48 pages • 1-hour read
The Stationery Shop
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of war, violence, death, and mental illness.
The Persistent Power of Love
The Stationery Shop traces the inception and evolution of Roya Archer and Bahman Aslan’s love affair to explore the power and possibility of young love. Roya is just 17 years old when she and Bahman meet at Ali Fakhir’s shop, a business designed to help young lovers sustain their often forbidden romances. She and Bahman are instantly attracted to one another, despite their contrasting backgrounds and competing familial dreams for their lives: “Whether it was biology or foolishness or youth that was at the root of it, nothing could make [Roya and Bahman’s] all-encompassing desire go away” (103).
Roya often fears that Bahman’s political activism will endanger him or that the distaste his mother, Badri Aslan, has for her will test her patience. Nevertheless, Roya doesn’t stop loving Bahman. Similarly, Bahman knows that his mother doesn’t approve of his and Roya’s relationship and that loving Roya pulls him away from his activist efforts. However, even these conflicts can’t thwart his love for Roya. This early confidence in their relationship allows it to withstand the tests of time, space, circumstances, and even war and betrayal.
The young lovers’ attachment to each other has no logical explanation, conveying how true love is a mystery beyond human understanding. The plot twists and narrative revelations in the novel’s final section show that Roya and Bahman’s love survived even more than either of them understood. Bahman believed that Roya had given up on him because of Badri’s struggles with mental illness, while Roya believed that Bahman had given up on her to marry Shahla. In reality, Badri and Mr. Fakhri altered their love letters to each other, thwarting their plans to elope. When the characters reunite in the US in Part 5, they discover that they’re still in love. Their indelible connection has proved indomitable, withstanding the political conflicts they lived through in Iran in 1953, their transatlantic moves, Badri’s meddling, and their misconceptions of each other: “They were bound, attached in a way that was impossible to fight. She had loved him and her love for him had never quite stopped. She had tried to push it down, hide it, make it disappear. But it was always there” (287). The same is true of Bahman’s love for Roya. Despite how her alleged rejection hurt him and how much time has passed, Bahman still loves her. The inexplicable nature of their longstanding attachment to each other proves that love can survive myriad tragedies and hazards. True love helped Roya and Bahman to survive violence, grief, and sorrow, giving them a sense of meaning, purpose, and goodness throughout their lives.
The Challenges of Navigating Political Upheaval and Social Expectations
The novel incorporates political, social, and personal conflicts into Roya and Bahman’s overarching narrative to convey the difficulty of coming of age amid familial and cultural pressures. Alternating between various temporal and physical settings, the chapters follow the lovers in both 1950s-era Tehran and the US in 2013.
In the narrative past, Roya and Bahman’s world is defined by an ongoing conflict between the Shah (or king) and Prime Minister Mossadegh. This large-scale political conflict coincides with the main characters’ familial demands. Roya’s family wants her to go to school and become a scientist, while Bahman’s family wants him to marry a wealthy young woman who can elevate their class standing. These dynamics pressurize Roya’s and Bahman’s youthful senses of self, complicating their ability to make choices based on their own instincts.
In the intermittent 2013 chapters, Roya and Bahman’s lives are influenced by the ongoing war in the Middle East. The characters no longer live in Iran, but their hearts remain connected to their country of origin. For Roya, following the overseas conflict is difficult because she has spent decades trying to forget her life in Iran and to detach from her past. This is particularly true because Roya associates politics with Bahman: When she follows the news, she thinks of her lost love and grieves.
Roya and Bahman struggle to shape autonomous identities because of their country’s political upheaval and their families’ social expectations. At the start of the novel, Roya wishes that “the polarization and constant political rivalry could end” (16). She feels disengaged with the conflict between Mossadegh and the Shah and fears how the conflict will impact her and her family. However, when she falls in love with Bahman, she becomes more engaged in the conflict. She admires his investment in Mossadegh’s cause and realizes that they “all had to fight, to protest, to march […] so the country could have true freedom” (36-37).
However, the ability of both characters to stand up for what they believe in doesn’t last. Bahman is forced to leave his home in the city to stay with his sick mother and to marry Shahla. Roya is forced to relocate to the US to protect herself after the Shah’s followers oust Mossadegh. Bahman fulfills his mother’s desire for him to adhere to marital tradition instead of following his heart. Neither character can exercise agency in the way they want to, because their external circumstances endanger them and their cultural expectations compel them to negotiate their desires.
The Struggle to Shape Identity Across Cultures
Roya’s attempts to reinvent herself after immigrating to the US convey the difficulties of reconciling competing cultural backgrounds. When she first moves to California for school, she’s “beset by a chronic homesickness” (167) and unable to make sense of her new environment. She feels as if she has been “plunged into a darkened room” (167) where all her surroundings blur together senselessly. Roya knows that she had to leave her home in Tehran for her own physical safety, but she still longs for the life she left behind. She also knows that relocating to the US was the only way to remake herself and her life in the wake of losing Bahman. Moreover, a new future in the US is Roya’s opportunity to study science and pursue the career her parents imagined for her. Despite these truths, Roya discovers that the only way to settle into her new American life is to bury her memories of her past and to disassociate from her life in the present.
Roya’s entrapment between the young woman she was in Iran and the woman she’s trying to become in the US enacts her diasporic experience. Her internal monologue in the scene where she meets Walter Archer for the first time captures this dynamic:
She felt like she was parting the sea. She wasn’t sure if she was being too forward. But wouldn’t it have been rude to say no? She wished she knew the rules in this country. Sometimes there didn’t seem to be any rules. It had been far easier in Iran, where tradition and tarof and who your grandfather was often dictated how to behave (172).
The metaphor of “parting the sea” conveys Roya’s divided self. Her old life, identity, and customs in Iran are on one side of the proverbial ocean, while her new life, identity, and customs in the US are on the other. Roya actively tries to dispel memories of Tehran, Bahman, her parents, and her home country, yet she often finds herself longing for her former life because of its familiarity. Conversely, Roya often feels frustrated by US life: She dislikes the food, sees through people’s inauthentic cheeriness, and doesn’t like how she’s always treated as an outsider; however, adhering to this new lifestyle is the only way to escape her irretrievable past. Since arriving in the US, Roya has convinced herself that “she [has] no choice but to create—stitch by stitch—a new life” (168).
By the novel’s end, Roya learns that she doesn’t have to discard her former life to feel settled in her new life. Her private meditations in the novel’s final chapter convey her newly reconciled sense of self. After attending Bahman’s funeral and receiving his letters from Claire, she sits alone in her room and reflects on her life, musing about everything from “her parents in Iran” to “Zari and Jack and the kids,” to “the Iran-Iraq war” (300). She also thinks about Bahman and Walter. The scope of her reflections illustrates Roya’s newfound ability to fuse her past and present identities and past and present cultures. All these experiences have one thing in common: They’re part of her life and thus part of her as a person.
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