A Place We Used to Call Home by Shiraz Nomad — What We Carry After We Leave
There is a particular kind of loss that comes with leaving home.
You can leave a house. You can leave a city. You can even leave a country. But leaving the version of yourself that existed there is much harder.
That is what stayed with me while reading Shiraz Nomad's A Place We Used to Call Home.
On the surface, this is a memoir about growing up in post-revolution Iran, living through political upheaval, witnessing violence and repression, enduring imprisonment, and eventually leaving the country.
But the book becomes more interesting when it moves away from history and into memory.
Because history tells us what happened.
Memory tells us what it felt like to live through it.
When political history enters ordinary life
Nomad's childhood is not presented as a simple before-and-after story.
There are family tensions, friendships, faith, affection, fear and ordinary moments of life existing alongside political violence. That contrast matters.
Political upheaval does not arrive in people's lives as a neatly separated chapter. It enters kitchens, families, friendships and childhoods.
The boy at the centre of this memoir slowly discovers something that many of us take for granted: speaking what you believe can have a cost.
And that cost is not always paid by the person who speaks.
Sometimes a family pays it.
Sometimes friends do.
Sometimes an entire generation does.
What I found particularly striking was the tension between courage and consequence.
It is easy, from a safe distance, to romanticise resistance. We like stories in which the brave person stands up, speaks the truth and becomes a symbol.
Real life is rarely that clean.
Nomad's experiences make resistance look much more complicated. Courage can coexist with fear. Conviction can coexist with uncertainty. A decision that feels morally necessary to one person can create danger for the people closest to him.
That makes the memoir more human than a straightforward story of political persecution.
The person behind the suffering
The prison chapters are among the hardest parts of the book, but I was equally interested in what surrounds them.
The memories of family, food, friendship, faith and ordinary life prevent the story from becoming only a catalogue of suffering.
That is important.
If a memoir about trauma contains only trauma, the person inside it can slowly disappear behind the events.
Nomad does something different.
He keeps returning to the human being.
There is also an uncomfortable question running underneath the book:
What exactly are we willing to sacrifice for the freedom to speak?
We often speak about freedom as though it is an abstract principle.
But for someone living under repression, freedom can become painfully concrete.
It can mean a conversation. A book. A leaflet. A friendship. A decision to question something. Sometimes even the right to say what everyone already knows but nobody
is allowed to say aloud.
And yet, I also found myself resisting the temptation to turn Nomad's life into a simple formula about courage.
Survival is not always heroic.
Sometimes survival means compromise.
Sometimes it means silence.
Sometimes it means leaving.
And leaving does not necessarily mean surrender.
When home becomes memory
This is where the title became more meaningful to me.
A Place We Used to Call Home is not only about a country that was left behind. It is about the strange experience of carrying home after home has ceased to feel like home.
What happens to belonging when memory becomes your only permanent address?
That question reaches beyond Iran.
Anyone who has left a childhood home, migrated to another country, lost a parent, watched a familiar neighbourhood disappear, or returned somewhere after many years may recognise a smaller version of that feeling.
The physical place remains in memory, but the relationship with it changes.
I also think the memoir benefits from its refusal to make suffering the only identity available to the survivor.
There is pain here, certainly. There is loss. There are memories that are difficult to sit with.
But there is also affection, humour, faith, friendship and the stubborn continuation of ordinary life.
That balance is what gives the book its emotional weight.
Where the memoir made me pause
My only hesitation is that the memoir's emotional and historical material can sometimes feel so large that the reader may want more distance to process individual episodes.
The accumulation of difficult experiences is powerful, but it can also make some moments compete with one another for attention.
Still, perhaps that is partly the nature of remembering a life shaped by upheaval.
Memory does not always arrive in perfectly measured chapters.
It arrives in fragments.
A face.
A room.
A prison corridor.
A friend.
A family member.
A smell.
A fear.
A place you can no longer return to in the same way.
And perhaps that is why the book stayed with me.
What do we carry when we leave?
We usually ask survivors how they escaped.
This memoir made me think about a different question:
What part of yourself do you carry out when you finally escape?
Because leaving a place does not mean leaving its memories behind.
Sometimes the country you left becomes the country you continue to carry.
And sometimes, even after everything has burned, home survives in the person who
remembers it.
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