Roza Nozari's memoir is about 'understanding shame' & embracing her identity as a queer Iranian Canadian woman

When Toronto-based writer, artist and therapist Roza Nozari decided to write her memoir, All The Parts We Exile, she began with "an inquiry into shame."

"I was particularly invested in understanding shame as it related to our narrowly defined social definitions of womanhood, of Muslim-ness, of Iranian identity, of queerness, and many others," she told CBC Books in an email.

"It evolved into a story of a mother and daughter trying to understand each other — across languages, across time, across geographies and identities. A journey that traverses many emotional terrains: shame and acceptance, fear and courage, loss and reclamation, disconnection and belonging, exile and return."

All The Parts We Exile tells the story of her search for belonging as a Canadian-born daughter of Iranian emigrants. It follows her experiences visiting Iran, learning the secrets behind why her family left, finding her queer identity, rejecting it and coming back to it and everything in between.

"I wanted to explore what happens when we begin to call home those banished parts of us. The possibilities that emerge when we begin to excavate long-buried histories, or finally speak aloud what was once silenced. The realities, both of joy and devastating loss, when we begin to reclaim and embody that which we once exiled away."

Nozari is also known as @YallaRoza on social media and is the illustrator of children's books including Fluffy and the Stars by T'áncháy Redvers and Mindy Kaling by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara.

All The Parts We Exile will be out on Feb. 25, 2025. You can read an excerpt below.

Over the 2013 summer in Iran, Khaleh Soraya became my qibla, my moral compass. "What kind of hijab is that" I asked her, gesturing towards a group of young girls dressed in all black. Sure, I was curious, but I also knew my question would impress her.

"Those are schoolkids. They wear the maghnaeh," she responded.

"I like their hijab." I smiled and realized I had forgotten what a maghnaeh looked like. Khaleh gazed at me with an approving smile. Days later, I found myself a black maghnaeh at the bazaar. I started dressing for God, with long-sleeved shirts and a knee-length manteau in the high heat of the summer. I even donned a chador a few times, just like Khaleh Soraya would wear. My aunties looked at my mother like Damn, you raised this dream of a child?

I kept thinking, This place could be your forever home, if you could just make yourself fit. I even started thinking that I could marry a man here and leave behind my complicated queer life. The truth was, the juiciness of home and belonging had me imagining all sorts of shit I hadn't thought I'd wanted. Shit I'd thought I was too progressive for, too radical for.

I even started thinking that I could marry a man here and leave behind my complicated queer life.- Roza Nozari

Not everyone was as devoutly and conservatively Muslim as Khaleh Soraya. Many of my cousins weren't. There was my cousin Manijeh, who was part of the younger generation of Muslim women that devoutly believed in both Allah and women's rights. She painted her eyelids with the boldest of eyeshadows and wore loose, colourful hijabs with her highlighted curls peeking through the front Manijeh lived on the second floor of a quaint apartment that I loved visiting on quiet midweek days. On a Wednesday afternoon, we sat at a small wooden dining table in her white-tiled kitchen, laughing as she picked apart the Los Angeles Persian music videos with their luxury cars and scantily dressed women. That was until I started to sob into my perfectly cooked gheimeh. "What happened? Do you miss home? You must miss home," Manijeh asked, naturally concerned. With a mouth full of half-chewed lentil and rice and mascara streaking my cheeks, I hunched over and cried an even bigger cry.

It wasn't that I missed home; it was that I really didn't want to go home. I was suddenly seriously considering marrying a man and moving to Iran, where I could be surrounded by my beloved family. Nothing in Canada could remotely compare to the feeling of folding into the soft bodies of my aunties, who would press their faces against mine and tell me they loved me. Or the generosity of my cousins, who would cook me gheimeh. Who would hold my hand as we walked the streets, always poking fun at each other and laughing.

When my breath returned, I asked Manijeh how she knew if a woman was kharab — a word you would traditionally use for food, to mean rotten, or objects, to mean broken. Zaneh kharab directly translated to "women who are rotten or broken." To me in that moment, this was the only barrier — that I wouldn't be marriage material. "You're not kharab! Sure, you're khareji, but you're not kharab! We have different beliefs, different cultures," she reassured me. "No, but how do you know?" I asked. Manijeh paused briefly before explaining that some are more obvious than others — the sex workers living on the streets, those with addictions.

It wasn't that I missed home; it was that I really didn't want to go home.- Roza Nozari

"But, what if a woman used to be kharab, but now she's good? How would you know?" I wondered aloud. Manijeh explained that sometimes you would hear about their histories from others in the neighbourhood, or families would have doctors check the hymen and it would be broken. I became obsessed with finding a loophole.

"What if a woman has used tampons?"

"What if a woman rode a horse and her hymen broke?"

"What if a woman was just born with a broken hymen?"

Whether it was intentional or by chance, a broken hymen was enough to fold you into the zaneh kharab category. As was my being queer, which, regardless of how much I tried to conceal it, I thought they would just know. The reality was that the confines of what made a good woman were always this suffocating and sharp. Yet, I wanted to belong. I edged myself closer and closer to the edges of the box, willing to cut off whole parts of me, willing to make myself smaller if it meant I could belong with them and stay here, in the land of good women.

The pressure to be acceptable had intensified to a boiling point.- Roza Nozari

That same week, I wrote Ren an email with the same tired explanations I'd heard in the movies. Stuff about growing apart and no longer wanting to be with them, and some abstruse allusion to there being more to the story. The pressure to be acceptable had intensified to a boiling point. In my mind, to stay here, I had to be a good Iranian woman. And to be a good Iranian woman, I had to be a good Muslim. And that would require me to sacrifice my queerness.

In my efforts to distance myself from my queerness, I told myself I was only queer by association — that it had been a rite of passage, a youthful and naive exploration of sexuality that all of us went through. I exiled the things I thought "made" me queer — plaid shirts, political pins, books. My partner, my friends, even the city I deemed the birthplace of my "gay." I swore off drag clubs. I promised to get right with God. And I told myself, again and again: I was never really gay, anyway.

Excerpted from All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari. Copyright © 2025 Roza Nozari. Published by Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.