Mahdokht Mimi Salili

Mahdokht Mimi Salili

Mahdokht Mimi Salili was born in Tabriz, Iran, on July 8th, 1936, and died in San Pablo, CA, on August 12th, 2025.

Mimi was an Iranian American writer, artist and healthcare professional. In the introduction of her forthcoming autobiography, she writes:

"the author of this account of an eventful and difficult life has never sought to entertain the reader in the ordinary sense of the term by glamorizing her past."

Such an unmistakably realistic view of a complex and difficult life underpinned her self-conception. She knew that the price of true freedom in life was nothing less than courageous refusal to compromise with an unjust society. A society whose chief enforcers are often members of one's own family. That is precisely what she did by leaving behind her family and the fascinating country of her birth, Iran, in search of new horizons. In her own admirable formulation, she

"redefined her cultural identity without ever renouncing her profound ethical principles."

All it took was willpower. Nothing less.

Born to a wealthy and influential family in Iran in the 1930s, Mimi grew up in a crowded household. Her mother, Fari Ghodevh, was a poet and a widely admired philanthropist. Fari was the scion of a long line of scholars and poets who had played a decisive role in shaping Iran's modern intellectual and political landscape. Fari instilled the love of poetry, world history and the French language in her five daughters. Fari's most famous ancestor was the Neoplatonist theologian and jurist, Fazel Mollah Ahmad Naraghi (1771-1829), tutor and adviser to the Persian Qajar King Fath Ali Shah (1772-1834). Naragi later became known as a major theorist of resistance to royal injustice. Mimi seemed to have inherited this ancestral penchant for rejecting injustice.

Mimi's father, Abolhassan Salili, studied law and linguistics at Tehran University in the 1920s. He met Mimi's Mother, Fari, through her brother, Reza Ghodveh, whom he had befriended at the university. Mr. Salili became an influential jurist and senior judge in Iran.

From an early stage in her life, Mimi realized that the only way she could live a life of her choice was by drawing on an inexhaustible willpower. Family support was not an option afforded to her by her austere father. Working as an elementary school teacher and a correspondent for "Young Asia", a monthly progressive Iranian literary review, she managed to earn enough money to leave Iran to study healthcare in London in 1959. She was a brilliant nursing student. Working concomitantly as a London correspondent for "Young Asia", she wrote a few noted articles on various aspects of British cultural and political life. Her interviews with such British personalities as Sean Connery, Norman Wisdom and Hugh Gaitskell drew a great deal of attention back in Iran.

An avid fan of culture, she covered many international exhibitions whilst mastering classical ballroom dancing at the famed Victor Silvester Studios in London.

Her remarkable beauty, kindness and love of classical Persian poetry won her many admirers among her peers and teachers at the state hospitals where she studied. In 1963, she became a State Registered Nurse (SRN) as well as a State Registered Midwife.

Beginning in 1964, Mimi started working as a private nurse and midwife in London. She helped many young mothers give birth to their babies. Some of them stayed in lifelong contact with her. In London, she also wrote two volumes of Persian poetry. A few of these were published in several Iranian literary reviews. Upon returning to Iran in 1965, she was appointed Senior Health Inspector at Iran's Health Ministry. In this capacity, she helped improve nursing care standards and midwifery facilities in rural areas.

In 1965, she married Dr. Mohamad Oliai, a noted Iranian surgeon and Deputy Labor Minister, who played a crucial role in modernizing Iran's healthcare system. Mimi raised her two sons at home whilst studying for her master's degree in nursing and public health at the American-founded University of Health Sciences in Tehran where she also completed the bulk of her doctoral work. Her Iranian MA thesis bore on the incidence of in-hospital infections. It was published as a separate book in 1983 and remains a major academic resource for health care professionals today in Iran.

In 1984, she accompanied her two sons to the United Stated where the family resettled. Mimi started working as Clinical Nurse Specialist in Chicago and later in Denver while supporting her two sons, Simon and Fred. An avid reader, culinary and sketch artist, she travelled the world before starting to write her autobiography in 2018. In an essay published in 2022, she noted that her life story

"serves to unite me with future readers in the common desire to adopt a mentally liberating distance from history and its symbolic actors."

Her poetic conception of freedom from the injustices that beset man's finite existence is perhaps best encapsulated by this celebrated passage from Omar Khayam's Rubaiyat:

"And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press, End in what All begins and ends in-Yes; Think then you are today what Yesterday You were-Tomorrow you shall not be less."

Mimi is survived by her two sons, Simon and Fred, and her two grandsons Erik & Wyatt.

To learn more about her academic contributions go to academia.edu