The Widowed Land unfolds in two parallel narratives:
First, my return to neighborhoods I once inhabited in childhood, spaces shaped by the presence of our ancestral home.
Second, a documentary account of the only remaining residents of that place, a handful of women who have become heads of their households.
At times, these two perspectives converge.
The woman you see in the photograph, for example, was my grandmother’s cousin. They called her Bibi Amu. After her husband’s death, she held the family together for over a decade. She exists in both stories, in the first as a familial figure, in the second as one of the unnamed women whose names we never fully learned.
None of the women in the second narrative are known by their own names. They exist through others m: Amu(Uncle) Moslem’s wife, Amu(uncle) Farzollah’s wife, Mashti Saheb, Mashti Ziba, and the last, my grandmother.
The voices you hear were recorded at my request, captured during my mother’s return to the family home or gatherings of these women. The questions arose without plan, unfolding in the flow of conversation.
At times, moved by the memory of my absence from that soil, my mother weeps quietly beside them. At other times, she laughs with them, at the half-formed sentences, the stories of long-ago weddings, fractured and luminous in the haze of memory.
