The One and Only Googoosh: Iran’s Beloved Superstar

Gr 1-3–Both heartbreak and a strong ­affirmation of common cultural ground shine out in this love note to a wildly popular performer who was forced into decades of ­silence in her native country by the 1979 ­Iranian Revolution. Faegheh Atashin, known as Googoosh, began her career when “your acrobat father pulled you out of his trouser cuffs.” She rose to fame as a child who, from the age of four, sang like “the ­warbling b­olbols that woke us at dawn,” and l­ater starred in over two dozen films. But at the peak of her fame in Iran, ­Googoosh went from being a public figure, as visible as the “snowcapped peaks of the Alborz Mountains,” to just recordings carried by refugees who fled the country after a new regime outlawed even “the sound of a woman’s singing voice.” But when at last, in 2000, she was allowed to leave the country and sing again, thousands of expatriate fans gathered for her comeback concert in Canada. “Then when you finally sang,” the author writes, “and the ribbons of memory unspooled around our feet,/ we were all t­ogether again/ in our homeland.” Along with the details of Googoosh’s story, and her own personal one, in an equally eloquent afterword, Westergaard creates layered illustrations that place expressive cut-paper images of the charismatic star and her audiences over block print backgrounds to evoke the waves of restrained but intense feelings. ­