Porochista Khakpour: “I’ve Become Uninterested in Darkness” (Guernica)
Born in Tehran, Khakpour fled the Iranian Revolution with her family and settled in Los Angeles. The pain of leaving her country was intensified by the hostility and racism she encountered as a refugee in ’80s America, when Iranian-American relations were at a low point. “Imagine you’re a kid, barely in elementary school, and you’re already confronted with people just hating you,” Khakpour says. The trauma of those early years runs through the essays in Brown Album…