Roxana shirazi biography of william
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With her short skirts and poker-straight hair (all her friends still wore their hair in the outdated 1960s puffed-up bouffants and backcombed beehives) and he with his bell-bottoms and platform heels and tinted eyewear, they made for a handsome couple.
She left me with Anneh when she went to work, teaching all day to provide for me and my grandmother, just like she had done before I was born for her parents – all her wages every month had been handed to her father who was crippled after a stroke.
Life was meant to be hard, otherwise you weren’t a real socialist.
Lead image: At a rally in London on 29 April 2023, calling for UK to declare the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organisation (Photo: X / Roxana Shirazi)
All photos credit: Roxana Shirazi
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Roxana Shirazi
Author, Actress, Journalist
https://shorturl.at/BgX7F
My memoir of paying human smugglers to take me to Iran on horseback.
Missing her home and never one to shy from a life-threatening challenge, Roxana paid Kurdish smugglers to take her there illegally on horseback via the Turkish mountains.
Born in Iran, I was a child-revolutionary within a very politically active family. With flashbacks of my life with a mafia boss in the US and meeting the Ku Klux Klan.
*Runner-up prize winner for non-fiction writing for the Footnote Counterpoints Press awards.
https://counterpoints.org.uk/project/counterpoints-x-footnote-writing-prize/
The Last Living Slut: Born In Iran, Bred Backstage (HarperCollins).
https://shorturl.at/tGy76
The Last Living Slut: a book of a childhood in the Iranian Revolution, Political Activity, War and the Persian dusk… bath-houses in twilight, child abuse, escape to England, racial violence, American rock stars, love, blood & abortion.
A place where women are demonised for doing what men do. For seven days, nurses wheeled me in like a dairy delivery, granted her a few minutes of breastfeeding, then wheeled me out again convinced that that their strict, almost militaristic routine was in the patient’s best interest.
She named me Negar, meaning ‘beloved’ and ‘sweetheart’, and we lived with my maternal grandmother Ashraf, whom everyone called Anneh – meaning ‘mother’ in Azari dialect, because she was a mother to everybody who met her.
The Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, had raided my grandmother’s home bashing down the front door and ripping apart furniture in search of anti-Shah literature one afternoon as my mother nursed me.
They arrested her for anti-Shah political activity and, before my grandmother’s terrified eyes, the five of them bundled her into a car.
But it also cost her economic opportunities, besides making her persona non grata in her birth country.
A self-described gonzo journalist, Shirazi has written from within the situations she covers – from encounters with the Ku Klux Klan to being smuggled into Iran. At 14 I wrote my first book ‘The Secret Garden’ about the street kids of Sao Paulo.
My love of academia has taken me to many universities and brought me to a political arena where I have had the opportunity to lecture on Sexual Politics and Gender Theory, and to speak at International Women’s Conferences on gender and cultural taboos.
As a human I am saturated in: Iran’s beauty, Michele Foucault, Victorian London, Transylvania, Oscar Wilde, Deconstruction, Judith Butler, Edith Piaf, Dylan Thomas, James Douglas Morrison, Leonard Cohen, animals and wildlife, Edinburgh’s underground city, Eric Cantona, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, The Rat Pack and feta cheese.
The Last Living Slut: Born In Iran, Bred Backstage
Raw, Unvarnished, provocative, and poetically written, "The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage" is the memoir of Roxana Shirazi, who was raised during Iran's revolution within a politically active family and sent to England by her family aged ten during the Iran/Iraq war, and led far astray by the sound - and the sex appeal - of rock and roll.
Once inside the interrogation room, she had been blindfolded and braced for the torture that was the fate of all political activists while I was handed over to the guards. With heart-breaking accounts of child abuse, abortion and domestic violence, TLLS reads like an Iranian female Bukowski: raw, working class and poetic.
The opium made him so mellow and laidback that it transitioned into being apathetic and uninterested in parenthood.
He had been absent on the day I was born in the Soviet Military hospital in Tehran in September 1973.
Roxana Shirazi is an Iranian-origin UK-based author, journalist, and actor whose work explores identity, exile, and sexuality through a feminist lens.
Her 2010 memoir The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage (HarperCollins) drew attention for its candid portrayal of life between revolutionary Tehran and the world of rock ’n’ roll in the West, replete with graphic descriptions of sex and female sexuality.
This probably added more cachet to her trendy identity as a revolutionary-poet-feminist-teacher with a young daughter.
She had grabbed me and run.
Being a socialist revolutionary in resistance to the Shah’s totalitarian regime, a dictatorship with little social and political freedom, was more important to her than anything else in the world, and she continued her activism even when she took me to the school where she taught literature. Alone in England and feeling a loss of identity, she found a new 'home' in the world of rock 'n' roll with bands like Guns 'n' Roses, Motley Crue and Velvet Revolver and discovered that there is no such things as rock 'n' roll: a place where only men are allowed to be transgressive, and sexually wild.
My mother was milk-soaked when they came for her. Female sexuality which has always been saturated in a saccharine, florid coating and ensconced within wealth, material goods, and fairy tale-like settings, is raw and human here and unvarnished: More Henry Miller and Bukowski, never Anais Nin. This book is a performance of dissent in order to demonstrate how men are idolized for their sexuality whilst women are demonized for it.
Unlike the many other countries, ‘The Last living Slut’ was censored in the UK and all interviews with Roxana and press for the book blocked by British media as Roxana didn’t fit the ‘safe’ stereotype of Iranian woman-oppressed, refugee, asylum seeker- in the UK media where diversity has such rigid categories that any voices operating outside of those frameworks are not legitimised.
Iranian girls who are sexually open rock n roll girls, wear slutty clothes and are also academics and intellectuals doesn’t fit the UK media’s agenda of ‘diversity’ representations.
‘The Last Living Slut’ also inevitably put Roxana on a black list in Iran, meaning she could never go back to Iran without being imprisoned and maybe worse.
Soft, useless, squinting into the bright slap of the day, unaware I was being taken to prison.