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Nebraska Quarterly Magazine
By Tom Nugent
Four years after Ali Hosseini left his native Iran in order to attend college in America, the country exploded in the firestorm that was the Islamist revolution of 1979. What was it like to watch his homeland change so dramatically, while studying chemical engineering at UNL? And how did he deal with the anguish of saying goodbye to the world of his childhood? In "The Lemon Grove," his first novel in English (published last year by Northwestern University Press), Hosseini paints a dramatic picture of one man's struggle to comprehend the implacable forces of history.
Standing flat-footed in the main concourse at Boston's crowded Logan Airport, a stunned and totally confused young man from a tiny village in southern Iran fought to control his surging panic.
Ali Hosseini (BS '80; MS '88) was in terrible trouble, and he saw no way out.
With growing horror, the shell-shocked traveler contemplated the enormous problems he now faced.
Problem No. 1: He was completely lost and could not determine which of several busy terminals would serve as the gateway for his rapidly approaching flight to St. Louis.
Problem No. 2: He spoke only a few words of English, and the chances of finding someone who spoke Farsi – his native tongue – were one in a million, if that.
Problem No. 3: All of his luggage – all of his material possessions in the world, in fact – had been lost on the flight from London. What if it was gone forever?
Problem No. 4: After traveling from tiny Marvdasht, Iran, to the Iranian city of Shiraz, and then to Tehran, and then to London, and then to Boston, Hosseini was thoroughly exhausted. He was hungry, and he needed a bath. He was worried sick and full of anxiety.
Things looked utterly bleak ... but the 19-year-old wannabe American college student refused to despair. Would Ernest Hemingway have despaired? Would the great "Papa" Hemingway have thrown in the towel? As a high school student in Shiraz (a city of 1.4 million located in southern Iran, not far from the Persian Gulf), Ali had fallen in love with novels such as "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "A Farewell To Arms."
These were stories of valiant men who refused to surrender to difficulties, no matter how challenging! Hosseini admired Hemingway's characters ... but most of all he admired the old man who had fought to keep the sharks from stealing his fish.
How many times had the youthful Iranian student sat dreaming over his battered Farsi translation of Hemingway's great 1952 novel, "The Old Man and the Sea"? How many times had he thrilled to the words of the struggling fisherman, as he battled alone against hopeless odds:
"Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
Standing alone in the great, echoing concourse, Ali Hosseini took a deep breath. He clenched his jaw. Then he strode toward a tall, African-American gentleman who wore the bright blue uniform of a Logan Airport security guard.
The guard stared in amazement as Ali thrust a tangled wad of papers and tickets at him. "Help, please," said the young traveler in thickly accented English. "St. Louis!"
The guard blinked rapidly. "You don't speak any English?"
"St. Louis!" wailed Ali.
The guard thought for a moment. Then he studied the pile of papers and tickets for a while.
He looked up. "Your flight is leaving from Terminal 3. This is Terminal 2."
"Help!" said Ali. "St. Louis!"
The guard took his arm. "All right," he said. "Follow me."
Ali fell in beside him. They walked for what seemed like five miles. Then the guard stopped at the correct gate for the flight to St. Louis.
On the jetliner, zooming at 30,000 feet toward the Great American Midwest, the voyager did his best to sleep. But his mind was racing. His nerves were shot. Somehow, he would have to find his way to yet another flight ... to a smaller, regional jet that would take him to Carbondale and the campus of Southern Illinois University – where he'd been accepted into a high-intensity language course that would teach him how to speak English in a matter of months.
At St. Louis, however, his worst fears were realized.
The airport was virtually empty; a manager at the main terminal tried to explain that there would be no more flights to Carbondale that day.
"Help?" said Ali.
The manager thought for a moment. Then he took Ali into his own office. Pointing at a small sofa, he told the kid from Kushk: "You can sleep there tonight."
In the morning, he sent the young man down to the airport cafeteria and made sure he got some breakfast.
Then he put him on the plane to Carbondale.
Ali was sitting in a language class at SIU a few days later when an airline delivery truck showed up with his luggage.
And so it began ... Ali Hosseini's amazing American adventure.
That airplane journey from Marvdasht to Carbondale took place in January of 1975. Thirty-eight years later, Hosseini told Nebraska Magazine: "I couldn't believe it. I was amazed by the friendliness and generosity of Americans. I remember ... as soon as I could, I went and bought a postcard and I mailed it to that man in St. Louis who had helped me so much.
"I told him ‘Thank you' ... and I meant it from my heart."
Man is not made for defeat!
Crafting ‘A Masterful Tale of Persia's Many Subcultures'
What Ali Hosseini didn't know – during that long-ago struggle at the Boston airport – was that his own destiny would eventually lead him to write books ... and that the day would come when his first novel in English, "The Lemon Grove," published by Northwestern University Press, would be displayed in bookstores from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles.
Describing that lyrical, fiercely passionate novel – which has been compared more than once to the best-selling "The Kite Runner," by Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini – American novelist Paul Bates recently wrote: "Ali Hosseini takes us to vivid places in the landscape and heart of a contemporary Iran sorely missing from the news bites. He weaves a masterful tale of Persia's many subcultures caught in a changing climate of intolerance and of one man's agony, remorse, redemption – a story of love lost and found."
For her part, Ali's New York literary agent – Valerie Borchardt at the highly regarded firm of Georges Borchardt, Inc., simply says that he's "a wonderful writer. His prose is so heartfelt and poignant and I think he tells his story in such a way that the reader is exposed to yet another ... layer of Iranian life."
A tale of two brothers (and the woman they both love) who are separated by the vast turmoil of the Islamist revolution and the immense butchery of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), "The Lemon Grove" is a love story charged with nostalgia – an extended prose poem that discovers at the heart of suffering and exile an authentic reason to go on.
Nowhere is Hosseini more effective as a writer than in the passages where he celebrates the timeless serenity of the abandoned lemon grove ... a symbol for the beauty and wonder that can redeem a heart wounded by violence and loss:
"From behind the sheets of dust set in motion by the wind, I watch the sun. It has a reddish halo and looks huge hanging at the horizon. I love this time of day, the last hour when sun, sky, and desert are engaged in playing with colors. The yellow of the horizon changes to orange, then to scarlet, and then red as if a huge fire at the edge of the earth were slowly burning itself out, giving way to darkness. It's that time in the shift from day to evening when things take on a dreamlike quality, the eye seeing and not seeing, recognizing and not recognizing, until the power of sight is finally vanquished."
‘Your Studies Are Everything, My Son'
"I think it probably started with my [paternal] grandfather, Aliakbar," Ali Hosseini said during a recent interview at a bookstore in Boston's Harvard Square. "He was a wonderful storyteller, and he loved to tell us tales of the great camel caravans he had once helped to lead across Iran. For six months at a time, carrying tea and clothing and kerosene ... they rode across the great desert, across the mountains, from Bushehr on the Persian Gulf all the way to Tehran in the north.
"A fabulous storyteller, Aliakbar entertained us all with the adventures of his Karami tribesmen and their camel caravans. And that was when I saw how much I love stories, the power of stories to touch people."
Like many other youthful Iranians of that period, Hosseini had dreamed of attending a university one day. But by 1974, when he graduated from high school in Shiraz, his options for becoming a college student were severely limited in Iran. For one thing, the country offered only "five or six" universities to the tens of thousands of students who were clamoring for higher education. What to do? After talking with his high school counselor and several of his fellow students, Hosseini decided to join thousands of other youthful Iranians in a daring quest: He would apply for permission to attend college in the United States.
It took him nearly a year to sift through the endless red tape that was involved. And how would he ever pay for his foreign education? At first glance, the whole thing seemed hopeless. The second-oldest of ten children, Ali was the son of a working-class farmhand who also served as a laborer in a nearby sugar-beet factory.
But even as he scratched his head and struggled to find a source of funds, the 19-year-old Hosseini got a sudden, unbelievable break. His father – the hard-working factory hand Mohammed Ali – had been saving his extra pennies for many years, while dreaming of buying a piece of land that would allow him to build his own house. All his life, the older man had yearned to live in his own dwelling, instead of renting from others.
He had about $1,800, total.
But instead of buying the land, he gave the money to his son to purchase a visa and a one-way plane ticket to America. After those purchases were made, $1,200 remained. Mohammed Ali put the cash into the pouches of a money belt and presented it to the younger Ali.
It seemed to take forever, but the day of his departure finally arrived.
Preparing to climb into a friend's car for the trip to Shiraz – the first leg on his 36-hour trip to America – Ali hugged his mother, Shakar, one last time. It was she who had bought him his first notebook, his first pencil, on the day he first went to school. It was she who had constantly encouraged and supported him.
He hugged her. "Goodbye, mother."
Everyone was crying: His brothers and sisters, his cousins, his lifelong friends from the village. He turned to his father. "Remember your studies," said Mohammed. "Your studies are everything, my son." (Two decades later, Ali would help his father build two houses for the family, in return for the money he carried away in his belt.)
"Goodbye, father."
He climbed into the car. They rolled slowly out of the dusty yard. The dust blew away in sheets, and soon the car was nothing more than a speck on the horizon.
Building a Grain Elevator at Heartwell
After completing the language course at ISU and then a two-year program of studies at Winona State University in Minnesota, Hosseini descended onto the UNL campus in the fall of 1977. He dropped his belongings on the floor of his new dorm room in Selleck Hall, and then he went straight to work.
During the next few years, while he earned a degree in chemical engineering, Hosseini often worked a 30-hour week in order to pay tuition and bills. He bused tables at the Big Red cafeteria and stacked chairs and handed out programs at events in the Pershing Center auditorium in Lincoln. During the summers he worked as a farmhand in rural Nebraska ... and even helped to build a huge grain elevator at tiny Heartwell, in the south-central part of the state.
"In many ways, I got my real education working on those farms," he said. "I loved that work, and I loved the world of the Midwest – the open spaces, the huge distances, the way the sun and the wind endlessly move across the land."
But then Iran exploded. When the Islamist revolutionaries who had toppled the Shah took over the American Embassy in Tehran (Nov. 4, 1979), many Iranian students feared that they might face deep resentment on campus.
It didn't happen, however. "There were about 200 Iranian students at UNL back then," Ali would later remember, "and for the most part, all of us were treated politely, kindly, and with great respect.
"For me, that was just one more example of the generosity, the openness and friendliness I had already been experiencing in America for several years."
With his 1980 UNL degree now in hand, Ali traveled to Iran, then came back to the United States and started graduate school in computer science, while once again working a series of part-time jobs around Lincoln. Eventually he joined the Lincoln Telephone Company and spent several years as a systems programmer. While he was in grad school in computer science at UNL, he also audited classes in creative writing and English literature. Soon his interest in fiction was surging.
An ardent admirer of Joseph Conrad (another writer whose first language wasn't English), Hosseini began to publish short stories and eventually a novel in Iran. But those stories were written in Persian, and for many years the challenge of crafting fiction in English seemed too great to manage.
Having departed Lincoln in the early 1990s, the budding novelist went on to spend nearly two decades working as a computer analyst at major banks and investment firms in the Midwest and New England. But he was also writing fiction steadily by now ... and was also beginning to publish stories in English. Soon his byline was appearing frequently in such high-quality literary magazines as Guernica, Epoch, Fiction International and Puerto Del Sol, and the stage was set for the five-year struggle that would culminate last year in the widely praised publication of "The Lemon Grove."
In that 189-page novel, the 57-year-old Hosseini – who lives in a Boston suburb today and recently retired from his job as an analyst at a major investment firm in order to write full time – reflects at length on the Iranian revolution and the long war with Iraq that tore his country apart in the 1980s:
"Who can explain why savagery is so entangled with this land? Or how cruelty and violence can reinvent themselves time after time so that they have no end? Centuries ago, old Zoroaster walked these lands and told us of the struggle between light and darkness, encouraging us to practice kindness and good deeds so that light would be victorious over darkness. Was nothing learned from him?"
Ask Ali Hosseini why he wrote "The Lemon Grove," and he'll suggest that the book emerged from a complex tangle of feelings about his own painful exile from a world he loved and lost. But he said the most powerful motivation he felt was to shape a "gift" out of the struggle that has been his life in Iran and America.
"The gift," he said, "of kindness."