Author Roza Nozari.Sarah Bodri/Supplied
In her memoir, All the Parts We Exile, writer, artist and therapist Roza Nozari explores what it means to be caught between conflicting yet intersecting identities. Nozari was born in Canada to Iranian parents, and from a young age she felt deeply connected to Iran. When she eventually visited as a child, she fell in love with the country, and with the loving family she has there. Her relationship to her family’s culture of origin and to her ancestry became more complicated as she aged – and began to explore her own queerness, her feminist identity, her faith and the parts of her family’s history she didn’t previously know. As Nozari grappled with her intersecting identities, she also wrestled with her relationship with her mother. Once incredibly close, the pair struggled to find mutual understanding as they both aged and grew.
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Nozari spoke with The Globe and Mail about family secrets, truth-telling and how it’s only through making room for all parts of ourselves that we can truly become whole.
How did you know it was the right time to write this book?
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Because this story is so deeply personal I asked myself many times whether this was the right time to write it. I was coming to the end of a particular chapter in my life – I was reflecting on my relationship with my mother and how far we’d come. It was such a gift, with this book, to be able to tell a story about a family – and particularly a mother and daughter – that really struggle to understand and make room for each other, but who ultimately do get there.
This book also reveals a lot about your family, especially your mother. How did you navigate that as a writer?
I had to ask myself a lot of questions around consent. My mom and I talked many times about what felt comfortable to share and what didn’t. I also felt an enormous amount of responsibility to do our stories justice, and didn’t want to fall into writing the two-dimensional trope of a “good mom” or “bad mom.” I needed to make sure my mother came across as a very nuanced human who had feelings, experiences and a lot of reasons for why she was doing what she did. I was lucky that my mom trusted me to do that.
Throughout the book, you learn some information about your family’s history that surprises you. Why do you think we’re drawn to stories of family secrets?
Our parents have so many histories, both known and unknown to us. Learning about those histories can help us understand ourselves, to understand what came before us, what is happening in our dynamic with our loved ones. Perhaps we are trying to work out something that is happening within ourselves and our own families, and to find our own paths forward in all of that.
I was struck by the honesty in this book. You didn’t shy away from letting everyone – including yourself – have some less than flattering moments. Why was it important to capture that complexity?
Memoir is a genre where truth is paramount. As I was writing I was reckoning with truth-telling and also with a massive amount of shame.
I felt I had to be willing to be radically honest about all parts of me: the parts that I love and I’m interested in, but also the parts that I’d sometimes rather pretend didn’t exist, or that were deeply embarrassing or disappointing. My hope with writing this was that if readers received that honesty they might feel that they could also hold those parts of themselves that they feel shameful about.
Your concept of home shifts a lot throughout the book. What does home mean to you now?
At the beginning of this book home is Iran – but that gets complicated as I get older. So today, home is so many different places. I can even build a home within myself. That’s crucial to being a person in diaspora or someone living in exile. I can’t go back to Iran because I’m living as an out queer person – and there’s a tremendous amount of grief and agony in that loss – yet home is still Iran.
Healing is also a recurring theme. What do you think it takes for a person to heal?
I don’t think there’s one answer. For me, I had spent so long suppressing, silencing, exiling any part of me that did not fit the mould of a good kid, good woman, good queer, good victim, good Muslim. And I think a core part of my healing was being able to reconnect with those parts and take away some of their shame.
I also think healing happens in relationships with others. There is such a tradition of silence in my family, which my mother and I were both trapped in and trying to break out of. So there was something healing about being able to witness each other’s truths.
Many queer people – myself included – descend from cultures that are not always welcoming to queerness. And yet many of us still feel drawn to those cultures and countries of origin. Why do you think we feel that pull?
Because it feels like it was taken from us. I feel deeply within my bones that it was always our birthright to have access to our homelands. It makes sense that we feel pulled toward places where our descendants come from. We’ve been sold an idea that if we feel rejected by home, well that’s okay. We just make home somewhere else. But the reality is for many of us, it wasn’t all rejection.
For me, yes, I feel rejected. But there is so much joy in Iran, there is so much goodness, there is so much care. I love Toronto, but I cannot replicate that here. And so instead, I am in this chronic state of deep yearning and grief for the berries back home, the figs, the trees, the hug of my aunties.
Everyone’s identity is complex to some degree. Why is it important that we embrace the conflicting parts of ourselves?
I was under the impression that if one identity existed, the other had to go – someone had to be exiled.
Eventually I learned that my queerness informs my Muslimness. My Muslimness informs my queerness. I remember reading a book about how queer people have existed in Iran for ages, and suddenly I felt like my queerness is a callback to the ancestors. My queerness is this very old historic thing that exists within me, and I love it. Suddenly they’re not so conflicting, these identities.
This interview has been edited and condensed.