All the Parts We Exile

From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, insightful memoir that traces her journey toward radical self-acceptance and of exile from her ancestral home. As the youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents' emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry for a sense of belonging. From her early years, she shared a passion for Iranian cuisine with her mother and craved stories of their ancestral home. Eventually they visited and she fell in love with its sights and smells, and with the warm embrace of their extended family. Yet Roza sensed something was amiss with her mother's happy, well-rehearsed story of their original departure. As Roza grew older, this longing for home transformed into a desire for inner understanding and liberation. She was lit up by the feminist texts in her women’s studies courses, and shared radical ideas with her mother—who in turn shared more of her past, from protesting for the Islamic revolution to her ambivalence about getting married. In this memoir, Roza braids the narrative of her mother’s life together with her own on-going story of self, as she arrives at, then rejects, her queer identity, eventually finds belonging in queer spaces and within queer Iranian histories, and learns the truth about her family’s move to Canada. All the Parts We Exile is a memoir of dualities: mother and daughter, home and away, shame and self-acceptance, conflict and peace, love and pain—and the stories that exist within and between them. In sharp, emotionally honest and funny prose, Roza tenderly explores the grief around the parts we exile and the joy of those we hold close in order to be true to our deepest selves.