Nathan Hale she Ain't

Zarah as paper hero
I think this was the most surprising thing about the book to me. When Jesse chose it, I thought, "Great! A book about courage and the indomitableness of the human spirit." Yeah, that's not it at all. An uncharitable side of me thinks if Zarah's pink-shoe rebelliousness was really so important to her, why was she so able to throw it by the wayside? There are people who have suffered far worse torture than she did and yet remained true to their ideals. For me, it made the book an interesting story, but actually weakened my sympathy for the cause of Iranian dissent.

Of course, the more charitable side of me is simply horrified by what happened to her. This, I'm sure, was the intended reaction. By casting herself as just a normal person with normal likes and dislikes; just a college student who did nothing more than collect a few signatures, Zarah makes herself into the common (wo)man. She is at pains to do this throughout the book, from her descriptions of her family life to her infatuations with various boys to her adolescent admiration for her teachers. While this makes her more relateable, to me it defeated her larger purpose, which I think was to decry the injustice of her situation. Instead, it just made me pity her for making such naive, bad decisions. For someone apparently so naive to enter a collision course with a brutal regime seems, I don't know, inexcusably stupid. There I am being uncharitable again.

Value of suffering
I was talking about the value of suffering with a friend yesterday. I was comparing the different reactions of two families in my ward to diagnoses of terminal cancer. The first family lost a 14-year-old son, after years of sickness. Our ward really supported them, financially and emotionally, throughout the illness; but afterward they simply weren't able to get over the unfairness of the death. They drifted (back) into inactivity. On the other hand, there's a family now facing a similar trial; the father, who's probably five years older than me, has terminal cancer. In their case I've been astounded at the depth of change in their outlook on life. He and his wife both bear their testimonies of the beauty and truth of the Plan of Salvation.

Suffering is a crucible, and a refiner's fire, but I wouldn't agree that it's pointless for those who don't yet have wisdom, or courage, or faith as Zarah says. I don't believe such things are binary, that either you have them or you don't. Rather, suffering can develop your wisdom, courage and faith, or it can diminish them. And I believe that what it does to you is largely your choice. Not entirely, but largely.

Am I my Iranian brother's keeper

You know who I think was the hero of the book? The erstwhile boyfriend who got her released from prison and protected her while she was there. I wish there were a book about him. He's the one who supplied the student movement with funds; he's the one who actually demonstrated an ability (if not a will) to change things. Zarah casts him as blithely amoral, willfully blind to the injustices perpetrated by the regime, tacitly complicit. But he did more to advance their cause than the would-be revolutionaries did, and I think given the chance, he and his class will do more to actually change Iran.

So what does this have to do with being our brother's keeper? I guess I feel like we do have a duty to alleviate pain and suffering and injustice where we meet it. But as outsiders, to have any effect we need allies within the culture. If I were choosing an ally, it wouldn't be Zarah and her friends; it would be the moderate Iranians, like the boyfriend, who (pragmatically) have the means to effect a change and (ideologically) have the groundedness to understand how a change can best be effected.

I guess what I'm saying is this book didn't call me to the barricades like I expected it to. Rather it demonstrated to me the futility and the emptiness of the barricades. Of rebellion and transformation, I'll take transformation nine times out of ten.

Moral relativism

Zarah's mild embrace of Zorastrianism reminded me very much of the secular morality of our society. Try not to hurt people, enjoy beauty, don't be too sure of your own rightness. This is how people get along in a diverse society. They certainly aren't bad things. But when they are the only things, when there is no private conviction deeper than a superficial dedication to being polite, I think something's wrong. And I don't honestly believe that's the case in Zarah's situation; she has a dedication to those poets. They are her deeper morality. She glosses over what she really believes in, but I think you can back it out to some degree. She's a sensualist, dedicated to the beauties of the world around us. This shows up in her repeated references to Omar Khayyam, as well as more overt things she says. I guess it's really at the heart of her pink-shoes rebellion. Maybe it's more evident than I at first thought...but I felt like she chose to bury it to some extent (even though it's right there on the page) in order to make herself more common, more like everyone else (particularly the reader).