At the start of “Savage Tongues,” Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s third novel, the Iranian American narrator, Arezu, is arriving in Marbella, Spain. It’s her first time back in 20 years, since she was 17 and met Omar, her stepmother’s nephew, who was then 40. He would become “my lover, my torturer, my confidant and enemy,” she tells us.
Arezu is Muslim, and her best friend, Ellie, who is Jewish, will be meeting her in Spain. Arezu tells us that she and Ellie “were both born into such deranged whirlpools of geopolitical conflict, with so many contradictory voices swirling through our minds, that locating our own could be a laborious, exhausting task.” They accompany each other to the sites of their trauma for what they call “recovery journeys.” Below, Van der Vliet Oloomi talks about the value of grief, the stylistic influences on the novel and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
Not surprisingly, I started to think about it during the Trump era. But particularly around 2018, 2019, when it started to become apparent that the Obama-era decision to include MENA (Middle Eastern/Northern African) as a category on the 2020 census would be overturned by Trump. And then the Muslim ban followed on the heels of that. And the combination enabled civil rights abuses of Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent.
As a result of all that, I started to think about the politics of belonging, and who has the right to recognition and protection under the law....
Read Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/12/books/savage-tongues-azareen-van-der-vliet-oloomi-interview.html
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