Golriz Ghahraman remembers the moment when, as a nine-year-old, she said goodbye to life in Iran, packing perceptions into her memory like belongings into a suitcase. She sat on her bed, made up with sheets bedecked in a bright floral print. The big dark wooden desk where she did her homework sat opposite. Her shelves, painted the year before to her preference, were pink and white. There were books everywhere. The wallpaper was white, printed with big red apples. Ghahraman remembers that little girlââshe was a bit weirdââsaying farewell with the equanimity only a child could muster. âIâve got these memories,â she reasoned, âand then Iâll have these other new memories of this new other place.â
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That other place, of course, was Aotearoaâa world away from Mashhad, Iranâs second-most populous city, where Ghahraman was born in 1981. An important Shia holy site and her fatherâs hometown, it sits on the countryâs eastern border. Her motherâthe daughter of winemakersâhails from Urmia, on the countryâs opposite edge, near the border with Iraq.We met in the Karangahape Road bar where youâll often find Ghahraman on a weekend night, relaxing after a week in Parliament, chatting pre-theatre with friends over champagne. We ordered a bottle of champagne, and then a second, as she recounted her childhood above the barroom chatter of a Friday evening.Her parents ââbasically socialistsâ she says, a term she now identifies withâwere both active participants in the Iranian revolution, which started life as a grand uprising. Her paternal grandmother used to check the morgues at dayâs end if the family was late in returning home. Not that, in the chaos of revolution, the bodies assuaged her fears: disfigured by the violence of their deaths, they were unrecognisable. âIt was a horrific time,â Ghahraman says.The revolution lurched violently, and in 1979âinstead of the democratic republic many hoped forâthe just-returned-from-exile Ayatollah Khomeini ascended to power, establishing an Islamic state. Ghahramanâs first memories are of life under a theocratic regime getting established as it found itself embroiled in a brutal war with its Western neighbour, Saddam Husseinâs Iraq.
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Mashhad is about as far from Iraq as you can get in Iran and was spared direct attack, but the war was still present: in screaming bomb-raid sirens, in public infrastructure renamed after the newly dead, in the war-time culture of sacrifice for oneâs country, in the conscription of child soldiers sent with a key to heaven to clear the landmines on the countryâs border with Iraq. âVans would stop and just take kids off the street⊠like someoneâs older brother has been taken suddenly. Everyone was freaked out all the time. Like, what can we do to hide our kid?âOn the other side of the country, in Urmia, the war was a more direct presence. The family spent time there every year visiting the maternal side of the family. Maryam Ghafoori, Golrizâs mum, remembers it, on those visits, as a âghost cityâ, windows blown out by bombs, its streets unpeopled. Ghahraman found it difficult to take the bomb sirens seriously, conditioned, as she was, to the drills of Mashhad. But it was the changes apparent among her contemporaries that struck her most forcefully. âComing back every year, the kids were really changed by war⊠some of the kids I knew stopped talking from the shellshock, and that definitely was a real experience of war that was confronting.âAgainst that backdrop, the regime found its feet. At some point in her childhood âsomething changedâ for Ghahraman and her family, and for Iran at large. âI was born and the Islamic regime hadnât really taken hold yet and by the time I have any living memories, it was a theocracy. The adults in my life had never lived under a theocracy before, so they were in full panic mode, like they didnât know what the hell was going on.â Her parents, she says, talked incessantly about life before the revolution, about how they used to wear miniskirts and bikinis and listen to Western music. âAnd thatâs what my childhood was like, like those conversations were just constant.â
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Maryam Ghafoori, speaking in her lounge of her Epsom home under a large painting of Buddha hanging on the wall, tea and pastries served without asking, spoke of how the regime divided the country. âIf you were with them, you could kill somebody and get away with it. If you were not with them you had nothing. If you talked, you could be jailed and lashed, and even get killed. So many people got killed. So many girls, boys, 13, 14 years old, just selling opposition newspapers got killed⊠It wasnât only the war. Everything else was a mess.â In this political climate, even her closest relationships needed constant re-evaluation, she told me. âYou didnât know if that friend is now that side or this side.ââIt became frightening,â Ghahraman says. Her parentsâheavily politicised during, and then betrayed by, the revolutionâwanted out. âIt was a big decision,â Ghafoori says. âIt was scary. Now I get more scared actually⊠When youâre younger youâre a bit braver. The most difficult part is what is going to happen, and how can you actually leave everything behind?âThe family had a distant relative who had claimed asylum in New Zealand, and they decided to follow. They toured Iran, saying guarded goodbyes to far-flung family. They flew first to Malaysia, from there buying onward tickets to Tonga or Fiji (the family still debates which Pacific island it was), with a stop-off in New Zealand. On arrival, the family approached the first uniformed person they could find, and declared themselves refugees.
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Tune into a certain frequency of social media, and the aboveâtaken from the words of those who lived through itâis viewed as suspect at best, at worst as fabrication. Thereâs a perception out there of Ghahraman as a pathological liar, an overinflated balloon of mistruth forever on the verge of explodingâthat she has founded her political career on a cynical reassembly of her own biography. That, indeed, she uses her refugee status as political currency, turning victimhood into political power.âNot a real refugeeâ is a persistent refrain, most notably from Simon Jeans, an Australian immigration lawyer whose opinion piece on the matter was taken down after threats of legal action from Ghahraman. For Ghahraman, she says she has nothing to hide and is wary of discussing the particulars, noting the burden of proof doesnât fall on herâthat the matter was, in fact, decided 28 years ago. âYou either have been given refugee status or you havenât. Saying youâre a refugee, thatâs what it depends onâand we have refugee status.â(Immigration New Zealand states: âRefugees are people who cannot return to their home country because they have a well-founded fear of persecution because of their religion, race, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.â)A touch of anger entered Ghafooriâs voice when I mentioned the doubt that existed, in some quarters of the Internet, over the familyâs statusâor, at least, their truthful claim to it. âOk, letâs say Golriz lied. Letâs say that, huh. She didnât. What sheâs said is the truth, but would this make any difference for her to go into [politics]? No, sheâs a well-educated girl, sheâs a New Zealander, and she wanted to be a politician⊠What is so important about these things?â
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That reasoning hasnât stopped the trolls, who respond to Ghahramanâs public presence with opprobrium. Even within the Green Party, two of Ghahramanâs colleaguesâAmerican-accented Julie Anne Genter and UK-born Mojo Mathersâare immigrants to Aotearoa. Both came to New Zealand later in their respective lives, but neither deal with vitriol of the persistence and viciousness that is a fact of Ghahramanâs political lifeâdehumanising, threatening, plainly racist: âWait until they are punching you in the head and have a knife to your throatâ; âYou are the offspring of country shoppersâ; âGo back to where you come from and fix the problem thereâ; âTerrorist supporting tartâ; âWho breeds people like her?âIt started as soon as she announced her candidacy, but she still doesnât understand it. âA small political party, Iâm last on the list, Iâm a first-time MP, Iâm outside government. Itâs so weird. Iâd maybe understand it if I were wielding some power over their lives in some way.â Why then, I asked, do people object so vehemently to her presence in public life? She shook her head and sipped from her champagne flute. âIt does trigger something in people to see an immigrant just present their achievements and be like, âYeah, I have a right to be in Parliament.ââ
Ghafoori, a trained psychologist, remembers what it was like to be refugee in a strange country. It was 1990. She was happy, the big decisions made, but understandably apprehensive: in her mid-30s, with half a life behind her, the reality of starting again dawned on her. âA week ago,â she says, remembering that feeling, âI was a well-educated woman; the week after, in New Zealand, I was nobody. I lost my identity.â
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Nine-year-old Ghahraman was more sanguine about her new life, struck by Aucklandâs sense of spaceâevery property with its own front lawn, the parks, a reserve at the end of every other streetâafter tightly packed Mashhad. Accustomed to apartment living, the pitched-roofed houses looked to her like those she had only previously seen in cartoons.School, when it began, was met with the same equanimity with which she faced leaving Iran. âThis will be familiar soon. Soon this will just be school. Look at that tree. That tree will just be that tree.â A Chaucer School classmate I spoke to remembered her as a quiet, well-behaved kid. âShe was always quite relaxed about everything. Looking back on it now, from an adult perspective, everything theyâd done in terms of upending everything and moving to a whole new country, that mustâve been hugely traumatic.âAs her parents struggled with the language, the accent, the careers theyâd left behind, Ghahraman flourished. âBecause thatâs part of being an immigrant as well, a child immigrant, is that you realise that actually you are on the same footing as your parents. Eventually you surpass them, quite quickly, like within a year.â She soon shed her sense of foreignness and settled into the business of being a New Zealander, bouncing through suburbs and schools, and into university to study law.A formative spell as an intern at Amnesty International changed her life. âBefore then, I didnât do much. I was cool and I partied and whatever. But then I was like, 'fuck, I actually want to do shit' so I sat down and wrote out a ten-year planâI wrote it out, like literally every year and it was like books to read, and this is how much I am going to save, and like this is the work Iâm going to do because I need this experience.â
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One day, after law school, she was working in her mumâs gift shop, filling in paperwork. A lawyer overheard her saying she didnât know any lawyers who could move her admission to the bar. That chance encounter led to a job as a junior to Lester Cordwell, an Auckland criminal defender: âIt was all murder and rape and methamphetamine trials, but you get this incredible human story,â she remembers of the job. Cordwell told me via email that Ghahraman âwas always interested in ensuring peopleâs rights were protected and was always very passionate about her workâ.She followed that passion for the human story behind the crimes to an unpaid internship at the United Nations, during which she worked on the defence team for an accused Rwandan war criminal who died before he could be convicted. Later, in a paid position, she helped defend Simon Bikindi, the Hutu songwriter who used his music to incite genocide against the Tutsi minority. She also worked on the defence of a Yugoslavian leader accused of war crimes. She completed her Masters in International Human Rights Law at Oxford (âan excellent student, superbly motivatedâ a former professor of hers told me), worked on the prosecution of accused Khmer Rouge war criminals in Cambodia, and then returned home to, eventually, enter politics.
Ghahraman has a keen sense of how violent rhetoric leads to violenceâfrom her work defending and prosecuting accused war criminals, but also from a personal perspective. She is a survivor of domestic violence. âIâd go out with my friends, thereâd always be a massive fight⊠I couldnât turn on my phone because every time Iâd turn it on Iâd just get a barrage of messages that would just be something like, âSlut. Slut-slut-slut-slut-slut,â or âBitch-bitch-bitch-bitch-bitch-bitch.â And Iâd just be like, âOh well Iâve got to turn my phone off.â And then, eventually, it got really physical. It was just like pushing and shaking and whatever. And then it got to a point where a couple of times I got strangled.â
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In her political life, being called a âbitchâ is close to an every-day occurrence. Does she fear that, as in the case of her abusive partner, the violence of the words directed at her might become real violence? She brought up the example of Jo Cox, the British Labour MP who had advocated forcefully for the rights of immigrants: she was murdered by a far-right assassin who shouted âBritain firstâ before shooting and stabbing her. âIt does scare me⊠[If] I have to walk out that night on my own, or I might have to be alone at home or whatever, I remember Jo Cox.âI met Ghahramanâs partner Guy Williams, 31, at an Eden Terrace cafĂ©, near where he works at TV3. He arranged his large frame over a Charlieâs orange juice and a singular rice ball from the cafĂ© cabinet. The couple met several years ago at a charity event he emceed. He says he encouraged Ghahraman to get onto Twitter, assuming thatâgoing from his own experience as a public figureâsheâd get something like the same level of abuse he did. He was wrong. âWhat she gets is a thousand times worse and a lot more frequent.âWhat he has learned, he says, is that âNew Zealand politics is a shit pit and weâve basically jumped into it and now weâre sloshing around.â He cites the furore that erupted when former Labour staffer Phil Quin, in a series of tweets, criticised Ghahramanâs defence work at the Rwanda Tribunal. Quin later apologised for calling Ghahraman a âgenocide denierâ. The story widened when it was revealed that neither her Green Party website profile nor her Wikipedia page made mention of her defence work, focusing instead purely on the prosecution aspect. A hashtag, #GolrizMyCV, appeared for the first time, and has trended periodically ever since. She was naĂŻve, Williams told me, for not realising her career as a defence lawyerâa role she is proud of, and had spoken about publicly before Quinâs accusationsâcould be spun negatively.
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It was a difficult time for Ghahraman. An old friend, a journalist with whom she had interned at Amnesty, had just died suddenly in Turkey. At the same timeânot long after her maiden speech to Parliamentâshe started receiving death threats and hacks. Parliamentary Security later told her they were coming from Russian IP addresses. She suspects it had something to do with speaking out about Iranian human rights abuses. She often speaks of the duality of her existence: simultaneously not Kiwi enough for the domestic palate, not Iranian enough when she criticises the country of her birth.But the criticism, Maryam Ghafoori says, is proof her daughter is doing good things. âIf you are getting attacked it means you are doing something right to me. This is my personal experience.âGhahraman now avoids looking at the online hate she receives, but becomes circuitously aware of it when thereâs an outpour of corresponding support. Young women from backgrounds similar to her own, she says, often come forward to say how much her presence in the public sphere means to them. âThose people are literallyâare actuallyâmarginalised and they are less marginalised because they can see someone who looks like them with their background in politics. That is an actual fact.ââIf she achieves nothing else,â Williams told me, âthis could be her biggest achievement, breaking through and normalising a brown woman of Middle-Eastern descent in Parliament. If she can normalise that, then thatâs a wonderful achievement in itself.âItâs perhaps a measure of the place she occupies in Aotearoaâs political landscape that 2500 words into this article, I havenât discussed Ghahramanâs political passion: justice reform, and using her expertise in the field to inform better policy for Aotearoa. âIâve ended up with this whole other type of platform and itâs a massive privilege as well as a burden in some ways, but itâs still also a massive privilege in talking to race issues and minority issues and democracy.âBut it has taken a toll. Ghahraman, tired of the trolling, told me this might be her first and last term in Parliament. âPeople are like, âYou know, youâre forging this path, itâs incredible.â But I didnât ask to forge the path, and maybe after one term Iâve forged it. Do I personally need to keep going when itâs so hard?âFollow James on Twitter.* An earlier version of this article misidentified Mojo Mathers as a current member of the Green Party caucus. It has since been updated.