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named San Francisco State College’s Alumnus of
the Year for 2003.
Anne N. ThalheimerForeigner Nahid Rachlin (1978)
Feri, a young Iranian woman, comes to America
as a foreign student in a small women’s college.
Lonely at school, she chooses biology as her haven
to acquire a sense of belonging through under-
standing the breaking down and building up of
cells. In graduate school, she meets her future
husband, a charming American. The relationship,
once built on excitement over their contrasting
backgrounds, descends into an empty marriage
between two workaholics. After a miscarriage,
infidelities on her part, and assumed but uncon-
firmed ones on his part, Feri returns for a short
visit to her family in Iran. A small traditional
family consisting of a father, stepmother, Ziba,
and stepbrother, Darius, they live in a quieter
and less Westernized part of Iran. Her family of-
fers her questions rather than provides comfort
to assuage her feelings of alienation. During the
visit, she realizes that she has become a foreigner
in her own country and even more so in her own
family. On a whim, she decides to search for her
long lost mother, a beautiful woman who had left
her family in the middle of the night for a dash-
ing young lover only to be abandoned by him a
short time later. Left alone and unable to return
to her family because she had broken with tradi-
tion, Feri’s mother disappears into the outskirts of
Iran, where she lives among the architectural ruins
of an ancient city. Feri discovers her mother and
finds a semblance of peace. It is here where she
confronts her feelings about her husband and the
deep fissures in her life. Interestingly enough, the
only time she finds a place for herself in her moth-
erland, which bewilders her at first, is within the
ruins of her mother’s home. Feri is reborn within
the cavernous ruins of her mother.
Feri is stricken with a sense of living life behind
a plate of glass. After her miscarriage, she seems
to lock herself inside her head, unreachable by the
husband she once loved. She is even diagnosed
with a serious ulcer, a dull pain she becomes aware
of after entering her father’s home; only during
her reunion with her mother is the ulcer treated.
She is, in a sense, “eating” herself from the inside,
embodying what psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva calls
“cannibalistic solitude,” a term used to describe
feminine depression.
Like many of NAHID RACHLIN’s protagonists in
her later novels, Feri is heavily burdened with guilt
for having abandoned family obligations, espe-
cially in a culture that emphasizes family over all
else. Feri cannot come to peace with herself by just
buying her mother a new house, giving money to
a cousin to help with the wedding of her daugh-
ter, and returning to the United States. There is a
discomfort in her spirit that keeps her in Iran to
care for her mother. Filial obligation takes prece-
dence over her marriage to a husband who does
not understand her and looks upon her world with
condescension. The novel ends with a sense of am-
bivalence about whether or not Feri will return to
America.
Foreigner was welcomed with rave reviews for its
honesty, its stark narrative style, and its deep sense
of alienation; its ambience has been compared to
that of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. It continues
to capture readers’ imagination and is consistently
taught in universities across the nation.
Zohra SaedFor Matrimonial Purposes
Kavita Daswani (2003)
This is the debut novel of the South Asian–Ameri-
can fashion journalist turned author, KAVITA
DASWANI. The central character is Anju, a young
woman who lives with her affluent parents in
Mumbai, India. Anju and her parents believe that
marriage and motherhood are a woman’s destiny,
and they frantically search for a good husband for
Anju. Unfortunately, Anju does not meet her ideal
husband and remains single at age 33, in contrast
to many of her friends and younger cousins who
are married and have children. When an astrologer
predicts that Anju may have to wait awhile before
she is married, she persuades her parents to let her82 Foreigner