Book Review: Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

 ´I speak so many languages, but I am understand by no one´.

One needs to survive exile - self-imposed, forced upon - more than once in order to really understand what does it really mean to be on the run never allowed to return in that complex yet simple real called home. Complex, because it means so many things - a language, an address, a culture, your communication intimacy with your parents, the relationship (real or imaginary) with your parents and ancestors themselves - but simple as sometimes one simple word is enough to bring you back. 

´We, the ill fated, we took refuge in literature´, because of its ´prophetic nature´. Once the narrator´s father died - in other words, reuniting with the ´mind of the universe´ - she is retracing the roots of the exile through books and authors, literary quotes and observations of intellectual nature. A ´Hosseini descendant´, the last in a long line of autodidacts and anarchists, the self-appointed Zebra is retracing part of their exile journey without being able though to reach in person the physical shore from all this began: Iran. The duality of her condition deepened the dilemma: she is a woman whose fate in her home country is condemned by the strict religious rule; she may be against the US-imposed sanctions, but once returned back at home she may risk being imprisoned and accused of being a spy. What is left from this country of her?

The multi-awarded Call me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is an intellectual inquiry about the exile of the heart and of the soul. It contributes in a significant way to the increasingly growing literature on this topic by its complicated conceptual outreach. There are many discussions that I would have expect to see continued, developed or further explained in the book and this is the risk of opening too many intellectual fields at once. There are also situations when I´ve found the intellectual discourse artificious. But overall, my intellectual refugee mind was set alit during most of the reading, on alert to reconsider, revisit and confirm my own feelings about the condition of being an intellectual woman whose roots were suddenly cut from her place of birth. 

For all the good reasons, Call me Zebra brings a valuable contribution to the intellectual take on exile, a topic sadly so common nowadays. The Iranian-American Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is also the founder of the bi-annual symposium Litteratures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance.

Rating: 3.5 stars