Iranian-born Golriz Ghahraman arrived in New Zealand with her parents as a 9-year-old, making history in 2017 when she became the first New Zealand MP with a refugee background.
Golriz Ghahraman. Photo: RNZ /Dom Thomas
She studied human rights law at Oxford and has practiced as a lawyer in New Zealand and in United Nations tribunals in Africa, The Hague, and Cambodia dealing with war crimes and human rights atrocities.
In her new autobiography - Know Your Place - the Green MP writes about the quest to find her place in Aotearoa, New Zealand after her family's arrival in 1990.
Ghahraman said she was inspired to write the book out of a sense of responsibility to her parent's generation of Iranians, who had "fought so hard in that revolution to bring their country into being a modern democracy … and ended up with something far far more oppressive and violent and a theocracy."
"They just constantly wanted to explain themselves, like they told the stories of the revolution over and over and over again and why they'd done it," she said. "And that they weren't trying to form a theocracy."
Photo: supplied
She described the process of leaving Iran as "bizarre", where the family embarked on a "holiday" to Malaysia, with the end goal of seeking refuge in another country.
"That was around the time exit visas had become available but it was only the wealthy that could do it, so we put all our eggs into the basket of getting us on this tour.
"Then when we got there we realised everyone else was pretending to be on this holiday too."
The family had some contacts who knew a refugee lawyer in New Zealand and managed to get a flight out of Malaysia, with a stopover in Auckland.
"We knew that this was it, we were going to get rights, we just had to land on New Zealand soil, but you don't land on New Zealand soil - you're in transit when you're on a stopover.
"So we had to break out of transit, that was the sort of the life-changing act for us."
She said they knew that if they were turned back, they would be exposed for trying to seek asylum - which Iran did not look kindly upon.
Trying to get down the escalator at Auckland airport and out of transit was a "harrowing couple of hours" for Ghahraman and her family.
"But we made it down and just went up to someone who looked official and sort of said we're refugees and they were so kind."
This kindness would be her first impression of her new homeland - "they called a lawyer, you've got rights and you're going to be treated with dignity, so it was quite beautiful".
However, moving to a new country where they didn't speak the language was harder for Ghahraman's parents than it was for her. Her father was an engineer and her mother was a professor of psychology - and giving up these professions was a "central heartbreak" for them.
"They're absolutely okay, but just knowing that what they lost was their identity, not just money or social support," she said.
"Mum used to say she keeps making friends who think she's really into cooking or gardening rather than literature or politics. She was still that same person, but she couldn't interact with the world around her in that way."
As her father had been "the life of the party" back in Iran, the language barrier was also hard for him.
"My dad started adopting this sort of very wide-eyed expression, where he's constantly asking people to repeat themselves … or just kind of lowering his head when he's talking and I think it was just this kind of submissive manner that something in him told him to adopt to not be as threatening as an outsider."
But the "social safety net" that benefitted the family in their early days in New Zealand made a big impression on Ghahraman, which she described as a new value for them to encounter.
"We had liveable social safety nets and my family got to benefit from that, in the moment that we really really needed it - and there was no shame in that," she said.
"We lived in a community where people were really open about needing help or not having it all sorted… and it wasn't a problem. In a place like Iran it would be, it's very hierarchical, you would hide things like that."
While Ghahraman said she was grateful for the support they received, it had also helped her advocate in parliament for those in a similar situation.
"It is a real responsibility that I feel, because we are grateful, we should all be grateful for being in this country, especially right now," she said.
"We have a right to be here and we have a right to be here in the way that others are here, once we get to that decision making table it's my job to challenge and to push - and maybe that's what patriotism actually looks like, wanting the best for this country, wanting a liveable social safety net as part of my ideal about New Zealand."
