Review by Margaret von Klemperer of “Becoming
Iman: An Adventure through Rebellion, Religion and Reason”. (Courtesy of The
Witness)
For readers who only know Iman Rappetti as
a warm, skilled and urbane presenter on television and radio, this memoir will
come as something of a surprise. We may think we know someone through their
daily arrival into our space via the media, but in fact, we really know nothing
about them other than that they are the one we like, or dislike.
Rappetti grew up in Phoenix, living with
her Indian father and her Coloured mother, a combination that caused deep
family rifts. She loved both her parents, though her father was violent and
abusive to his wife until he became part of an Evangelical Christian church and
apparently changed his ways. And then there were her siblings. Her eldest
brother had been forcibly removed from her mother straight after his birth to
live with his Indian grandmother, and there were another older brother and
sister who suddenly arrived back to live with the family without explanation.
It was a complex, very South African childhood, taking place in the apartheid
days where discovering your own identity was always going to be compromised and
complicated.
But Rappetti tells her tale with humour,
bringing to life aunties and their “School of Suffering” (SOS) which they
raised to an art form. The writing is beautiful, with unexpected and memorable
turns of phrase, while the telling of the story is episodic, linear in emotion
rather than in time.
Once beyond the coming-of-age memoir stage,
Rappetti’s life takes unexpected turns. From the evangelical Christianity of
her upbringing, she converts to Islam, moves with her husband to Iran and
becomes a veiled, submissive Muslim wife and mother as the reader begins to
realise that whatever Rappetti does, she does wholeheartedly. It’s an
extraordinary story, and the frankness with which she relates her growing later
disillusion with both her marriage and her faith is powerful and compelling.
Now, she sees the Muslim veil as a symbol of oppression, but her journey into
faith and on to rebellion is fascinating to follow, as are the swings in her
story between the sacred and the profane.
Becoming
Iman: An Adventure through Rebellion, Religion and Reason by Iman Rappetti is published by Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-77010-596-6 -
Margaret von Klemperer
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