Review of Love &
Pomegranates
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2013-12-23 12:25:28
For the time being, there seems to be a truce in the war of words between the United States and Iran. Much of this is due to
the Iranian people’s election of reformers who have promised to pursue a less aggressive foreign policy in addition to a more
open attitude in relation to religious rules and observances. The important word here is “election.” Like the United States,
Iran elects its rulers—within certain constraints, of course, but that has been true of most democracies. The results of Iran’s
most recent election thus reflect a general dissatisfaction with the country’s isolation. Iranians, in other words, want to get to
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know and be part of the world. |. = 8 a This fact may come as a surprise, but not to the readers
of Megan Nuttall Sayres’s new anthology, Love & Pomegranates: Artists and Wayfarers on Iran (Nortia Press, 2013). This
collection of essays, poems, interviews, biographical sketches, journals, folktale adaptations, recipes, and drawings and
photographs explores historical and personal connections between Iranians and other citizens of the world. While most of
the contributors are from either the United States or Iran, there are contributors from Canada, Turkey, Eastern Europe, and
elsewhere. All of them demonstrate the importance of “getting to know the Other,” learning about each other’s lives, culture,
religion, and history. This is a well-organized anthology, with sections devoted to the experience of travel, finding what we
have in common despite our backgrounds, art and culture, food, religion (where we learn that there are many strains of Islam
and Islam is not the only religion practiced in Iran), and alternatives to the current geopolitics. The variety of genres and
themes make this a rich source of information and will tempt even the most suspicious of readers to make their own journey
to Iran. Among other things, readers will learn that the hard-line Islamic turn since the 1979 revolution is, in many ways, an
aberration in a long history of cultural and religious interchange, The Persian civilization is ancient, and Iran’s key position
on the Silk Road between Europe and Asia guaranteed that many different peoples would come to live there. Iran has an
established Jewish community (some of the recipes are, in fact, from Jewish homes) as well as the Baha’i faith and several
important strains of Islam. While we in the United States identify the current Islamic regime with the veiling and oppression
of women, the female poet Forugh Farrokhzad (who died in an automobile accident in 1967 at the age of 32) wrote
exquisitely sensual poems that appear in this collection, along with homages by more recent Iranian women poets. Readers
also learn that in the mid-twentieth century, the ruling Pahlavi family banned the headscarf and suppressed other forms of
traditional Islam, a policy against which the 1979 revolutionaries reacted. To me, the most powerful pieces were ones that
established human connections across borders. Susan Fletcher is a noted author for children whose novel Shadow Spinner is
based on the Persian story of Sheherazade. Shortly after the novel was published in English, she was contacted by the
Iranian translator Hussein Elvand Ebrahimi, and the two began a “friendship of words” (never having the opportunity to
meet in person) that lasted until Ebrahimi’s death in 2007. Not long after they “met,” Ebrahimi was diagnosed with
leukemia, and Fletcher shared with him her own experience of undergoing treatment for cancer. In her essay, “A Friendship
of Words,” Fletcher reflects on this most intimate and universal of bonds, as two people on opposite sides of the world
confront illness, pain, and death. The collection is worth that essay alone. And there are so many other pieces that enlighten,
reveal, compel, and change minds. Editor Sayres—a professional weaver as well as a writer for children and adults (her
novels Anahita’s Woven Riddle and Night Letter are set in Iran in the nineteenth century)—has taken the courageous step of
travelling to Iran at the height of tensions between the United States and that country. She has brought back a gift for every
reader.
