“That lipstick is martyr’s blood.”

Short Story: The Daughters by Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh

Filed under: short story, suzi ehtesham-zadeh

Very short stories like this one sometimes fail to leave a lasting impression. Not the case with The Daughters, published today in Lit Hub. It starts with this:

The daughters filled out their paperwork, renewed their passports, reserved their tickets, packed their suitcases, and flew halfway around the world to their parents’ apartment in northern Tehran.

They were tourists in their own country. The parents noticed this in every conversation the daughters held in stilted Farsi, in their new gestures that seemed copied from an American television program, in every request they made to be driven to the bazaar or the chelow-kababi as if these normal features of everyday life in their country had become exotic to them.

It’s charming at first, and a sinister tone creeps in. It’s one of the stories in Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh’s collection called Zan. The collection is described by the publisher this way:

A university student strips off her hijab in the streets of Tehran and films herself as part of a daring protest movement. A wealthy Iranian woman living in Atlanta maintains a secret life as a burlesque dancer. A teenager slips out of a hotel room at night to skinny dip in the toxic Caspian Sea. An Iranian lesbian agonizes over her coming out and her father’s subsequent attempts to re-educate her. These are some of the many windows Zan opens into the complex lives of Iranian women today-those who continue to suffer oppression under the Islamic Republic, those who are crafting new identities in America, and those who hover somewhere in between.

It came out last week, and I’ll be looking for it this weekend, I think.