The New Zealand political memoir has become a rather gruesome exercise in vanity publishing, with one self-described titan after another telling us how great they were in the corridors of power that they so plainly miss – Steven Joyce, Chris Finlayson, someone called Graham Kelly (Labour, 1987-1996). None of them were worth a damn and all of them were badly written. Judith Collins didn’t wait to leave the corridors of power when she wrote her memoir Pull No Punches and it was arguably the worst of the lot, certainly the vainest. But there was one memoir, published in 2020, that broke the pattern, that was honest, vulnerable, personal, that qualified as genuinely good literature – Know Your Place, by Golriz Ghahraman, who as of last week has no place in New Zealand politics.
The former Green MP is due to appear in court next week in response to charges of shoplifting. She has released a statement on the subject of her mental health. Clearly the circumstances of her behaviour suggest someone who was not in their right mind. There’s nothing new about that: four years ago, her own book made it plain that she struggles with mental health. It was an an extraordinarily open self-portrait of someone frail, someone vulnerable, someone unwell.
X, that forum of mental health experts who respond to every news event with empathy and understanding, has always loathed Ghahraman. One of the few people I follow on X is Abigail Johnson. She wrote, “Golriz is a huge loss. Damn.” There were 101 replies. Most were of similar mind. As in: “Please provide one, single example of why.” And: “Good riddance.” Also: “Yes, every day without these shining lights in our communities is hell on earth.”
There was no tolerance for Ghahraman’s claims of mental health, no acceptance. Know Your Place, published by HarperCollins, charted years of anxiety and unhappiness. At intermediate school in Kelston, girls told Ghahraman she was fat (“I had developed curves early”) and made her life hell: “I started counting calories and incessantly running after school, desperately trying to lose the ‘fat’ … I lost sleep feeling anxious about things I had eaten as far back as years before. I wore baggier clothes and avoided boys.”
After she got her law degree at the University of Auckland, and a Master’s in international human rights law from Oxford, Ghahraman worked for the UN. Success, though, was paralysing. She had panic attacks. She fell to pieces. “I stopped sleeping … My hair was falling out … I came home with a deep sense of insecurity about my work prospects … I started seeing a psychologist.”
She was a complete mess, but at least she was a complete nobody. As a Green MP, she became public property, and has always been uniquely aggravating to a great many people – yes, of course they include trolls, maniacs, white supremacists, rednecks, and various assorted haters who may be more or less insane, but they also include perfectly reasonable Kiwis who simply can’t stand her critique of a society that thinks of itself as fundamentally decent.
“I pause when I leave the house,” she wrote. “Pause each time I step out onto a podium. I scan the audience for anyone who looks out of place, for lone men, for bulges under jackets.” But is this a very real fear, and a terrible indictment of the way things are in New Zealand, or a kind of melodrama? Maybe all of the above. “I felt an urge to protect democracy itself,” she declares, with fantastic grandiosity, of her decision to enter politics. Golriz of Nazareth, or Kelston or wherever, come to bring us peace and slogans.
She entered Parliament in 2017. The dislike was immediate. Ghahraman first became a public figure when she featured on the famous North & South cover in April 2017, when art director Jenny Nicholls and photographer Toaki Okano staged a very Vanity Fair / Annie Leibovitz portrait of seven Green MPs. It remains the only photo of Chlöe Swarbrick in a dress, lol. Ghahraman modelled a long, very glamorous, very sparkly green dress. (At least some readers will instantly think: “Did she steal it?”). Social media responded with rage that an MP should dare to wear an evening dress, dare to be a beautiful woman, dare to be upfront and in your face. It set the tone for the next six years of rage.
Much of Know Your Place would drive her critics up the wall. She wrote of winning arguments and resolving issues; she presented herself as someone brave, principled, resourceful, an urban guerrilla telling us how great they were in the corridors of power … But there was something else going on, something all inside her head. Writing of the party atmosphere of her family home back in Iran, she wrote, “Truth be told, I felt pretty alienated from the uber-extroverted Iranian party culture of dancing and singing with full abandon … I would often escape to my room with one or two close friends to play quietly.” She goes from this moment of reflection to launching a sudden sting: “But for my mother, every party was a show of her success as a mother.”
I thought the most revealing passage in Know Your Place was a dialogue she had with former defence minister Ron Mark.
He: “You know, Golriz, I think about what you and I have been through in our lives [Mark was raised in foster care] and I wonder how we’ve come out of it okay, we’ve ended up normal.”
She: “We’re not normal! You’re obsessed with war planes and I’ve been in therapy for three years.”
Such a good and interesting book. Maybe one day she will write a sequel. She’s definitely got a lot of material.
Know Your Place by Golriz Ghahraman (HarperCollins, $39.99) was published in May 2020.
Love it
With friends like Steve who needs enemies? Feeling an “urge to defend democracy” is not “fantastic grandiosity” and if all the NZers who go into politics do so, our democracy is in safe hands. I haven’t read her memoir but sometimes my own mother celebrates her success in ways that I wouldn’t and saying so is not a sting – my mum doesn’t exist to do what I want every time. It’s a not a sign of mental illness to suggest that “for my mother, every party was a show of her success as a mother” and she must have loved the N&S cover as lots of us did. I find Twitter a source of info and useful debate – those who find it a pit of vipers maybe need therapy but unlike Golriz aren’t brave enough to acknowledge that. Yes I’m defending Golriz, you’re dead right!
“Feeling an “urge to defend democracy” is not “fantastic grandiosity” and if all the NZers who go into politics do so, our democracy is in safe hands. ”
Absolutely! A preparedness to defend our democracy should be a requirement for entering parliament.
“Know Your Place” is a fantastic read, insightful and inspiring. It covers a particularly significant time in the history of Aotearoa NZ.
Here is a relevant excerpt from Know Your Place, Ch 9: The Work of Democracy.
This circa early 2019:
“In one meeting, we discussed the need for better access to mental health services for a particular veteran whose cause I had taken up. Ron [Mark] told the officials to prioritise this, they duly took notes, and we were about to end the meeting when the Minister turned to me and said, ‘You know, Golriz, I think about what you and I have been through in our lives and I wonder how we’ve come out of it okay, we’ve ended up normal.’
“I looked at him and said, ‘We’re not normal! You’re obsessed with war planes and I’ve been in therapy for three years.'”
Through these last five years as a female MP, Golriz has been subjected to continuous, unrelenting online abuse, via direct emails as well as through the various social media channels. There have been death threats, threats of violence and of explicit violent sexual abuse, as well as the full spectrum of racial and gender attacks. This is the world in which she had to live, serving as a female MP here in 21st century NZ.
She herself spoke out about this back in early 2019. The abuse had become so severe that she had to move her female staff out of their monitoring roles, and replace them with men.
“The men were in shock – because it was something they had never had to consume,” she said. “It is gendered and it is race-based abuse, and it is constant.” https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/green-mp-golriz-ghahraman-says-female-staff-exposed-to-racist-and-sexist-abuse-had-to-be-moved-into-new-roles/BAX7KZJPY3NHSAE6NZTZCLU754/
Also from that linked article:
“An Amnesty International paper found a third of New Zealand women said they had been abused or harassed online, and a fifth of them had been abused on social media. That was more than any of the eight first-world countries surveyed except one – the United States.
“The online abuse had a tangible impact. Most of the women who had been abused said they had trouble sleeping, suffered from anxiety or feared for their safety.”
People breakdown in different ways. Before anyone rushes to judgement on Golriz, I recommend trying to find a way to “walk a mile in her shoes”, – just acquire some understanding of what it might be like to have to live every day under those conditions.
The Post on 20 Jan had two opinion pieces on Ghahraman, both by people who have worked for the National Party, and who piled on with the “hard line” on her shoplifting – no excuse, etc etc. Neither had much to say about the constant anonymous attacks related to her gender, race, culture, and appearance. The attacks on Jacinda Ardern and her family were even worse and must have played some part in her decision to step down as PM. Which is exactly the aim: to get rid of these pesky women.