Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, author of The Girl from Revolution Road by (Allen & Unwin, $37). Photo by Sacha Stejko / Supplied.
Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, author of The Girl from Revolution Road by (Allen & Unwin, $37). Photo by Sacha Stejko / Supplied.
Kiran Dass talks with Ghazaleh Golbakhsh about her compelling collection of essays.
When Ghazaleh Golbakhsh was 6 years old, she spent a night in jail.
In an electrifying chapter in her collection of personal essays The Girl from Revolution Road, she describes in cinematic detail an underground warehouse party inher homeland of Iran. Men and women flout strict Islamic rules by mingling. Swilling homemade vodka that tastes "like bleach and cardamom", the adult partygoers listen to Persian pop music blasting from a car tape deck. The carefree revelry is shattered when soldiers wielding AK47s burst in and break up the party. The group is arrested and taken to the police station where the women and children are locked in a room.
Golbakhsh's father received 60 lashes as punishment. "It's a rather odd memory in my life where I only really remember the horrific image of my dad's bloody back after having been lashed," she tells me.
Written with a punch-to-the-guts honesty but also sass and a lightness of touch, The Girl from Revolution Road is Golbakhsh's look at what it is like to be a third-culture kid with a hyphenated life – growing up Iranian in New Zealand. It's about identity, family, racism, travel and art. A vivid storyteller, Golbakhsh also writes colourful accounts of her time working as a pornography assessor, a brush with Prince William in a nightclub and the vicissitudes of Tinder.
Her family moved to Auckland from a war-ravaged Iran in 1987. One of her first impressions of her new primary school in Auckland was that it wasn't surrounded by protective sandbags. She innocently wondered how anybody was protected from missiles and bombs.
"I was born right in the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war, so air raids and sandbags were just a part of my life. My limited experience made me think that this was the norm," she says.
Golbakhsh remembers the challenges of starting a new life with limited English in a new country without the supportive scaffolding of family and friends. Her love of language and words stems from coming from a culture where literature is revered. "Poetry is something that is held in such high regard that people sit around and recite their favourite poems."
There's a bittersweet moment in Wellington writer Rose Lu's collection of essays All Who Live on Islands, where Lu recalls how one of her non-white classmates drew a picture of herself as a blonde white girl because that was all she had ever seen on the screen and in books. It simply didn't occur to her that she was allowed to draw herself as she was. The scene serves as an acute reminder of the importance of representation, and Golbakhsh can relate.
"That was one of my favourite moments in her book! I try to look at my own obsession with whiteness and internalised racism in my book. There was a time when I was young, when my friends, all Iranian, lied about being blonde and white to a bunch of boys we were chatting to, who incidentally were also lying about their own looks," she laughs.
"Hollywood has a lot to answer for, because Hollywood is not a national cinema but a global one, in which it supposedly brings us universal stories. If we're not represented in these stories then it means that our experiences and voices don't count. That is inexcusable."
A Fulbright scholar with an MA in screen production, Golbakhsh has interned at the Sundance Institute and studied screenwriting and film production at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. She is in the final stages of her PhD, which looks at Iranian film-makers in the diaspora. Her first feature film, which focuses on the tight friendship between two young Iranian-New Zealand women on a road trip, is in development.
Golbakhsh says her family is full of cinephiles – her parents met when they both worked for the national Iranian broadcaster and passed on r their love of the moving image. One of the more niche jobs this interest has landed Golbakhsh was as a transmission controller for a cable company that broadcast three adult channels that continually played pornography.
"It was like this window into the abyss of nothingness," she says.
"I'm not against pornography in general, just what constitutes mainstream pornography, which was for the most part misogynistic, racist, homophobic and degrading. I think it negatively affected all of us who had to watch it."
Golbakhsh not only confronts microaggressions – small indirect daily acts of racism – but also direct, aggressive acts of racism she has encountered. In her book she remembers being on a bus where a man in a suit unleashed an onslaught of racist remarks at her while other passengers looked away. Rather than engage with the man, Golbakhsh chose to productively channel her energy into her writing. A testament to the power of words.
"I was just astounded at the brazenness of the man and the vitriol he was yelling at me. For me, it's really therapeutic to put it into my work. People need to realise the power of words," she says.
"We cannot let voices of hate and ignorance grow and infect our communities. We just need to support people who are fighting it and elect those who are battling it."
Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, author of The Girl from Revolution Road by (Allen & Unwin, $37). Photo by Sacha Stejko / Supplied.
The Girl from Revolution Road, by Ghazaleh Golbakhsh (Allen & Unwin, $37) Golbakhsh appears at WORD Christchurch (October 29-November1) and Verb Wellington (November 6-8).
