Book Description
“The Black Rose” is the story of a young, multi-talented and feisty Iranian woman who decided to steer a different path from the orthodox and blinkered path of her society at the age of 19 and pursued her American Dream wholeheartedly without fail. Life became an agony for her in the Middle East as a woman, as a human being, as an individual, as a gender minority, as a religious minority, as an activist-to-be, as an artist, or just simply as a member of the society. A strong teenage girl with grand dreams who defied the odds and persevered up until the age of 33 as a mature woman for the sake of her lofty ideals. She was starved of her every single right in every sense of the word. She was behind the closed doors to which she did not hold the key. She was totally fenced-in, with her wings clipped, with her voice confined and with her life and future being left at the mercy of the merciless authorities. She was an epitome of an oppressed artist. The content to most of her art pieces were totally against the bigoted norms and laws of the Middle Eastern societies. In particular, her LGBTQI-centric art pieces which would drag her into persecution, imprisonment and death as an immediate fate, and some of her pieces also dealt with societal maladies which were regarded highly contentious in that part of the world. Therefore, she could never publish or share her art pieces. First, she started to resist and defy the wave of ostracism at her country; afterwards, when things bordered on persecution, she fled Iran and signed up with UNHCR in Ankara, Turkey with the hope of freedom. Her case was deemed as a special case, courtesy of the fact that she was an artist, and received expedited treatment. She soon got recognized by UNHCR as a refugee and her case was sent to the resettlement agency to be relocated to a third country. To her dismay, around that time, there had been a newly-appointed prerequisite for the resettlement process; that the cases up for resettlement, should be interviewed by Turkey’s DGMM (Directorate General of Migration Management), or in another words, the government of Turkey. The government of Turkey twisted everything and rejected her case and suspended and blocked her resettlement and lined her up for deportation to Iran. She tried to seek help from everywhere, but no one reached out a hand for her to hold and she was left out on a limb. She fled Iran to seek freedom in the land of opportunity, but got stuck in an even more complex quagmire in Turkey. All her talents, efforts and hopes went down the drain and instead of actualizing her American Dream, she met her untimely demise in the cruelest fashion.
