In 1987, Ghazaleh Gol bakhsh, along with the rest of her family, left Iran’s totalitarian regime to make a life in NZ.
Her new book titled, ‘The Girl From Revolution Road,’ takes direct inspiration from her early childhood and shows us what it was like for immigrants living here in the 1980s.
Originally about her family’s escape, the book’s premise slowly evolved into an account about her life as an Iranian-Kiwi growing up in New Zealand.
“I wrote it initially as a short story intending to make it into a film, but once I started I realized that I could take these ideas and turn them into a series of essays. I’d been reading books by authors such as Ashleigh Young and Rose Lu who inspired me to explore more of my own background.”
As a teenager, Ghazaleh struggled with the idea of integrating her Iranian culture into her identity as a New Zealander. Eventually, she came to the epiphany that assimilation and integration were at total odds with one another.
“For me, assimilation meant you had to be one of us, and that becomes problematic because it sets up the idea of ‘us against them’.
“In the book I use an example about Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman show made about E.T. the extra-terrestrial. Instead of going home, like in the movie, he chooses to stay on Earth and become a gangster, growing Jheri curls, wearing gold jewellery and carrying guns.
“When his family finally arrives to take him home, he winds up killing them because he doesn’t recognise them anymore; he’s assimilated so much to being on Earth that he’s forgotten his roots.
“For me, assimilation means foregoing everything you were and becoming something else. This is why integration is so important; because it lets you keep your cultural identity instead of ignoring it, which is what I think a lot of kids are tempted to do nowadays.
“That’s the key difference; integration means joining a society without forgetting where we came from, whereas assimilation is letting go of our ancestry and who we are.”
When I asked why some writers chose to focus on the negative stereotypes when it came to the Middle East, Ghazaleh felt that, to some extent, it came down to ignorance.
In one instance, she recalled being cast in a commercial where they dressed her in an Indian saree, while her co-star, originally from Senegal, wore a Moroccan fez. It’s not that the casting directors were intentionally pigeon-holing them, it’s that they didn’t know any better.
“Negative stereotypes become toxic when they’re the only ones being used. If you only see your people portrayed as terrorists or criminals on the T.V., what does that tell you, especially if you’re a child? (Kerry Lee)
For more information about ‘The Girl From Revolutionary Road,’ please visit Allen and Unwin’s home page at: www.allenandunwin.com or to learn more about Ghazaleh herself, follow the link www.ghazalehgol.com
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