1

INTRODUCTION

To tell a tale that's left

To those forbidden passage home

It's in the telling

Not the tale

That the untold pieces get re-sewn

To pick them up

One

By

One

And then throw them in the air

Is this storyteller's mad hope

That one piece will make it there.1

(Aphrodite Navab)

These lines are excerpted from "Tales Left Untold", a poem by the Iranian-

American poet Aphrodite Navab. Like all exiles, Iranian-Americans experience the

dilemma of having a split identity which in turn makes them alienated and estranged

in both cultures. However, Iranian-Americans encounter this dilemma in a deeper

sense as they belong to two polar and rather contesting cultures in which they

constantly have to define and defend themselves. Navab implies that these women,

like herself, have bottled-up struggles that are "left untold" and it is only through

"telling" their own stories that these women will find an outlet for their trauma.

Nevertheless, not all Iranian exiles are as talented as Navab; they cannot write poems,

short stories or novels, yet they need to voice their experiences. At the same time,

they are not famous people who have accomplishments to brag about in their

autobiography. Therefore, these women have a pressing need for a literary genre that

allows ordinary women to write their own stories that in turn help them put their

fragmented selves together, attaining wholeness.

1 Karim, Persis M. ed. Let Me Tell You Where I've been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian

Diaspora. The United States of America: The University of Arkansas Press, 2006. P181

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In her anthology of writing by Iranian exiled women, Let Me Tell You Where

I've Been (2006), Persis Karim explains that Iranian American literature has mainly

been known to reflect the experiences of Iranians who migrated to America, just

before or right after the 1979 Revolution (xxiii). She adds that lately, it has also

included the narratives of "young Iranians who were born and raised in the United

States or born and raised in Iran, but studied in the United States" (xxiii). These young

people become disoriented when asked what sounds to be the least challenging

question: where they are from. For them, however, it is the most ambiguous question

as they define themselves as "neither Iranian nor American" (xxiii). They think of

themselves as being "from Iran, but not Iranians", or being "born and raised in the

United States" but not really Americans (xxiii). Apparently, they do not consider

themselves Iranians as they belong to the Iran of the Shah that does not exist anymore,

and they do not consider the Iran of the Islamic Republic, which banished them and

caused them the trauma of living in a host country, their home, either. At the same

time, they do not consider themselves Americans as their American peers make sure

to alienate them by harassing them for belonging to a country that is stigmatized with

terrorism. The trauma of this group is that they belong nowhere.

Of this group, I decided to work on women. Unlike men, those women are

doubly estranged in comparison with their Iranian counterparts in Iran because they

are not only women who have to be invisible in Iran of the Islamic Revolution, but

they are also women who are related to the West which intensifies their discredit in

the post-revolutionary Iranian context. Consequently, writing helps them understand

the "chaotic experiences" that befell them as Iranians who were born or raised in the

United States, away from their homeland, illustrating how their experiences are

different from those of Iranians who have never left Iran (xxi). Since writing is

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therapeutic, in her book The Text Is Myself (2004), Miriam Fuchs assures their need

for writing a "self-representation" narrative to safely re-experience their trauma:

"[T]hese women were embroiled in or else deeply affected by events beyond their

ability to readily cope. Each had reached a life juncture at which self-representation

became imperative" (5). In other words, they need a genre of self-narrative that takes

them into outward and inward journeys. On the one hand, an outward journey is a

journey outside their selves which allows them to re-visit the places they have been to

through writing about them and about the chaotic experiences attached to them; the

"inward journey"2, on the other hand, is a journey to the different selves that have

developed through the years of living in-between these cultures. Isadora Duncan

describes this "inward Journey" in her autobiography My Life (1927) as "div[ing]

down within ourselves and bring[ing] up thought as the diver brings up pearls –

precious pearls from the closed oysters of silence in the depths of our subconscious"

(qtd. in Baer 5). Likewise, writing about their lives helps Iranian-Americans dive deep

into their selves, digging out their "undiscovered selves" that have long been replaced,

suppressed or covered by the newly acquainted selves that have been formed through

the years of living outside their Iranian social context. According to Thomas Larson in

his book The Memoir and The Memoirist (2007), losing their "core selves" or what

Carl Jung calls "the undiscovered self" is what causes their disequilibrium as it is "the

internal quality which our civilization and traditions collectively suppress, and is

always alive and forming within us" (116). Without their core selves, they will turn

into, what Jalal Al-e-Ahmad describes, "a particle suspended in the space" or "a mote

on water" (qtd. in Vahdat 62). Writing about their physical and spiritual journeys

helps them negotiate with their contesting selves, reconciling them to attain a whole

2 A part of the title of an essay entitled, "The Journey Inward: Women's Autobiography" written by

Elizabeth R. Baer.

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balanced being. Fuchs explains that "regaining authority, finding a voice and restoring

emotional equilibrium" is guaranteed through writing (23). According to Larson,

memoir, rather than autobiography, is the genre that these Iranian women need:

"Autobiography is written by the public person who tells the birth-to-date story of her

persona. By contrast, the memoir allows the authentic self to lift the mask and tell the

story of how mask and self have been intertwined. The memoir's aim is to beget the

authentic self to come forward, to assume the mantle: expose the inauthentic" (129).

Therefore, the Iranian-American women are attracted to the genre of memoir as

they need a literary tradition that is no longer male-dominated, by re-writing the

political and social context of Iran from a female perspective in a genre that has been

assigned female by some writers such as Thomas Larson, Miriam Fuchs and George

F. Simons who also consider autobiography to be a male genre. Larson states that

"Despite the occasional female author, autobiography is a male genre" (12). Their

choice of this genre crystallizes their way of resisting the domineering Islamic regime.

They gallantly declare that they are going to write about themselves which has been

forbidden as a taboo by the Islamic theocracy that discouraged women's writing. In

addition, choosing to write about their selves in a non-Iranian context, but rather in a

Western style is a blow to the Islamic regime which considers whatever is Western to

be the equivalent of evil. In other words, these women writers "have embraced this

genre in part to signal a kind of agency that heretofore was off-limits to them and

perhaps to reflect the new realities of negotiating identity in a non-Iranian context"

(Karim xxv). Besides, these Iranian-American memoirists took it upon themselves to

speak on behalf of the disempowered Iranian women who are not allowed to publish

their memoirs in Iran due to the extreme censorship. Being hyphenated American

gives them the space and liberty to criticize the political and social contexts of Iran

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without being harshly censored by the Islamic regime. For example, when Firoozeh

Dumas, an Iranian-American woman memoirist was asked in an interview if her

memoir Funny in Farsi (2003) is available in Iran, she said that she sent it to be

translated into Persian, but the censor's office sent it back after it had been translated

asking her to remove the entire chapter "The Ham Amendment". She said, "I consider

that chapter the soul of the book, so having to remove it was painful. That's life under

an Islamic theocracy" (Dumas 203).

This thesis aims to illustrate that using the genre of memoir to write about the

"return" or "pilgrimage" to Iran by Iranian-American women writers is a quest for a

whole and complete identity (Karim xxvi). In order to do that, I will refer to some

memoirs written by Iranian exiles, but I will focus my study on three of them, chosen

from a wide range of memoirs for two reasons. One is that they are recognized

journalists which increases the readability of their memoirs as their American

colleagues and readers of their columns will be waiting on tenterhooks for their

personal accounts of Iran; they will be curious to see if their accounts are going to

satisfy their own prejudice about Iranians being hostage-takers or if they are going to

write about Iran as the childhood Eden. Being professional journalists also gives them

"an authority to address the broader social and political issues in contemporary Iran"

(Darzink 56). Besides, as they are educated in the West, they have learned that

nothing is beyond criticism; therefore, "they are being critical of their 'homeland' and

possibly also of their 'host land'" (Hashim and Manaf 545). The second reason why I

chose these three memoirists is because they represent three different generations, a

factor that I use to prove the idea that a memoir is the voice of a generation; through

the analysis of their texts, I embark on these differences, showing how they are

reflected in their writing. It is true that life narrative pinpoints individuality, but at the

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same time the Iranian Revolution is a socio-political event that has caused the trauma

of these women and their generations. Larson suggests that if ten siblings wrote their

own memoirs about growing up: "[W]e would find agreement, in general, only on the

barest facts. Everything else –pecking-order differences, stronger and weaker egos,

parental favoritism –would be subject to individual perspective…Which book is true?

All are true, none is truer, though each of the ten writers would defend his or her truth

forever" (19).

The chosen three contemporary Iranian-American women memoirists are Tara

Bahrampour, Gelareh Asayesh and Azadeh Moaveni. Karim declares that "These

writers do have experiences in common, but because of where they were born, where

they were raised or the circumstances of their or their family's immigration, there are

notable differences among them" (xxv). Tara Bahrampour is an Iranian-American

who has an Iranian father and an American mother. Being an Iranian-American who

lived in Iran gives her a different perspective on the customs of Iran from that of most

second-generation Iranian-Americans. Bahrampour is the author of the memoir To

See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America (1999) which describes her family's

migration to the United States after the 1979 Revolution and her journey back to Iran

after fifteen years. Unlike Tara Bahrampour, Gelareh Asayesh moved to the United

States with her family just before the Iranian Revolution. She is the author of the

memoir Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America (1999). Her family left Iran in

1977, but she revisited Iran in 1990. Living through the era of the Shah and coming

back after the Revolution makes her feel the difference between the two Irans. The

case of Azadeh Moaveni is quite different from that of Tara Bahrampour and Gelareh

Asayesh. Born and raised in northern California to Iranian immigrant parents makes

Azadeh Moaveni's perspective towards Iran a distant, and inherited one. Therefore, in

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her memoir Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and

American in Iran (2005), she expresses her cultural shock by comparing the Iran of

the imagination, which her parents remember, to the Iran of the Islamic Revolution.

Through their memoirs, the three memoirists aim to reinforce their Iranian-ness in

order to seek their wholeness, so re-visiting Iran highlights their need to belong.

"Anyone familiar with the classical Persian poets such as Hafez and Rumi knows that

these poet-philosophers wrote beautifully about their desire for connection –whether

connection to God, a lover or nature" put by Karim (xxviii). That same desire of

connection has passed on to the contemporary Iranian-American women memoirists

and has been thoroughly explained in their memoirs (xxviii). This sense of belonging

is reflected in their increased movement to and from Iran, either for the first time or

on repeated occasions. Karim mentions that "The lure of Iran as cultural motherland

yet a place too difficult to live in on a daily basis" is expressed in their writing (xxvi).

They reflect on family ties, traditions, Persian literature and the Iranian New Year, but

at the same time, they cannot live without the liberty their American-ness is granting

them. They are interested in blending their cultures in their memoirs using different

techniques.

In order to understand why contemporary Iranian-American women have

become memoirists, Chapter One will introduce the Iranian literary tradition to see

how women have managed to have a voice by transgressing the all-male Iranian

literature. They have been able not only to break free from their walled life and instill

themselves in literature, but also to write memoirs about their private lives. Roya

Hakakian, author of the memoir Journey from the Land of No (2004) declares the

reason why one has to look back on these women's past to understand how far they

have come: "Look at the past twenty years, what Iranian women have been

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through…there has to be a way to avenge ourselves, and we do it on paper…It's a

vindictive way of looking back at my own history to say 'We had a voice'" (qtd. in

Malek 363).

In other words, in this chapter, I will discuss the literary and socio-cultural

changes that women have experienced within the historical frame in pre- and post-

revolutionary Iran. For Iranian women to write about themselves is a confident step

that enabled them to enter the public sphere which has been denied to them in the

Iranian tradition. Besides, writing accentuates the "new identity" of women after the

revolution as they have attained their autonomy through re-writing about the

revolution from their own perspectives which in turn reflects that women have

become politically aware and active citizens after the revolution.

In Chapter Two, I will take a further step with Iranian exiled women who

choose the genre of memoir, rather than autobiography to write their accounts. This

chapter delineates the genre of memoir and its characteristics. It also discusses the

reasons why Iranian-American women have chosen this genre for their writing.

Moreover, it expands on the therapeutic nature of memoirs.

After reviewing the Iranian women literary tradition, and grasping why they

chose the genre of memoir, an analysis of the three memoirs is in due course to apply

what have been presented. That is why in the following three chapters, I will provide

a general background on each of the three memoirists: Tara Bahrampour (1968- ),

Azadeh Moaveni (1976- ) and Gelareh Asayesh (1962- ). Besides, each chapter is

dedicated to provide a qualitative analysis of each of the three texts, pinpointing the

way they express their generations and illustrating each one's journey towards

wholeness.

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In conclusion, the experience of these women is universal as being a

hyphenated person becomes the rule rather than the exception in the mutli-cultural

trend the globe is directed to. However, their experience is painful as they belong to

two opposing cultures. Writing about their traumatic experience has been difficult and

nerve-racking as they have been put in some critical situations where they have to

choose between their two cultures. Nevertheless, writing their memoirs helped them a

great deal not only to overcome the pain of being fragmented, but also to appreciate

the privileges provided by being a multi-cultural being. They appreciate the plurality

provided to them by the Iranian culture as we find Iranians celebrate both pre-Islamic

occasions, like the Persian New Year and the Fire Festival and Shia Islamic

occasions, like Muharram and Ramadan. They also appreciate the freedom granted to

them by the American culture, for example, the freedom to write their memoirs in

which they criticize both the American and Iranian cultures, but they are still allowed

to publish them. They even step up being cultural diplomats, taking upon themselves

to explain each culture to the other which in turn allows them to enjoy inner peace

once they see themselves as whole beings.

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CHAPTER I

IRANIAN WOMEN'S LITERARY TRADITION

[T]he written word is the most powerful tool we have to protect ourselves,

both from the tyrants of the day and from our own traditions. Whether it is the

storyteller of legend Scheherazade, staving off beheading by spinning a

thousand and one tales, feminist poets of the last century who challenged the

culture's perception of women through verse, or lawyers like me, who defend

the powerless in courts, Iranian women have for centuries relied on words to

transform reality. (Ebadi 209)

These words are written by the 2003 Iranian Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi in

her memoir, Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her Life and

Country (2006). A former judge, lawyer and human rights activist and Nobel laureate

in a land where women have been brutally silenced, Ebadi is an example of many

Iranian women who have struggled to break free of the all-male literary tradition, of

the secluded private sphere and allotted silence dictated on women. In her quote, she

manages to cast light on the history of women's literary tradition from Scheherazade's

oral narrative to her own memoir. In her book, Veils and Words: The Emerging

Voices of Iranian Women Writers (1992), Farzaneh Milani3 states:

Iranian women, for centuries, were suppressed physically and verbally by the

conventions of the veil and public silence. The norms and values that

regulated women's physical concealment applied equally to their literary

expression…Traditional propriety, Hojab-o-Haya, or Sharm, demanded that a

3 I excessively quote from Milani's book because there are not enough sources on Iranian women's

literary tradition. Even Milani points out this fact: "No full-length study of women's literary tradition in

contemporary Iran was undertaken despite the popular attention women writers had elicited" (xv).

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woman's body be covered, her voice go unheard, her portrait never be painted,

and her life story remain untold. (46)

For Ebadi and many other Iranian women publishing their memoirs, having

their life stories told is "the record of women's struggle to gain access to autonomous

subjectivity, to become the speaking as well as the spoken subject. It is a rebirth of a

sort. It is an attempt by women writers to establish dialogues with themselves, with

other women, and with men" (73).

This dramatic shift from the private to the public sphere –from oral stories told

to all-female audience to memoirs that expose women's private lives that had been

considered a taboo told to an audience of both male and female –did not take place on

the spur of the moment. Milani emphasizes that:

Women have literally transformed Persian literature in less than 150 years.

They have desegregated a predominantly all-male tradition. They have

reappraised cultural norms and patterns on a very intimate level. By achieving

public, creative expression, they have delivered men from ceaseless

soliloquies. Although men have lost exclusive control over public discourse…

they have, through women, gained access to dialogue. (72)

In other words, it took Iranian women almost a century and half to trespass the

male-dominated literature and to become voiced. In order to grasp the idea of this

shift in Iranian women's literary tradition, an understanding of the catalysts that

caused this shift and of the socio-political context within which these changes took

place is required. Karman Talattof finds that the phenomenon of women's works

produced after the 1979 Revolution, where their private experiences become public, is

"noteworthy not simply because this is a literature produced by women about women,

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but also because this body of work displays a contrast with the literary works

produced by women in the decades preceding the revolution" (531). Pre-

revolutionary women's themes had been mainly centered on socio-political issues

(531). In other words, when the country was modernized in the Shah's era, women

tended to write about socio-political issues and when women were covered from head

to toe in chadors, they wrote about gender themes. Talattof considers the 1979

Revolution to be the major historical event that separates the two different literary

discourses presented in women's literature. Therefore, discussing the literary changes

and developments in Iranian women's writing that take place in the aftermath of

political upheavals should be made within the context of the socio-political events that

have influenced these changes. That is why Talattof presents the concept of the

"episodic literary movement (discursive movement)":

A literary episode is taken to mean a cluster of aesthetically significant literary

texts that together form a discursive literary movement. It is thematic and

temporal, a convergence of meaning at a particular time. Literary movements

can be conceptualized in terms of their ideologies of representation, in which

case they demonstrate affinity with social movements… Once established in

forms of social, religious, or literary discourse, ideologies motivate political

movements and create new semantic systems. The dominant cultural and

socio-political discourse of a specific episode determines which ideological

issues will be central to its literature. (532)

To further explain his point, Talattof refers to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of

"dialogic" that explains the relationship between the author and social and literary

conventions: "Although broader social and personal factors are important in

structuring literary works such as those created by female Iranian authors, the actual

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process of producing literary meanings can be most successfully analyzed within the

dynamic of the discursive context within which they are produced" (533).

Supporting the same idea, Golbarg Bashi states that "The political situation in

Iran has always brought ideological discourses, which in turn has created different

and specific episodes in literature" (2). Consequently, in order to discuss the episodes

of Iranian women's literature, a background of Iran's recent history, and an account of

women's status in the past will provide a full view of how they successfully squeezed

themselves into the Iranian exclusively male tradition, creating their own literary

tradition in post-revolutionary Iran.

Iranian Women's Invisibility in Literature

Iranian women's invisibility is culturally constructed as it is a tradition

inherited from their ancestors. This tradition is deep-rooted in the ancient Persian

concept of authoritarianism that resulted from the fact that "[t]he institution of Persian

kingship spans the history of Iran from the Achaemenians of the fourth century B.C

through the Pahlavis of the twentieth century A.D", as Sandra Mackey puts it in her

book, The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation (1996) (95). This

authoritarian tradition which was imprinted in the Iranians took different shapes in the

Iranian patriarchal society: the family is ruled by the patriarch, the nation is ruled by

the absolute king and "[i]n religion, authority figures to whom the faithful owe

obedience are central to the theology of Shia Islam" (93). Therefore, in installing the

father as the head of the family, males were decreed superior to women. This ordering

of Iranian society into dominant men and subordinate women was mirrored in the

veiling of women which Mackey dates back to Cyrus the Great who founded the

empire of Persia: "In the endless debate on the origin and practice of veiling in the

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Islamic world, which many see as symbolic of woman's inferior status to man, some

historians argue that it was Cyrus the Great who, ten centuries before Islam,

established the custom of covering women to protect their chastity" (94).

Since then, women have been veiled, silenced and excluded. Their invisibility

is also evident in the fact that at Persepolis4, the cornerstone of Persian national

identity, women are absent (94). Mackey describes how its architect reflects the

patriarchal society: "All the splendid reliefs and noble statues carved at the peak of

empire represent bulls, maned lions, winged stallions, and warring men. Even the

servants who walk behind kings swinging fans or swatting flies are men" (94-5).

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh5, The Book of Kings, stands with Persepolis as a symbol of

Iranian identity. About Shahnameh, Mackey says, "Four times longer than the Iliad,

the Shahnameh winds through a thousand years of history from the Achaemenians to

the Sassanians…Through a series of heroic acts in defense of the homeland, Iranians

are led –and sometimes betrayed –by their kings" (62). Similarly, women are not even

mentioned in the book title, and the therein lies the predominantly masculine

character of the Persian literature where women were praised for being "Sangin o

Samet [solemn and silent]" (Milani 49). Since then, women's silence was treasured;

rather, it was a key criterion of the woman's beauty and desirability if not a pre-

requisite of the ideal woman:

Persian literature abounds in eulogies about "gracefully silent" women. As the

protagonist in Shahrnush Parispur's Zanan Bedun-e Mardan [Women without

4 Persepolis is the capital of the Persian Empire. It was built on a platform as "a symbolic throne, a

metaphor for the seat of empowerment from which the Persian king reigned over an ecumenical world

order" (Mackey 28). 5"Ferdowsi was the nom de plume of Abdul Qasim Mansur, who was born in 935 near Mashhad in

northeastern Iran. Believed to have been a landowner who needed money for his only daughter's

dowry, Ferdowsi undertook a commission from Mahmud of Ghazan –a military commander and a poet

–for an epic poem. Over the next thirty-five years, he composed the sixty-thousand-line Shahnameh"

(Mackey 61-2).

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Men] describes his ideal mate, he echoes an age-old aesthetic model: "She is a

girl, eighteen years of age, excessively beautiful, gracefully silent, bashful,

timid, kind, industrious, diligent, modest, chaste, solemn, and neat. She wears

her veil when in public and always casts her eyes down. She blushes all the

time." (49)

The appreciation of women's silence is not only attributed to traditional

writers, but modernist writers as well. For example, Sadeq Hedayat, in his novel, Buf-

e Kur [The Blind Owl] equates women's beauty with their silence. Thus, Milani states

that "[T]he only woman who excites the narrator's aesthetic admiration and desire is

his source of comfort and delight is a perpetually silent woman" (50). Even a

prominent literary figure as Jalal Al-e Ahmad avoids referring, in his autobiography,

Sangi bar Gui [A Tombstone on a Tomb], to his wife directly by her name although

his wife is a respected writer in her own right, Dimin Daneshvar; he only refers to her

as "my wife" (47-8). For him, she is invisible unless she is defined in relation to him.

The same is clarified in the classical heritage, like the well-known story of Layla and

Majnun, which reinforces the idea of silencing women. Both Layla and her Majnun

compose poetry. While Majnun's poems are collected, Layla's "brilliant chains of

poems were delivered to the wind, which remained Layla's sole privileged audience"

(51). Lamenting the imposed silence upon her, she grudgingly grieves her fate, "He is

a man, I am a woman… He can talk and cry and express the deepest feelings in his

poems. But I? I am a prisoner. I have no one to whom I can talk, no one to whom I

can open my heart: shame and dishonor would be my fate" (51).

In short, the veil –in the Iranian context– constructs dichotomies between

female/male, veiled/unveiled, private/public, indoors/outdoors, silent/voiced,

subordinate/dominant (51). Consequently, women were absent and invisible from the

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literary tradition as well as from public life. In addition, in men's literature, women

were cherished for their silence. However, Iranian women have implicitly found a

way to express themselves: if they are forbidden from the written works or from being

heard, like Layla, they can tell their tales and they can have their own audience, like

Scheherazade.

Iranian Women's Oral Literary Tradition

"If the veil concealed their bodies and silence muted their voices, the blank page

covered the storytelling craft of Iranian women…Veiled women storytellers know

best the story of the blank page. It is their uncontested territory, their tale, their fate. It

is the destiny they share, their kismet. It signifies a present absence" explains Milani

(177).

Iranian women exerted concerted effort to defy the silence imposed upon

them. Instead of passively accepting it, they developed their own literary tradition:

oral narrative. Regardless of the fact that their tales were doomed to be forgotten

since women were forbidden access to the formal written work, these tales have been

present despite their absence. While men excluded women from the public sphere,

women excluded men from their oral tradition. Salman Rushdie (1947- ) says,

"Because it is the women who keep those tales, it passes through the female line,

going from mothers to daughters" (qtd. in Milani 178). He adds that it is their

"domestic craft" which gives them the upper hand since they "held the key to the

magic world of tales…Storytelling was not only an outlet for their life stories, it was

also an artistic arena in which they found an expression for their life stories. Their

unwritten tales were handed down orally from generation to generation" (178). Stories

tell us who we are. In his book, The Healing Power of Stories: Creating Yourself

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Through the Stories of Your Life (1966), Daniel Taylor quoted Alasdair MacIntyre:

"[T]here is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own,

except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources" (7).

So, through women's tales we could understand the Iranian society: their customs,

traditions and way of living. Moreover, stories have an assuring nature. Taylor also

states that "We find through stories that others also share our pain, confusion, hopes,

jokes, and little victories. Maybe we even feel a bit of relief that some we hear about

have it worse than we do…Exchanging stories stiffens our courage" (6). In other

words, women could share their suffering in stories; through sharing these stories,

they could give each other comfort and support. Furthermore, storytelling is a strategy

for survival:

It saved Shaherzad, who spent her wedding night telling stories in order to

escape the fate of her predecessors, the many virgin girls who lost their heads

the morning after. A Thousand and One Nights, better known in the West as

Arabian Nights Entertainment, exists because women knew of the

transformative and liberating power of storytelling. (Milani 178)

Through storytelling, women aimed not only at defying the silence that was

forced on them, but also at empowering, voicing and liberating themselves within

their confines by subverting their role as receptive of male, written literature to

productive of female oral tradition:

Through the magic of storytelling [Scheherazade] reverses the relationship of

domination and subordination. She becomes the active agent, the narrator,

while he turns into a passive and addicted listener. She appropriates the

sovereign prerogative, the discourse, and tames the sovereign…She tells,

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[King Shahriyar] listens. She mesmerizes, he is mesmerized. She controls, he

is controlled. (179)

Thus, it is true that women were effaced from written texts and they were

deprived of having public recognition, but it is also true that within their walled

society, they managed to make their voice heard, their stories told and re-told through

generations, and above all to have their own exclusive tradition that male are not

allowed to venture into.

Women's Transgression of the All-Male Literary Tradition

Unlike Layla, who tells her poems to the wind or Scheherazade who, despite

having an audience, could not write her tales, the educated upper-class Iranian women

of the early twentieth century unveiled themselves, trespassed the male public sphere

and transgressed the all-male literary tradition. This transgression times with two

catalysts in the Iranian history, the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11) and the

Pahlavis' modernization program, both of which helped in the emancipation of

women (Bashi 3).

About the nineteenth century, Milani states, "In the society of mid-nineteenth-

century Iran, knowledge, like a child, was only legitimized if properly fathered by a

man. In the hands of a woman, it became an unnecessary tool, a dangerous tool, even

a sign of the end of time" (77-8). In addition to being silenced, they were deprived of

access to education. Moreover, when surveying the Iranian women's history to

document the beginning of women's struggle for emancipation, Massoume Price dated

it back to the nineteenth century when the poet, Tahereh Qurratol'Ayn6 (1817-1852)

transgressed the men's world verbally, spatially and physically (Bashi 2). When

6 Born Fatemeh Barghani (Milani 82)

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women were veiled and excluded from public domain, she unveiled herself in public;

when theology and Arabic were reserved for men, she mastered Persian, Arabic and

Islamic literature and became a public scholar, discussing Islamic issues; when

traveling was out of women's reach, she was "[u]ninhibited by spatial constraints of

femaleness, moving from one city to another, crossing boundaries between nations

and cultures, she could not be pinned down" (Milani 94). She succeeded at turning

women's absence into presence.

Shortly after her unveiling act, the opposition of the veil became the theme of

the period along with a prevailing wave of Westernization. One of the ideas imported

from the West is that women should participate in the public sphere (Metz 113). In

her book, Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History (2001),

Nasrin Rahimieh states:

In diametric opposition to the revolution of 1979, the Constitutional

Revolution was fueled by an avid curiosity about the West. As the historian

Tavakoli-Targhi points out …"European penetration and intervention in

Iranian political economy had begun in the early 19th century… In the Iranian

political discourse Europe came to symbolize civilization, enlightenment,

knowledge, military and political might." (87)

Noticeable numbers of women from the upper classes, or those who were

related to politically active men, were active in supporting the constitutionalist

movement since one of its thematic concerns was the emancipation of women. They

revolted against the veil, demanding its abolition (Milani 29-31). Milani states that "A

group of women were seen in broad daylight marching in the most crowded streets of

Tehran and taking off their veils while shouting, 'Long live the Constitution. Long

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live freedom'" (31). Henceforward, poetry became women's channel for demanding

equal rights. For example, the poet Qurratol'Ayn expressed the difference between a

man and a woman in Iranian society in the following lines:

Kingdom, wealth, and power for thee

Beggary, exile, and loss for me

If the former be good, it's thine

If the latter is hard, it's mine. (quoted in Milani 88)

The fact that women's published literature of this period is mainly confined to

poetry, except for some exceptions of educated women of the court and high

aristocracy, is noteworthy (32). Milani explains that "Poetry, out of all literary genres,

proved to fit most closely women's circumstances and possibilities" (58). In other

words, while women still oscillated between their long-confined domestic life and the

new concept of emancipation, poetry granted them the bridge between the private and

public spheres.

Another attempt at transgressing the male-literary tradition was made in 1914

by Princess Taj al-Saltaneh (1883- n.d.), the daughter of Nasr od-Din Shah (1848-

1896). In her autobiography, she addressed European and American women,

comparing their condition to that of Iranian women as quoted in Nasrin Rahimieh's

book Missing Persians (2001):

I would say to them, "As you fight for your rights happily and honorably, and

emerge victorious in your aims, do cast a look at the continent of Asia. Look

into the houses, where the walls are three or five meters high and the only

entryway is a door guarded by a doorman. Beneath the chains of captivity and

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resistless weight of subjugation you will see a mass of oppressed cripples,

some sallow and pale-faced, others bare and hungry, yet others endlessly

expectant and mournful…these are women too; these are human too. These

are also worthy of due respect and merit. See how life treats them." (127-8)

Later on, another phase of emancipation was inaugurated in January 7th

, 1936

when Reza Shah Pahlavi7 (1925-1941) announced that unveiling became a royal

decree8. Actually both of the Pahlavis, Reza Shah and Mohammed Reza Shah (1925-

79) implemented social reform, inspired by Turkey's reform act of modernization.

Talattof states that: "The Pahlavis were committed to improving the status of women

through opening certain channels of social mobility such as education and

employment in the modern (state) sectors of economy as well as through the removal

of certain traditional obstacles that had hindered women's participation in public life"

(533).

For example, in 1963, women were allowed to vote; the Family Protection

Law granted women a court-approved divorce and the marriage of girls under thirteen

was forbidden. In 1966, the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI) was established; it

was responsible for women's health, literacy, education, law, social welfare and

international affairs (Bashi 5). Furthermore, the reform of the early 1960s allowed

women to be "enfranchised"; as a result, there was an increase in the number of

women who participated in the labor force in the 1960s and 1970s (Talatoff 533).

Talatoff mentions that "Some women even became the occupants of the highest

echelons of the state bureaucracy at the cabinet, parliamentary, and ambassadorial

7 In his attempt to restore Iran to its pre-Islamic Persia as a way of modernization, he chose the name

"Pahlavi", the Persian language Iranians spoke before the Arabs destroyed independent Persia, to be his

dynastic name (Mackey 170). 8 Mohammed Reza Shah put an end to this law when he came to the throne in1941 (Bashi 4).

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levels" (533). In short, women moved away from their veiled, traditional territory, the

house, and made their entry into the male domain.

However, in their reforms, the Pahlavis were oblivious to the fact that the

Iranian identity combines two inseparable things, Persia and Shia Islam. By

reinforcing one (through Westernization) and effacing the other (through unveiling),

Iranians felt culturally alienated9 (Mackey 184-5). Thus, some intellectuals and

writers, in reaction to Westernization, started to advocate nationalism. Henceforward,

literary works by women and men alike were produced through the context of

oppositional literary movement; Talattof further adds that "Borrowing heavily from

various forms of socialist ideology and Marxist literary criticism, this opposition was

epitomized in 'committed literature' (adabiyat-i mutahid)" (534). This literature

discloses the problems of social inequality and political despotism and oppression.

Writers aimed at galvanizing people into action (534). Talattof mentions how Jalal

Al-i Ahmad –who belonged to a group that opposed the state reforms –in his book,

Ghorbzadgi (Westoxication, 1962), "links both consumerism and women's

emancipation to what he perceives as the subversive, colonial, Western influence on

the pure, indigenous Iranian culture" (534). Besides, Al-i Ahmed was concerned with

the Iranians' cultural alienation which was the result of being plagued by the West. He

says, "Today we stand under that [Western] banner, a people alienated from

ourselves; in our clothing, shelter, food, literature, and press. And more dangerous

than all, in our culture" (qtd. in Mackey 216). As for women, they abandoned any

gender issues for the sake of sociopolitical ones through romantic and didactic novels.

However, to evade censorship and punishment, these writers developed metaphorical

9 Besides, during the celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, Muhammed Reza

Shah conspicuously disregarded "any acknowledgement of that accompanying part of Iran's history and

culture shaped by Islam" (Mackey 7).

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forms of literary expressions (Talattof 534). For example, in order to convey the

meaning of something they were forbidden to refer to directly –like freedom, political

change and revolution– they tended to use similes, symbols, personification and

metaphors (534). This literary stance lasted until the 1979 Revolution. That is why

Talattof describes the pre-revolutionary literary discourse as social. One of the

prominent literary figures of this literary episode is Simin Danishvar (1921- n.d.) who

is called "The emblem of commitment" (534). Her novels and short stories back

"committed literature" in the way "[h]er characters seek to be recognized as advocates

of humanism and assure the members of committed literature that, although gender

issues are personally important, they will not hinder their greater collective quest for

political change" (537). For example, in one of her short stories, Tasadof (The

Accident), the male and female characters, husband and wife, represent the dichotomy

between the East and West, respectively. Through the husband, Danishvar criticizes

the consumerism of the West when he objects to his wife's materialistic behavior; she

then divorces him. The fact that she has the say in their marriage reflects the

superiority of the West and inferiority of the East. When the man beats his wife, it

pinpoints the anti-Western reaction of Danishvar. These metaphorical representations

of the East and the West are "consistent with Al-i Ahmad's anti-Western exposé in

Westoxication" (536). Another icon of the "commitment literature" is Forugh

Farrokhzad (1935-67). In her poem, "One Like No Other", she prepares her readers

for a "savior" who is going to lead a revolution and bring justice: "Someone is

coming…/Someone who can't be arrested and/ handcuffed and thrown in

jail…/Someone's coming out of the sky over Artillery Square on the night of the

fireworks/ And he'll spread the tablecloth/and divide the bread" (qtd. in Talattof 538).

The fact that the leader "cannot be arrested" means that he is going to be supported by

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the people; the oppressor who wants to arrest, handcuff and imprison the leader is a

metaphor of the state; and the main characteristic of this leader is that he will do

justice to the people (538). Another poet is Simin Bihbahani (1927- n.d.) who states

that her works "explain people's pain and dissatisfaction. I confess that since I have

presented my poems for public judgment, I have been encouraged by critics and have

been welcomed by the people, especially those from deprived and oppressed classes"

(qtd. in Talattof 539). In other words, these women subordinated and demoted their

need to discuss gender issues, things that touch them deep down, and rather decided to

prioritize social issues. This has cost them an exorbitant price as stated by Mary Jacob

who is quoted in Carolyn G Heilbrun's book, Writing A Woman's Life (1988):

But this access to a male-dominated culture may equally be felt to bring with it

alienation, repression, division –a silencing of the 'feminine', a loss of

women's inheritance… To propose a difference of view, a difference of

standard –to begin to ask what the difference might be –is to call in question

the very terms which constitute that difference. [She means] the rift

experienced by women writers in a patriarchal society. (40)

If making their presence into the literary world would cost them their identity,

they will do it. That is exactly why these women writers deserve recognition because

they took it upon themselves to suppress their gender issues which should be a major

concern in a society that accuses them and their predecessors of "loss of reputation,

[of] allegations of immorality, promiscuity, lunacy, even heresy" (Milani 8). Milani

advocates women's participation in literary and social movements:

For too long, for instance, it has been assumed that the stimulus behind the

movement for unveiling and the liberation of women's literary voice in Iran

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has been either masculine or culturally exogenous (i.e., Western). As if

notions of autonomy, equality, and development are solely the prerogative of

Westerners or of men; as if Iranian women neither desired nor struggled for

them. (12)

In brief, women proved their ability to write creatively, and to express their

opinions about socio-political issues to prove to the masculine world that they can not

only enter the public sphere, but they can also respond to the need of their society,

motivating the readers to take actions through a revolution.

Writing as a "Historic Imperative" for Iranian Women

Since the revolution, a remarkable shift has occurred in women's fiction. For

the first time, women have found a more powerful voice in prose than in

poetry. Women's concerns, their points of view, the details of their personal

lives, formerly taboo topics, are now being discussed openly, subjectively,

unformulaicly [sic]. Perhaps the novelist Sharhnush Parispur does not

exaggerate when she claims…"If twenty years ago, you would have asked me

why I write, I would have probably answered, I write because I want to be

someone; or I protest without even knowing why. Today, however … I can

say I write because the course of events has suddenly pushed my generation in

the crossroad of events. It seems as if writing now is a historic imperative."

(Milani 199)

The "now" in her quote coincides with the compulsory veiling after the 1979

Revolution when women considered their writing a "historical imperative". In spite of

the obligatory veiling, which represents the Islamic Republic's reaction to the

Westernized unveiled woman, women's literature makes astounding advances inside

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and outside Iran. Surprisingly, the number of women's published books after the

revolution exceeds its prerevolutionary numbers. Milani states that "Between the

writers of 1983 and 1985, 126 books by or about women were published in Iran. In

the course of twelve months, more than 500 such articles were written. If compulsory

veiling was meant to segregate and silence women, then it has not been successful"

(231). As previously noticed, Iranian women cannot submissively be put back into the

walled, excluded private sphere after their long struggle for liberation. They master a

magnificent way of manipulating the situation for their own good. Therefore, if they

are expected to be veiled and if the Islamic theocracy "demands that its writers

reexamine, reevaluate, and redefine not only the nature of artistic activity but the very

essence of art, women writers have managed to take a visibly more active part in the

Iranian literary mainstream" (233).

The post revolutionary government dictated a new approach to literature as it

redefined literature in a way that served its political discourse. Two weeks after the

revolution, in a meeting with the representatives of the Writers Association of Iran,

Ayatollah Khomeini (1900-1989) stated that writers should be committed to the

revolution, "Now, you should use your pen for the welfare of this people and write for

the welfare of this society" (qtd. in Milani 232). The same meaning is delivered at the

Congress of Poetry, Literature, and Art in 1982 by President Khameini: "If a

revolution and a culture do not utilize art to establish and express itself, that

revolution will fail to take root and mature" (qtd. in Milani 233). The question now is

how women can support the revolution that has failed them. Losing their ground, by

being reshaped and redefined by the Islamic theocracy, Iranian women have thought

of a way that assures their presence in the literary tradition without being censored.

Ali Akbar Mahdi expresses this dilemma:

27El-Rayis

To demand those opportunities in the midst of a repressive and misogynist

state, Iranian women find themselves forced to be more concerned with their

basic rights, security against the unyielding forces of fanaticism, and dignity in

face of two decades of assault on their identity and status… Iranian women

find themselves oscillating between contradictory tendencies: between the

desire to defy and that to survive, between liberation and destruction, between

achieving the peace of freedom and dealing with fear of violence. (66)

The characteristics of the literary works of this period are thus different. This

period is characterized by the feminist discourse which entails change in themes and

characterization (Talattof 541). The most prominent thing that best describes their

post-revolutionary works is that they reflect a "collective action without actors"

(Mahdi 68). They act, but without a leader; they all agree to use writing as a medium

to express their oppression without really agreeing (68). It served them well because

"the high activity, high visibility and widespread presence of women …will open

greater space for them, thus reducing the patriarchal space" (68). That is why a

"sense of sisterhood and identification" prevails this literary episode (Milani 234).

According to Milani, "Women's limitations and suffering are not seen as merely

personal, private. They are not depicted as unavoidable. Rather, they are portrayed as

endemic to social structures that can and ought to be altered. Anger and revolt emerge

as major themes" (234). Mahdi mentions that "one Iranian woman has observed,

'Lipstick is not just a lipstick in Iran. It transmits a political message. It is a weapon'"

(66). Finding their body being veiled and unveiled in contest between modernity and

Islam, they decided to reconcile these two poles in their writing. They reinforced the

theme of the Iranian identity being woven by these two intertwined concepts; their

literature "neither advocates a return to 'pure' ethnic origin nor does it accept the

28El-Rayis

exclusiveness of Western models of individualism, democracy, objectivity, women's

rights, gender relations, and so forth" (Milani 235). Furthermore, resisting the idea of

being confined to the house, the theme of mobility is emphasized in their works.

Iranian women are like the Moroccan writer, Fatima Mernissi who finds mobility

more satisfying than paradise: "More important than Paradise is the freedom to move

around without conditions; without qualifications; without permission" (qtd. in Milani

236-7). Ebadi mentions in her memoir how Iranian women experience lack of

freedom because of the komiteh, or morality police who exert pressure on women,

inspecting them for showing a hair or two from under their hejabs, instead of arresting

criminals: "The komiteh, or morality police, harassed all Iranians –Muslims as well as

Iranian Christians and Jews, old people as well as the young –but they preyed upon

women with a special enthusiasm" (96). Ebadi concludes that the aim of these

harassments is to force women to stay home: "I concluded that there was little one

could do for protection against a state that simply wished to impose a climate of fear.

And that was the ultimate aim, I suspected, a fear so pervasive that it would keep

women at home, the place where traditional Iranian men believed they should be"

(103).

However, these women writers use their works as a medium where they make

their voice heard and the fact that more women stayed at home grants them more

readers: "The literary critics Reza Barahani, Nasrin Takhayuri, and Karim Imami

confirm that ordinary women who are confined to their homes spend a great deal of

time reading. The presence of such a readership and the popularity of female authors

are reflected in the frequent reprinting of these works" (Talattof 543).

In addition to the different themes tackled in the post revolutionary period,

also different genres are ventured into by women, like biographies, autobiographies,

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diaries, letters, and most recently, memoirs (550). As noted, these genres require self-

exposition which has long been forbidden to women. Renouncing the imposition of

the government of having women veiled, disempowered and silenced, Iranian women

writers take it upon themselves to define themselves personally, socially and even

politically (Milani 233-4).

Self-Definition in Iranian Women's Writing

Before discussing Iranian women's increasing interest in self narratives, a need

to understand the reason why this genre has long been avoided by Iranian men and

women is primarily needed.

Regarding women, it is not surprising in the Iranian context to expect that

women would be forbidden from autobiographical writing since they themselves have

been veiled, secluded and privatized: "In a sexually segregated society where access

to a woman's world and words is limited, and the concept of honor is built around

woman's virginity (proof of her inaccessibility) women's autobiographies, with their

assertive self-attention and self-display, cannot easily flourish" (Milani 201).

However, it is unusual for men to be reluctant to use the autobiographical

genre. Since autobiography helps men to feed their ego as it is a "personal history

document" of the autobiographer, one expects that men would be enthusiastic to feed

their self-image (204). It could be true anywhere else, but not in Iran where "'a real'

man is expected to be self-contained, in charge of himself and his surroundings,

serious, invariably ceremonial, remote, given more to thoughts than emotions. Crying,

getting emotional, are for women and little girls, as is confiding" (201).

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There are many factors that made autobiography, of all other Western genres

that have long influenced the modern Persian literature, the scarcest genre. To begin

with, Persian art is traditionally impersonal. It is noticeable in exhibitions of Persian

art that "painted figures are given in a disembodied, flat manner, which makes them

appear without corporeal substance" (206). Milani asserts that "In Iran, where not

only has art been mainly impersonal but also where an individual's identity is closely

tied to the community and where use of the first-person-singular pronoun is still hard

for people and is often diffused a bit by we, writing an I-book is not an easy task"

(206). Actually, many Iranian artists, critics and writers try to evade self-exposure.

For example, in an interview with the painter Homa Partovi, she notes, "I can talk to

you about my work, but talking about myself is always extremely hard, almost

impossible, for me" (qtd. in Milani 207). Another argument that explains the rarity of

autobiographies is censorship: "the fear that the information revealed in them can be

used or, rather, misused against their authors" (209). For example, when the novelist

Bozorg 'Alavi- who was imprisoned in 1937 for political reasons- was asked if he had

ever considered writing an autobiography, he admitted that he wanted to. He added:

But an autobiography, in order to be meaningful, had to tell the whole truth. It

needed to be written with candor and a feeling of freedom… The time for that

had not yet come. There were still people alive whose positions and welfare

would be jeopardized, if his relationship with them were ever made public.…

Under the circumstances, if an autobiography were truly called for, then much

better to write it and have it published posthumously. After one's death, people

would be more inclined to view one's life and works with greater objectivity.

(quoted in Milani 209-10)

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Censorship has played a central role in the most of "the 1,100 years of Persian

literature"; it reflects "the strength of totalitarian regimes, religious fanaticism, and

chaotic, ultimately repressive historical periods" (210). To evade censorship, writers

developed a metaphorical language to express their message in codes. However, this

figurative language was not suitable for autobiographies. In comparing herself to

Simone de Beauvoir (1908- 1986), Simin Daneshvar (1921-2012) agrees that in

Iranian society, an autobiography that is sincere is going to be dull:

Recently, I read Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography. What a happy and

cheerful life she had. She studied on time. She gratified her sexual needs on

time. But then what about me –Simin Daneshvar –who had to witness

thousands of unpleasant events… I had to struggle for basic human needs.

What is there to write about other than pain and sorrow? (quoted in Milani

214)

Iranian women, who have encountered many political and social upheavals

such as revolutions, the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), suppression, and imprisonment,

are less likely to write autobiographies. Nevertheless, this reluctance to self-exposing

narratives has recently changed. The first autobiography written by an Iranian woman

dates back to the mid-twentieth century "when Banu Mahvash, a singer / dancer, and

Maleke-ye E'tezadi, a political activist, published their highly unconventional life

stories" (220). Henceforward, this trend became famous among publicly known and

upper-class and women of the court. For example, Faces in the Mirror (1980) is

written by Princess Ashraf Pahlavi (1919- ); Soraya: The Autobiography of Her

Imperial Highness, Princess Soraya (1963) is written by Empress Soraya Bakhtiari

(1932-2001); Mes Mille et un Jours (My Thousand and One Days) (1978) is written

by Empress Farah Pahlavi (1938- ), and Princess Shams Pahlavi (1917-1996) wrote

32El-Rayis

published in installments in Etela'at Mahyiyaneh (221). Then, Iranian women started

to write other self-narrative genres, such as memoirs. Like autobiographies, memoirs

provide a projection of the author's self, but "the primary focus seems to be directed

more toward historical or sociogeographical recounting" (207). The fact that Iranian

women choose autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, or any self-writing narratives is

compelling.

In order to answer the puzzling question of why Iranian women decided to

use self-writing narratives where they re-write and re-define their selves while

existing in a culture that "wanted a woman to be childlike, helpless and passive… –

obedient, submissive, someone who does not step out of her role"10

, we should

scrutinize Mark Freeman's words thoroughly. In his book, Rewriting the Self: History,

Memory, Narrative (1993), Mark Freeman clarifies:

For we are once again considering the possibility of creation, broadly taken:

creation of new social realities, new stories to tell, and new selves to tell about

them. What does it mean for human beings to be able to create all these new

things? It means that in addition to being subjects in the sense of being

subjected –to the determinative power of culture, we are subjects who have the

power- in principle, if not always in practice- to recreate both culture itself and

our place within it. Here, then, is yet another meaning of rewriting the self: in

becoming aware of the ways in which we are determined and in considering

alternate modes of living our lives than the ones bequeathed us, we denature

and demystify the established order of selfhood itself, thus paving the way for

different stories to be told. (186)

10

Davar Ardalan. My Name IS Iran. New York: Henry Holt and Company 2007. P 193

33El-Rayis

If women are imprisoned within their society, they can liberate themselves in

their writing; if women are marginalized, they will bring themselves to the forefront;

and if they are expected to be voiceless, they are going to talk publicly and freely, not

only about gender issues, but rather about their own personal lives. They are going to

expose the self that has long been suppressed. By doing this, they aim at changing the

stultifying social conditions that are meant to set them backward to their starting point

as invisible beings. For example, Taj-os Sltanah's Memoir written in 1914 but

published in 1982, is a good example of "a culturally defined, silent woman [who]

becomes a self-defined, articulate author producing a narrative characterized and

unified by an integrated conception of her individuality" (Milani 224). She even

justifies her narrative by saying, "Do you believe I should occupy myself with any

other kind of history, while my own past and present is a sad and amazing history?"

(qtd. in Milani 224). Therefore, it is women rather than men who urgently need to

define themselves by subverting the definition imposed on them by a culture that sees

them as inferior and disempowered. By writing about their selves, they declare their

autonomy as they are the writers and the narrators of their own life stories:

By textualizing personal experience, by saying "I" in a written and public text,

this choice shows a reverence for and fascination with the individual. It

bespeaks a growing need for a literature of a woman-self in which woman

becomes both the object and the subject of scrutiny. In short, whether the self

is un-covered, dis-covered, or re-covered in these life narratives, they all

testify to a frantic search by women for autonomy and public self-expression.

(Milani 227)

All in all, Iranian women have managed to change their destiny through their

writing. They did not give in to being marginalized –if even visible –inferior and

34El-Rayis

subordinate beings. They successfully emerged from the deep bottom to the surface in

the literary world through their oral tradition; then, they transgressed the male-literary

tradition which cost them the suppression of their "feminine" identity. Later on, when

they found themselves obliged to be veiled and put back in their walled, excluded

society, on the verge of returning to point zero, they decided to rebel through their

words by exposing their selves in the self-writing genre which had been beyond their

reach for so long.

The following chapter is dedicated to the genre of memoir; it elaborates on the

genre and its characteristics. Besides, it clarifies the reason why Iranian-American

women need this genre and how different their themes are from the ones tackled in

Iranian women's memoirs.

35El-Rayis

CHAPTER II

IRANIAN-AMERICAN WOMEN'S MEMOIR

Marla Harris believes that "The watershed event that inspired Iranian women

to begin writing their life histories in significant and growing numbers was the

Islamic Revolution of 1979, which precipitated the emigration of between one and

four million Iranians" (141). In other words, the 1979 Revolution is the turning point

in the lives of Iranian women and by extension Iranian-American women, that

prompts them to write their memoirs to re-define themselves (141). For Iranian

women, as previously explained in Chapter I, memoir is the outlet that helps them to

re-define themselves as women in a male-dominated culture, discussing gender issues.

Iranian-American women also need to re-define themselves through the genre of

memoir, but in a different way. While being Iranian and having Iran as their homeland

are things taken for granted by Iranian women, Iranian-American women are left with

two mystifying questions: Who are we? And where do we belong?

As previously mentioned, under the umbrella of the term Iranian-American

lies three groups: Iranians who migrated to America just before or right after the 1979

Revolution, young Iranians who were born and raised in the United States and the

ones born and raised in Iran, but studied in the United States. However, Persis M.

Karim clarifies that the term Iranian-American sounds problematic for some Iranians

who identify themselves as neither Iranian nor American (xxiii).

To understand why Iranian-Americans try to dissociate themselves from Iran

by "construct[ing] and perform[ing] an identity removed from the contemporary

political scene requires delving into the history of political ruptures between the two

countries" as Persis M. Karim and Nasrin Rahimieh put it (8). Rahimieh also

36El-Rayis

mentions that after the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, Iranian-Americans

tend "to refer to themselves as Persian instead of Iranian in an attempt to distance

themselves from the anti-Iranian sentiments" (20). The complicated relationship

between Iran and the United States goes back to the coup d'état orchestrated by the

CIA in 1953 "to remove from power the popular and democratically-elected prime

minister, Mohammed Mosaddegh" –who nationalized the Iranian oil industry –and to

reinstate the Shah (Karim and Rahimieh 8-9). Since then, Iranians have developed an

anti-American attitude that "eventually erupted in the 1979 revolution" (9). Another

incident that instigated the tension between these two countries is the hostage crisis of

November 4, 1979 when some revolutionary students took fifty-two American

hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran for four hundred and forty-four days.

Marina Nemat explains in her memoir Prisoner of Tehran (2007) that "They wanted

the United States to return the Shah, who was in the States for cancer treatment, to

stand trial in Iran" (105). Consequently, Iranians who live in America became "the

target of Americans' rage against the Iranian government" (Karim and Rahimieh 9).

Thus, Iranian-Americans felt that they were not welcome in either Iran or

America; in Iran, they were considered traitors, as they had left the country during the

political upheavals taking along with them their wealth which could have helped the

country out of its economic crisis. Nilou Mostofi explained their "perplexity": "They

are also blamed indirectly for the revolution because of their admiration and support

of the West and directly for the demise of Iran because of their hasty immigration and

removal of their wealth from the country" (690). Ebadi, who refused to leave Iran,

expresses, in her memoir, her discontent with her friends who left Iran:

When someone leaves Iran, it's as though that person has died to me. We're

friends so long as we share the same world, for as long as the same hopes

37El-Rayis

illuminate our lives, the same anxieties keep us awake at night. Years later,

when my friends traveled back to Iran for short visits, I saw how right I had

been. We still spoke Farsi, the same blood still ran through our veins, but they

were living on a different planet than I was. You could find the words we

exchanged in the same Persian dictionary, but it was as though we spoke

different languages. In reality, I had lost my friends. (81)

While in Iran they are considered traitors, in the West –particularly in America

–after the hostage crisis, exiled Iranians are considered terrorists. In her memoir,

Persepolis: The Story of Childhood and the Story of A Return (2006), Marjane Satrapi

mentions how, heart-achingly, her mother compares between how Iranians were

received in the West before and after the hostage crisis: "I remember the days when

we traveled around Europe. It was enough to carry an Iranian passport; they rolled out

the red carpet. We were rich before. Now as soon as they learn our nationality, they

go through everything, as though we were all terrorists. They treat us as though we

have the plague" (205).

Moreover, Davar Ardalan, in her memoir, My Name Is Iran ( 2007) expresses

how hard it is to be Iranian in America due to the hostage crisis, "[I]n Boston, I saw

graffiti on the streets with the words 'BOMB IRAN.' I felt out of place, lonely and

ashamed. I decided to drop my first name [Iran] and use a middle name, Davar, which

means 'arbitrator' in Persian" (144). Moreover, Jackie Abramian in her memoir, My

Iranian Matriarchs (2006) states:

As an "Iranian" student in an American college, I had the privilege of daily

harassment from American students who pushed their face against mine

demanding I "free the American hostages." Slogans such as "Nuke Iran"

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counterbalanced the "Death to America" banners flanked by Iranian students

marching in Tehran… I had to assure many angry American students that if I

were in charge of the Iranian government I would have gladly freed the

American hostages. But the insults continued. (116-7)

She also mentions an incident when "[a] Boston University Iranian student

was clubbed to death by three American students, sending warnings to all Iranians to

hide our identities and accents" (117). Lamenting the fact that one mistake has been

more than enough to erase the ancient civilization of the Persian Empire, Firoozeh

Dumas in her memoir, Laughing without An Accent (2008) bitterly states:

By the time the hostages were finally released, the impression of Iranians as

terrorists was firmly embedded in everybody's mind. Forget the Persian king

Cyrus, the first ruler ever to issue a declaration of human rights, back in the

sixth century B.C., more than a thousand years before the Magna Carta. Forget

that king Cyrus is mentioned many times in the Old Testament for freeing the

captive Jews from the Babylonians. Forget the contribution of Iranians to

literature, music, gardens, and food. Forget that Iranians are famous for their

hospitality and that most Americans who have traveled in Iran have loved the

country and its people. Four hundred and forty-four days is a long time,

seemingly long enough to erase everything good that happened before. (215)

In other words, Iranian-Americans are displaced both in their homeland, Iran

and in the host country, America. Satrapi expresses this displacement in her memoir,

saying: "I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't

even know anymore why I was living" (274). So, in addition to their identity crisis,

Iranian-American women are in a state of "homelessness" and "non-belonging-ness";

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they are "occupying the cusp" as described by Catherine Cucinella and Renee Curry

in their essay, "Exiled at Home" (2001). It is "a notion important to exile literature

because the cusp 'establishes its own centrality while locating itself on the margins of

two cultures'" (Cucinella and Renee 198). Furthermore, Karim describes them as

"uprooted": "Like the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, women of

the Iranian diaspora –mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, girlfriends, aunts, cousins –

have inherited the heartbreak and hurt of the émigré, the immigrant, the exiled, the

disconnected, the misunderstood and unwelcome; in a word: the uprooted" (xiii).

In order to fit in each culture, they resort to suppressing the self that would

cause them to be displaced. In other words, in Iran, they suppress their American self

to fit in, and in America, they suppress their Iranian self to fit in. As Davar Ardalan

admits in her memoir: "Suddenly I understood that like so many Iranian Americans, I

had been living in disguise. I had been afraid to share the Iranian side of myself with

Westerners but I had also been afraid to express my individuality and rise above the

cultural norms of my Iranian Side" (282). Suppressing a self that is part of their

identity made them disoriented and fragmented. Here, Daniel Taylor likens this

suppression of selves to fit in to the Greek mythology of Procrustes:

Procrustes is a character from Greek mythology who was less than a perfect

host. He invited guests to sleep in a bed but insisted that they fit it perfectly.

Anyone who was too short was stretched and made to fit, and anyone too long

had overhanging limbs chopped off. Many of us try to live by Procrustean

stories that force us to stretch and chop our experience to make it fit. (129)

To avoid the fate of Procrustes' guests and instead of oscillating between their

two selves, mistakenly thinking that they have to choose one and suppress the other to

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survive, Iranian-Americans need to accentuate both selves and accept their

hyphenated identity.

Therein lies the reason why Iranian-American women need a literary voice

that helps them understand the experiences that befell them as Iranians who were born

in the United States or grew up there, illustrating how their experiences are different

from those of their counterparts who were born and raised in Iran. According to

Robert Atkinson, "Telling a life story can be one of the most emphatic ways to answer

the question, 'Who am I?'" (128). That is why the genre of memoir for the Iranian-

American women has become the medium that helps them cope with the "chaotic

experiences that define revolution, war and immigration", to heal their wounds of

losing part of their selves and their homeland, and to reconcile between their

American-ness and Iranian-ness which in turn will help them attain their wholeness

(Karim xxi). The question now is how the genre of memoir supplies the needs of the

Iranian-American women. In other words, there must be certain characteristics that

make the genre of memoir the most suitable genre for the life story of Iranian-

Americans seeking to attain wholeness.

The Genre of Memoir and Its Characteristics

Vivian Gornick poses a question, which may have gone through everyone's

mind, in the title of her essay, "Why Memoir Now?" (1996). She finds out that:

"Thirty years ago, people who thought they had a story to tell sat down to write a

novel. Today they sit down to write a memoir. Urgency seems to attach itself these

days to the idea of a tale told directly from life, rather than one fashioned by the

imagination out of life. (Gornick 5) Thomas Larson agrees with Gornick in his book,

The Memoir and the Memoirist (2007) that memoir differs from fiction as "in the

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memoir, the truth and figuring out the truth abide" (Larson 25). Besides, Louise

Desalvo in her book Writing as a Way of Healing (1999) pinpoints that while writing

fiction requires talent, writing self-narrative "requires no innate talent, though we

become more skilled as we write" (15).

Larson dates the genre of memoir back to the late 1980s (xi). He adds that

memoir is not only a form of life narrative, but rather it is an extension or a sub-genre

of autobiography (xi). While some critics tend to use the two terms interchangeably,

there are some differences between them as Larson puts it: "Like any child, memoir

had had its issues with its parent, autobiography" (xi). For example, while

autobiography has been "dominated by the personal tale of a public figure", memoir is

written "by either known or unknown authors" (11-14). Another difference is, as

Gornick puts it, the "urgency" or "immediacy" of the memoir. Larson agrees with

Gornik: "With autobiography, we think there is only one life –the person lives it, then

writes it. Boom, Done. But the memoir feels prey to immediate emotional memory"

(18). In other words, while autobiography is, many times,11

a record of the past,

memoir is a record of one part of that past –the part that has the most influence on the

life of the author hereafter. That is why Larson suggests that in order to decide

whether to write a memoir or an autobiography:

List and reflect on your life's thematic centers. Search for a temporal phase or

an emotional thread. Love affair, profession or abiding interest, a single

geographic or psychological journey, a lost political belief. Which one has

greater weight than the others? To write memoir is to be selective; to write

one's autobiography is to be indiscriminate. (2)

11

Some autobiographies, however, focus on a certain stage of one's life line that of childhood for

example.

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In the case of Iranian-American women, for example, they "selected" to focus

on the post-revolutionary period to clarify how the 1979 Revolution has deeply

impacted their lives. Larson pinpoints that "Writing memoir means that we combine

what happened with how the exploration of what happened continues to affect us"

(10). So, memoir does not only require telling but also showing: "The memoir's prime

stylistic distinction is a give-and-take between narration and analysis, one that directs

the memoirist to both show and tell" (23). Sue William Silverman writes:

To write a memoir is not a simple act of regurgitation or spitting out facts to

an 'interesting story' along the lines of 'first this happened to me, then this

happened, then this next thing happened.' Of much greater interest, and at the

heart of memoir, is the story behind the story, the memoirist’s courageous

ability to reflect upon the past, thus artistically recasting his or her experience

into one that is transformative. ("Writers and Editors")

Because autobiography has been common among standing-out figures,

sometimes it is difficult to hear the voice of the authentic self: "Autobiography is

written by the public person who tells the birth-to-date story of her persona. By

contrast, the memoir allows the authentic self to lift the mask and tell the story of how

mask and self have been intertwined. The memoir's aim is to beget the authentic self

to come forward, to assume the mantle: expose the inauthentic" (Larson 129). This

impersonal characteristic of autobiography is what makes it seem a male genre to

some critics –like Larson, Fuchs and Simons –who also believe that women avoided

this genre, preferring memoir. For example, Fuchs opines that:

[T]hese women were not preoccupied with leaving behind completed, polished

records of themselves. Committed to their projects as a way of resisting

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calamity, they had little reason to follow Western male traditions of

autobiographical and biographical writing, which stress that the complete life

be worthy of reproduction and then of admiration by contemporary and future

generations…The life details that they provide served purposes more pressing

than rounding out the richness of their experiences or showing that their lives

deserve to be praised. (10-11)

However, I agree with Mary Jacobus who sees that women have successfully

used autobiography in their own way: "though necessarily working within 'male'

discourse, we women work ceaselessly to deconstruct it: to write what cannot be

written" (qtd. in Heilbrun 41). Consequently, there are numerous autobiographies

written by women who ventured to use autobiography differently as they wrote about

their personal lives. At the same time, despite scarcity, men do write memoirs; for

example, Christopher de Bellague (1971- ), an English journalist who lives in Tehran

with his Iranian wife and son, wrote the memoir In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A

Memoir of Iran (2004).

Therein lies the reason why the memoir genre is still confused with autobiography

because "the memoir form, so newly emerged, is less understood than written.

Function noses out form: writers write, and analyze what they've done only after

they've written" (Larson 26).

There are, however, more distinctive characteristics of the genre of memoir that

attracted Iranian-American women to use it.

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A. Public history and personal experience: Memoir as "The Voice of a

Generation"

One of the characteristics of memoir is the "balancing act of the self in relation to

the outer and the inner worlds, against the memoir's thematic and temporal

restrictions" (Larson 23). In other words, memoirists try to define themselves within a

socio-political context of their culture or cultures. George Egerton argues that

"[M]emoir could best be comprehended as a polygenre –a literary amalgam of diffuse

elements of recording, autobiography, biography, political analysis and contemporary

historiography" (qtd. in Rahimieh 16). Since the self is the product of the society

where it exists, including public history is part and parcel of narrating the self. For

Mark Freeman, "The idea of the self, as we have come to know it, and the idea of

history are in fact mutually constitutive" (28). If public history and personal

experience are integrated, one can conclude that life narrative is not subjective.

However, quoting Paula Moya, who explains "subjectivity", from Eva C. Karpinski's

book, Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation (2012), clarifies

the idea:

Subjective identity or simply subjectivity "refers to our individual sense of

self, our interior existence, our lived experience of being more-or-less

coherent self across time". Although it may feel "internal", subjectivity is

shaped by the experience of social recognition; it is relational because it

includes our sense of self in relation to others and to our various

identifications. (22)

This explains how memoirists "'struggle to constitute themselves as particular

kinds of actors and persons vis-à-vis others within and against powerful sociopolitical

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and cultural worlds', and… in turn individual selves shape the cultural worlds in

which they live" as put by Kristen W. Endres. Endres further explains that according

to Mikhail Bakhtin, "all utterances produced by a speaker are essentially multivocal

[sic] and dialogic" (35). Consequently, the memoirist's voice is a collective one -

"imbued with the socially and culturally charged words and voices of others" (35-36).

For example, the Iranian-American memoirist, Davar Ardalan, in her memoir,

wonders "Could the telling of the story about Iran's search for a lawful society also be

my conscious quest for my own identity as Iran [her name], the woman?" (282). The

answer is affirmative because what seems to be personal could be universal. While

narrating personal experience, readers who happen to encounter the same event, the

1979 Revolution for instance, are going to identify themselves with the memoirist.

Larson admits that "Memoir is the speaking 'I' of a trusting author, walking hand in

hand with the reader down a path both know well" (186). That is exactly why memoir

is called "The Voice of a Generation" "as each memoir speaks to the time of its

writing" (182). Francis Russell Hart believes that "The memoirs are of a person, but

they are 'really' of an event, an era, an institution, a class identity" (195). Moreover,

Louise W. Knight believes that historians could rely on memoirs as a source that

documents "a point in time": "Beyond government documents, verbatim

transcriptions, and eyewitness accounts recorded as events unfold, history's other

primary sources are memory products –miscellaneous notes, letters, diaries,

interviews and other oral histories, oral traditions, and, of course, memoir" (12).

To support her ideas about why memoir could be a historical source, Knight

argues that memoir reflects two truths: "cultural and interpersonal":

To explore cultural truth, we might see the memoir as a snapshot of the

memoirist's worldview at the time it was written, or as a piece of literature

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influenced by a culture. The second kind of truth memoir specializes in is that

created between human beings –in this case, between memoirist and reader.

To explore relational truth, we might see the memoir as an argument the

memoirist has shaped to persuade the reader…Here the memoir is a reliable

record either of what the memoirist believed or what she wished others to

think she believed at the time when she wrote it. (13)

Consequently, in the case of Iranian-American women, their memoirs reflect

the cultural and historical backgrounds of the time of their writing in addition to their

personal ideas. In this sense, Iranian-American women aim at re-writing history from

a female perspective against the all-male perspective that has long been imposed and

dictated on them. Louise Desalvo explains that "Writing testimony, to be sure, means

that we tell our stories. But it also means that we no longer allow ourselves to be

silenced or allow others to speak for our experience" (216). Morgan D. Rautzhan

illustrates that exiled Iranians, in their memoirs, refute the repression that befell them

and in turn caused their exile: "The memoir provides an outlet for women who are, in

a phrase as coined by Nawar Al-Hassan Golley, attempting to "'write back' to the west

and, more importantly, write back to…'patriarchy'.'They are fighting the image

through which both west and … male chauvinists have depicted them'" (5). For

example, Harris pinpoints that Iranian-American memoirists mean to correct the

stereotypical images of women:

All [memoirs] are invested in representing the complexity of Iranian women,

showing them to be far more resourceful, opinionated and better educated than

would be suggested by their Western stereotyping as Middle Eastern Step ford

wives. In Karim's words, they "contest, challenge, and undermine both the

view of Iranian women held by the Islamic Republic and the prevalent and

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often over-determined view of Iranian women as veiled, passive and silent, in

the Western media." (146)

In the end, one of the characteristics of memoir that has been implemented in

Iranian-American memoirs is the memoir being the "voice of a generation" in the

sense that the memoirist writes about personal experience within the context of public

history that is shared by a generation. The readers are conscious of the same

experience and how it shaped their lives, and thus they will identify with the

memoirist who speaks to them and for them.

B. Memory in Memoir: Past-Self and Present-Self

"Memoir, as its name implies …relies on memory", writes Knight; that is why

memoir's main subject is to interpret the personal past (12). As Larson puts it:

[T]he "I" of the memoir can also be the subject of the work. How do I

understand the person I was then in light of the person I am now? This I-then

and I-now (the pairing comes from Virginia Woolf12

) rings in memoir's

paradox. Though much time and many realizations may separate these two I's,

it is nigh impossible to keep the voices of today's narrator and of yesterday's

narrator apart. (24)

Digging into the past will surely help memoirists understand the present. That

is why telling personal stories guide the memoirists to understand who they have been

and who they are, as Freeman puts it, "when asked who and what we are and how we

might have gotten that way, we ordinarily turn to our personal pasts for possible

answers" (28). Besides, according to Georges Gusdorf:

12

"The first personal narrative to interweave the author's I-now and I-then is Virginia Woolf's stunning

and incomplete "A Sketch of the Past". This ninety-five-page memoir-essay was posthumously

published with four other pieces under the title Moments of Being" (Larson 27).

48El-Rayis

In recounting my history, I take the longest path, but this path that goes round

my life leads me the more surely from me to myself… Memory gives me a

certain remove and allows me to take into consideration all the ins and outs of

the matter, its context in time and space [just as] an aerial view sometimes

reveals to an archeologist the direction of a road or a fortification or the map

of a city invisible to someone on the ground. (qtd. in Freeman 29)

Thus, recalling the past gives memoirists an overview of lived experiences,

allowing them to reflect and interpret these moments of the past and accordingly lead

a coherent, meaningful and healthy present:

We use memory of the past, our personal and collective past, to help us think

and feel our way through the present. Remembering is the opposite of

disremembering. It is putting back together (re-member), or putting together

for the first time, fragmented parts of past experience in a way that gives the

past meaning for the present –and the result is story [memoir]. (Taylor 38)

Since personal history is constructed by a collective one, Iranian-American

women always compare between their two selves –past and present selves –within the

context of comparing between the two Irans – the Iran of the Shah and the Iran of the

Islamic Republic. For example, in introducing her book, Things I'VE Been Silent

About: Memories (2008), Azar Nafisi declares: "In this book my interest is not in a

general recitation of historical times but rather in those fragile intersections –the

places where moments in an individual's private life and personality resonate with and

reflect a larger, more universal story" (xx).

In comparing pre- to post- revolutionary Iran, Firoozeh Dumas shows how her

parents do not prefer to take photos in the Iran of the Islamic Republic; they always

49El-Rayis

feel nostalgic to the Iran they left behind: "It pains them to see Iran in its present

condition, with its skyrocketing inflation and a younger generation with no future. My

parents have not taken a single picture during any of their trips back. They prefer

looking at photos of the past. It is the Iran they want to remember, the Iran that held

so much promise" (Laughing without an Accent 132).

Afschineh Latifi, in her memoir, describes the difference between the two

Irans through her portrayal of the airport:

When I left it the first time, [during the Shah period] it was a hospitable and

magical place with a fine restaurant that hosted dances on Friday evening and

a coffee shop with big French windows opening onto a balcony…[then] I was

home but the mood in the airport was not welcoming. It was somber and

slightly menacing, like the unsmiling portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and his

anointed successor Ayatollah Montazari, that covered the walls. (qtd. in Paköz

108)

Consequently, in rejecting the other Iran, Iran of the Islamic Republic, Iranian-

American memoirists try to retrieve their Iran, the Iran of the Shah and by extension,

retrieve their past-selves in recalling memories of their childhood spent in the Iran

they prefer. Through these memories they freeze a past that deserves to be recognized

by the younger generation who happen to encounter only the other Iran, showing them

that Iran has not always been the Iran of the Islamic Revolution. However, to retrieve

this part of their selves –their past selves, they need to go into a journey inward –a

process which Freeman calls, "Rewriting the self" which in turn leads to wholeness.

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C. Wholeness through Memoir Writing

Wholeness is the prominent characteristic of the genre of memoir and the focal

point of this thesis. Through this process the memoirists aim at accentuating their

"individuation" to bring forth their true self/core self or as Carl Jung calls it, "the

undiscovered self" (qtd. in Larson 115-116). Before going into the journey in search

of this self, they usually turn back to their past selves, as explained before, and

ponder, "To what degree have the roles of family, culture, generation, race, ethnicity,

[and] gender entrapped [them]?" (115) Memoir motivates the writers to start this

inward journey in search of their self (130). This search for the self "is not a luxury,

but a common denominator of human survival which arises through adaptation to

diverse environments" (Hall 28). Thus, the first step into the quest for wholeness is to

speculate on the formation of the identity. In the case of Iranian-Americans, they

suffer from an identity crisis as their identity is split between two contesting selves:

their Iranian-self and their American-self. Each has been formed in a different, if not

opposite, cultural context.

1. Identity Formation Between Two Cultures

Needless to say, individual's identity is culturally constructed: "Culture involves,

among other things, shared language, symbols and values" (L. Hoffman 15). These

values pass from one generation to another through families. About families, C.

Margaret Hall states:

Families mediate the values of society. Parents consciously and unconsciously

select the values they communicate to their children, who, because of their

dependence, become participants in the parentally dominated family

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subculture. We come to know our values through painful experiences or

behavior labeled by others as disobedient and nonconformist. (25)

Thus, the formation of the individual begins at home where family imprints

social values such as conduct codes, customs, songs, literature, cuisine, names,

language and traditions of the society or the culture (Yuval-Davis 28). These values

identify the people and in turn identify their nation. Elizabeth Porter describes

nationhood:

The topic of nationhood and ethnicity "approaches the soul of our social and

political organization: that which distinguishes insiders from outsiders, that for

which wars and revolutions are fought". The boundaries between insiders and

outsiders define citizen and alien, member and stranger. Insiders share culture,

language and religion. Outsiders do not share cultural similarities and are

excluded. (36)

However, these values that used to connect people within a nation are prone to

change: "[W]hen we experience pain in particular circumstances, we may begin to

reflect on our values and possibly rearrange or change them. Crisis situations are

particularly compelling, and they frequently reveal and urge new directions in our

lives" (Hall 27).

In the case of Iranians, the 1979 Revolution caused drastic change in the

inherited and internalized values of Iranian people in general and Iranian women in

particular as explained in Chapter I. Consequently, Iranian women, especially the

ones who were educated in the West or were born there, felt like strangers and

outsiders in the Iran of the Islamic Republic. Rahimieh states that "most immigrants,

regardless of the familial, social, or political circumstances causing their exile, have

52El-Rayis

been cultural refugees all their lives. They leave because they feel like outsiders" (7-

8).

Not only did the 1979 Revolution cause their alienation, but also the hostage

crisis caused their double-exile in the host country, America. Thus, Iranian-

Americans, in order to save face and in order not to be considered "freakish", acquire

a persona that appeals to Americans and grants them a safe life in the anti-Iranian

atmosphere that developed in the aftermath of the hostage crisis: "According to

Marcel Mauss, that persona becomes 'a mask, a role played by the individual' that

hides a different part of the self. With the case of Iranian-Americans, masking their

Iranian self…is an important part of survival in the United States –a way of further

whitening themselves" (Mostofi 697).

Thus, Iranian-Americans constructed an identity that helped them assimilate into

the American culture, which unlike the Iranian culture of the Islamic Republic, will

grant them "freedom, rights and citizenship" (700). Some Iranian-Americans went so

far as to change their names to fit in. For example, Firoozeh Dumas decides to change

her name into "Julie" –an American name –because "Firoozeh" which means

"turquoise" in Persian attracts Americans to her "foreignness" and brings in questions

about her Iranian identity which she does not want to admit: "I wanted to be a kid

with a name that didn't draw so much attention, a name that didn't come with a built-

in inquisition as when and why I had moved to America" (Funny in Farsi 63). Names

are not only parts of our identities, but rather connect people to their societies. Taylor

states that "Most societies have believed in the importance of naming. Your name is

your destiny. You are linked to someone in the past –from history, family, religion –in

the hope that the character of that earlier person would somehow be linked to your

own" (45).

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However, adopting an American lifestyle in addition to changing names and

habits debilitated their Iranian-ness –their original culture. Hoffman assures that "The

loss or weakening of that culture may leave the self rudderless and without structure,

isolated without the social mediation upon which the self, at least in part, depends for

its existence" (L. Hoffman 15). As a result, Iranian-Americans feel that by

suppressing their Iranian-ness, they are losing an essential part of their being –of their

existence; they lose their core self. They find out that their assimilation has cost them

the price of always wearing a mask under which they hide their truer self. Satrapi

expresses this conflict between the real person and the persona as a game: "The harder

I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my

culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody

else's rules" (195). According to Larson, "[T]hey are bedeviled by the inauthentic…a

person who is not me, a faux me, a me who relinquished some intrinsic authenticity to

become I" (127). Consequently, to find one's core self, the mask should be removed.

That is to say that through writing their memoirs, Iranian-Americans try to remove the

layers of fake selves one by one, through narrating how each self has been formed and

how it has affected their lives.

2. The Core Self and The Sense of Belonging

The division of having a public persona and inner self causes people to live with

two different personalities. Larson adds that "Jung, who believed the persona to have

expanded dangerously, calls this bifurcation of role and self a 'painfully familiar'

division that creates 'two figures' who are 'often preposterously different'" (129).

Since living with two personalities is unbearable and causes the person to lose their

originality, the search for the truer self is a must. Larson considers memoir as "a self-

locator" (130). Robert Bly states, "Evidently we spend the first twenty or twenty-five

54El-Rayis

years of life deciding what should be pushed down in the shadow self, and the next

forty years trying to get in touch with that material again" (qtd. in Larson 183). The

best way to retrieve the lost or suppressed part of the self is to go back to the roots:

"In order to recover what I had lost, I had to go back to the moment of origin"

(Freeman 114).

In the case of Iranian-Americans, a sense of exile and non-belongingness pertains

to their being. Milani describes this feeling in the preface of her book:

A product of two cultures, I felt outside the circle of both, out of place,

dislodged, dislocated. I was immersed in discontinuities; engulfed in

geographical, cultural and temporal exile…Uprooted and transplanted, with an

unpronounceable name and coming from a country that was first not quite

known and then known for all the wrong reasons, I looked every which way

for a sense of familiarity, of belonging and reunion. I wanted something solid

to hold on to. (xi-xii)

Ardalan also feels this urge to go back to Iran to locate her core self: "Longing

to find a part of me that I had lost, I agreed to return to Iran. I donned the veil, left the

Western world and flew back to revolutionary Iran" (151).

Milani and Ardalan represent many Iranian-Americans who kept suppressing

their Iranian self while they are in America till they lost their core self, so in order to

locate this core self, they had to go back to their homeland, Iran. Their first journeys

back to Iran make them sure that Iran is the place of their origin –the place where they

belong, yet it is a place in which it is difficult to live. Experiencing the heaviness of

the emotional intensity of family gatherings, the traditional and religious obligations

and the lack of personal space, they appreciate their American-ness that grants them

55El-Rayis

freedom and accessibility to public services without having to queue up for hours.

Nahid Rachlin expresses this feeling in her autobiographical novel, Foreigner (1978):

"Now in Iran, things had quickly reversed –what had seemed mysterious was

menacing and what had seemed sterile in the States appeared to be orderly, almost

peaceful. I missed [the States], as if it were taken away from me permanently" (38).

As a result, she becomes unsure where her belongingness lies: "I understood

what provoked suicide –people taking overdoses of sleeping pills or jumping out of

windows. Perhaps they too lay awake in the middle of the night, with their identity

and sense of belonging suddenly reversed or blurred" (165). Rahimieh expresses the

change in feelings toward Iran, after returning for a visit:

Here I was in a country whose language I knew inside out, whose geography

and history were thoroughly familiar to me. And, yet, I could not fit in the

landscape on my erstwhile home. There were plenty of visible changes to

which I could attribute my malaise, but it was the lack of correspondence

between my own memories and the person I had become that was at the root

of my sense of exile. (165)

Rahimieh sums up the dilemma of the Iranian-Americans, stressing how they

go back to Iran, retrieving an Iran that no longer exists, oblivious to the fact that like

Iran, they have changed. They have acquired a new self, an Americanized self. Feri,

the Iranian-American woman protagonist in Rachlin's novel, has been described by

her Iranian friends as being "Americanized" (Rachlin 127).

Thus, while they write about their journeys back to Iran, they realize the

change in their perspective towards America; they do not resent it as they used to do

before going back to Iran. They find in it the things that the other Iran does not

56El-Rayis

provide: freedom and comfort of living. Their writing illustrates, as well, how their

perspectives have changed when Iranian-Americans return to their "home" in America

to enjoy their liberty and personal space; they start to miss the things that identify

Iran, the things they did not notice when they were there because they were seeing

Iran from an American perspective. For example, Ardalan notices that "In America, I

gave in to the rumors about Iran and I truly had become alienated from my own

homeland" (165). They were seeing the veil as an emblem of backwardness, not as a

protection or as a part of their cultural identity; they were discontent with family

gatherings that prevented their right of having personal space. However, once in

America, they not only feel nostalgic to all the details and things they previously

rejected, but rather they start to see the demerits of the American society. In other

words, they start to see America from an Iranian perspective. Ardalan states:

[In America], I could only find momentary love, momentary wealth, and

momentary security. I was not born to live in the United States and I was not

born to accept their mentality, which lives on buying the minds and faith of its

people by making a society that lacks nothing, nothing but one thing the most

important thing, God…I tried working and I tried modeling. I sang and I

danced. I swam and I ran. I was happy –I thought I was happy –but I was sad

and empty. I was alone. I was in the wrong place. America and all its

opportunities were not for me. My faith and country were to be the only two

things that would allow me to have a fulfilled life. (166)

She misses the Iranians' spirituality and their modest satisfaction:

I thought of the genuine Iranians I had met as a child in the villages. Pious and

down-to-earth, they were happy with fresh-baked bread, goat's cheese,

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homemade yogurt, fresh greens, and tea. Here I am living in America, I

thought, with its wealth and plenty –all the amenities one could ask for –and

yet I was searching for more. I felt myself spiritually lost, living in Los

Angeles. (150-151)

Arguing with her relative who believes Iran to be unbearable as "people will

disgust you. Always interfering in things that don't concern them", Satrapi replies,

"But in the West you can collapse in the street and no one will give you a hand"

(282). Iranian-Americans miss their Iranian-ness. They miss the hospitality of Iranian

people. They express their nostalgia in their memoirs: "Iranian hospitality is

legendary; in fact, the Shahnameh refers to the feet of guests being washed with musk

and rose water" (Ardalan 79). They also miss the celebration of the Persian New

Year, Noruz. It is celebrated on the twentieth or twenty-first of March and the

celebration lasts for thirteen days (15): "At dusk on the night of the last Wednesday

before Noruz, my father prepared for the traditional event preceding New Year. He

gathered piles of brush, arranged them in a circle, and set them on fire. All of us

jumped over fire, saying 'My yellowness and pallor to you, your redness and fiery

health to me'" (16).

For the Noruz, they prepare a table with seven things that begin in s in Persian;

they call them "haft seen or seven s's…apple (seeb), hyacinth (sonbol), vinegar

(serkeh), sumac (somagh), coins (sekkeh), garlic (seer), and samanou or cooked wheat

germ" (16-17). The fact that Ardalan mentions the celebration of the Persian New

Year in detail shows how she misses this Iranian part of her self.

Iranian exiles also miss some of their traditions like walking under a Koran to

have a safe journey as Dumas mentions in her memoir, "The most important part of

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our ritual involved my mother's holding the Koran at the top of the doorframe while

we each walked under it. For my parents, this ensured a safe journey" (Funny in Farsi

50). Moreover, they miss the family gatherings. For Iranians, family has a significant

importance as Sattareh Farmaian, in her memoir, Daughter of Persia (1992), states:

We Iranians, who value the family above all else and spend our whole lives

within its hot, protective walls, know that from it we derive our being, our

deepest and most meaningful sense of self. Through it we define who we are,

to the world and to ourselves. As long as the family is intact, secure, and

complete, we know that we are somebody instead of nobody. (quoted in

Rautzhan 40)

The same appreciation to family is revealed in Dumas' memoir: "Together, my

relatives form an alliance that represents a genuine and enduring love of family, one

that sustains them through difficulties and gives them reasons to celebrate during

good times…Without my relatives, I am but a thread; together, we form a colorful and

elaborate Persian carpet" (Funny in Farsi 103).

Furthermore, when Persis M. Karim asked Nahid Rachlin in an interview

about the aspects of Iran and the Iranian culture that she feels nostalgic for, she

answers:

I miss the availability and accessibility of people to each other, Iranians'

general curiosity about people, which allows intimacy and closeness. I miss

certain sights and sounds, things that are reminiscent of my childhood –the

gurgling of water in joobs ("fountains/pools"); the vendors standing on the

streets, selling hot beets and corn roasted on braziers in front of them; and I

59El-Rayis

miss the ancientness of the country with its historical sites, its magnificent

gardens, palaces, and mosques. (157)

In short, writing their memoirs about blending in with their cultural surroundings,

America and Iran, has changed the Iranians' perspective towards both America and

Iran. Although they keep oscillating between these two cultures, thinking that they

have to accept one and reject the other, changing their perspectives towards both

cultures is a way of healing recognized through the process of writing retrospectively

about their different selves. Mark Doty in his book, Heaven's Coast (1996), states

"What is healing, but a shift in perspective?" (qtd. in Desalvo 3). Thus finding the

core self can result in a change in perspectives which is a form of healing.

3. Healing and Wholeness: Reconciliation

"Hundreds of thousands of people, not just writers, rely on devotional and

therapeutic practices by which they can inquire into the truth of their lives. Memoir is

one practice, and it has ascended for this generation because the form is so useful in

getting at the truth" put by Larson (9). According to Larson, many people, not only

professional writers, turn to this genre for its therapeutic nature. Desalvo also

mentions how contemporary memoirists have achieved a balanced and healthy life

after writing their memoirs: "These writers describe how they have consciously used

the writing of their artistic works to help them heal from the thorny experiences of

their lives, especially from dislocation, violence, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism,

rape, political persecution, incest, loss, illness" (4).

Consequently, writing a memoir is a way of healing. In examining the relation

between healing and wholeness, Joshua states that "The expression 'healing unto

wholeness' conveys that beyond the level of symptom relief and cure, the healing

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process leads into broader areas of integration, harmony and balance: All is undivided

wholeness in flowing movement" (1). This harmony will not be attained unless a

change in perspective or attitude towards life takes place:

These deeper attitudinal changes are part of the emphasis of holistic healing,

which aims not just at treating the whole person –body, mind and spirit- but

also at facilitating a changed and more expansive orientation towards life

itself. As the American psychologist William James stated: "It has been one of

the most important findings of psychology in the twentieth century that a

person can change their life by changing their attitude." (2)

"These healing shifts in perspectives", as Desalvo calls them, come from

writing about traumatic experiences or past events that have deeply influenced the

person and rather changed his/her way of living causing a sense of loss that the person

cannot take anymore and thus feels the urge to write reflectively about these

experiences (6). In this case, writing is not a luxury provided only to the people who

can write or people who have time to write:

What, though, if writing weren't such a luxury? What if writing were a simple,

significant, yet necessary way to achieve spiritual, emotional, and psychic

wholeness? To synthesize thought and feeling, to understand how feeling

relates to events in our lives and vice versa? What if writing were as important

and as basic a human function and as significant to maintaining and promoting

our psychic and physical wellness as, say, exercise, healthful food, pure water,

clean air, rest and repose, and some soul-satisfying practice? (Desalvo 6)

Writing succeeds in fixing the self only when a post-traumatic growth takes

place. This post-traumatic growth is only guaranteed when the healing shifts in

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perspectives arise. According to Jennifer L. Pals and Dan P. McAdams

"[P]osttraumatic growth may be best understood as a process of constructing a

narrative understanding of how the self has been [positively] transformed by the

traumatic event and then integrating this transformed sense of self into the identity-

defining life story" (65).

However, before fulfilling this positive transformation, two steps have to be

followed in the narrative. The first step is to focus on the "negative emotional

response to the traumatic event and use it as a potential source for new ways of

thinking about the self, thus paving the way for post-traumatic growth to emerge"

(66). This negative emotion provoked by the traumatic experience is important as it

signifies that the person has experienced a loss (66). Once this loss is examined and

reflected upon, the second step that should complement this acknowledgement of the

pain is "to construct a positive ending to the story, but not just any kind of positive

ending will do. The ending should affirm and explain how the self has been positively

transformed" (66).

In the case of Iranian-American women memoirists, they attained this post-

traumatic growth through writing their memoirs. First, they acknowledged the

negative impact of the 1979 Revolution and the hostage crisis on their identity,

showing how they lost the sense of belonging, having no place to call home. They

keep oscillating between their Iranian-ness and American-ness, trying to hold on to

one, but they end up falling in the in-between-ness, belonging to neither. Then, the

second step of constructing a positive ending is achieved when they start to realize the

privileges that each culture has granted them instead of focusing on the negativity of

each culture. Therein lies the process of reconciliation. They reconcile between these

two contesting cultures, showing American readers that Iranians are not all terrorists,

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but they are a people who have beautiful traditions, customs and a language, and

showing the Iranian readers that Americans are not all anti-Iranian racists, but they are

a people who welcome ethnic traditions and appreciate differences13

. Harris states that

"There is undoubtedly a sense in which these writers see their memoirs as doing

diplomatic work, explaining Iran to American readers" (145). Dumas, in a

conversation with Khaled Husseini (1965- ) –an acclaimed Afghan-American author,

expresses that through her memoir she wants to show the similarity between peoples:

"I have always believed that there are far more good people in this world than bad

ones and that most people want to be reminded of our shared humanity rather than our

differences" (Funny in Farsi 205). Ebadi also asserts that "the cold antagonism

between the United States and Iran [has] made communication between the two

societies more urgent than ever" (qtd. in Harris145). Mary Louise Patt in Imperial

Eyes (1992) has called this communication as "arts of contact zone":

I use [contact zone] to refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in

which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact

with each other and establish ongoing relations…By using the term "contact",

I am to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial

encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffuisonist [sic] accounts of

conquest and domination. A "contact" perspective emphasizes how subjects

are constituted in and by their relations to each other. (quoted in Rahimieh 18)

This "contact zone" is stressed and created in the memoirs of Iranian-Americans

where they re-write themselves as the product of two cultures, accentuating their

13

Mostofi mentions that in the 1960s, "a new set of liberal immigration policies, multiculturalism and

pluralism, started usurping the assimilationist [sic] melting pot notion…Instead of the melting pot, such

a multicultural society is metaphorically described as a 'salad bowl' or the 'glorious mosaic'" (Mostofi

698).

63El-Rayis

hyphenated identity by celebrating both the belongingness to the homeland, Iran, and

the freedom that America grants them; Dumas expresses this gratitude to both cultures

in her memoir: "During our Thanksgiving meal, my father gives thanks for living in a

free country where he can vote. I always share gratitude for being able to pursue my

hopes and dreams, despite being female. My relatives and I are proud to be Iranian,

but we also give tremendous thanks for our lives in America, a nation where freedom

reigns" (Funny in Farsi 75).

Through their memoirs, Iranian exiles aim to reinforce their Iranian-ness in order

to seek their wholeness, so re-visiting Iran highlights their need to belong. However,

they come to accept that Iran is where they belong, but America is where they want to

live. In order to create a contact zone, they developed many strategies. One of these

strategies, reflected in their memoirs, is that they take it upon themselves to re-visit

Iran every now and then. Forming an Iranian community in America is another

substitute strategy for not being able to re-visit Iran on a regular basis. In this

community, they revive Iranian traditions, celebrate Persian New Year and read

Persian literature. In addition, they learn Farsi and, in their memoirs, they transliterate

some Persian idioms, words, phrases and expressions into "local english14

" (Karpinski

2). Besides, the titles of their memoirs reflect the reconciliation between these two

cultures; they are in English, but they mirror their Iranian-ness: Funny in Farsi, My

Iranian Matriarchs, Persepolis, My Name is Iran, Reading Lolita in Tehran and

others. Through these strategies, they declare that instead of oscillating between two

cultures, they straddle both. The new whole self that is re-written in their memoirs is

14

Lower-case english is used in postcolonial studies to describe transliterated words written in ethnic

texts: "For indigenous and postcolonial subjects, writing in borrowed tongues often means using the

language of colonial oppression and domination while at the same time trying to challenge cultural

imperialism and the dominance of Standard English through the use of various local

"englishes"(Karpinski 2). However, in the case of Iranian-Americans, they transliterate Persian/Farsi

words into english to express the co-existence of both languages in their lives.

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the product of the "contact zone". Yaëlle Azagury (1970- ), a Moroccan Spanish

Jewish woman writer, metaphorically defines this new collective identity:

I have always felt I was made of endless crystallization, layers brought by

winds and oceans, built through gradual accumulation, and then shattered by

landslides collapsing my epicenter. And finally, after the turmoil, it is as

though I had been swallowed by seas, and granted a patient reappearance, a

delivery in a new shape, as an island or perhaps a volcano. (390)

This "reappearance", "the new shape" or the hybrid identity is the whole entity

that Iranian-Americans as well as other exile memoirists attain through the process of

writing their memoirs. Ardalan stresses that she gets to know her self as a whole only

through the process of writing her memoir:

[W]hen in the process of writing this book…I began then to distill the past and

present, in order to open the secret of my own life. Like nomads on a journey

of self-discovery, we went from letter to letter and story to story hoping to

answer this unsolved mystery as old as time itself. Whether it was my Eastern

grandfather's Sufi cloak, which he had inherited from his father, or my

Western grandmother's American flag, which she had inherited from her

father, I found my answer in the splendor quest. (297-8)

Eventually, while writing her memoir, Funny in Farsi, Dumas, like Ardalan,

comes to admit her wholeness, defining herself as Iranian-American:

There are parts of me that are Iranian and parts of me that are American. I

can't cook for just four people; I'm always thinking, "What if someone drops

by?" And when I married my husband, I told him that when my parents get old

65El-Rayis

they will move in with us. That's my Iranian side. If I received good service

somewhere, I always write the management and tell them, and if I receive bad

service, I let them know too. That's my American side. (207)

Leila Ahmed (1940- ) asserts this plurality in her memoir, A Border Passage: from

Cairo to America- a Woman's Journey (1999):

For the truth is, I think that we are always plural. Not either this or that, but

this and that. And we always embody in our multiple shifting consciousnesses

a convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time

and this place and moving like rivers through us. And I know now that the

point is to look back with insight and without judgment, and I know that it is

of the nature of being in this place, this place of convergence of histories,

cultures, ways of thought, that there will always be new ways to understand

what we are living through. (25-6)

In the end, the genre of memoir has many characteristics that make it the most

suitable genre for Iranian-American women. The most acclaimed characteristic is

attaining wholeness through memoir writing which is the focus of this thesis. In other

words, I will prove that memoir helps the memoirists to go into a journey of self-

definition as put by Larson:

In memoir, we don't just tell the truth. We use the possibilities of the form to

guide us into a process by which we try to discover what the truth of our lives

may be…Memoir is offering to readers and writers its own inexhaustible

discoveries, proving itself adept as a literary form and as means of self-

disclosure. I would say that a memoir imaginatively renders our evolving

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selves and critically evaluates how memory, time, history, culture, and myth

are expressed within our individual lives. (xii)

This is my approach to this thesis: I will illustrate how the three chosen

memoirists used their memoirs to express their memories, their cultural myths and

their perspectives of the historical events which in turn help them to know who they

are.

Before introducing the three texts that are the case studies of Iranian-American

women memoirists' quest for wholeness, an introduction of the two waves of exiled

Iranian women memoirists is needed. These two waves are introduced by Marla

Harris in her essay, "Consuming Words".

"The Two Waves of Exiled Iranian Women Memoirists"

According to Harris, there are two waves of exiled Iranian women memoirists

whose memoirs are written in either English or other Western languages, but not in

Farsi. The first wave is represented by women, born before the World War II, who are

able to write and publish their writings due to their relation to famous Iranian men,

defining themselves as "their wives, sisters and daughters". Among these memoirists

are "Ashraf Pahlavi (Faces in the Mirror: Memoirs from Exile, 1980), Sattareh

Farman Farmaian (Daughter of Persia: A Woman's Journey from her Father's Harem

through the Islamic Revolution, 1992) and Farah Pahlavi (An Enduring Love: My Life

with the Shah, 2004)" (Harris 142). However, these writers' position as memoirists

"has been challenged because of their reliance on ghostwriters or collaborators" (142).

Persis M. Karim criticizes their memoirs as she believes that their target audience is

the Western, mostly American readers, as these women memoirists "reinforce those

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enduring cultural stereotypes, myths, and fantasies that westerners have about the

Middle East" (qtd. in Harris 142).

The second wave of exiled Iranian women memoirists, who were born in the

1960s and 1970s, unlike the first wave that consists of the country's educated elites,

consists of common women; they are "poets, artists, academics, novelists, attorneys

and journalists, who are, for the most part, the educated daughters of upper-middle-

class Tehrani families…but a relatively privileged and Westernized group" (142).

Among this group are: Tara Bahrampour (To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and

America, 1999), Gelareh Asayesh (Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America,

1999), Firoozeh Dumas (Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in

America, 2003), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran, 2003), Marjane Satrapi

(Persepolis: The Story Of a Childhood, 2003; and Persepolis 2 :The Story of a Return,

2004); Azadeh Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in

America and American in Iran, 2005), and Afschineh Latifi (Even After All This

Time: A Story of Love, Revolution, and Leaving Iran, 2005) (142-3). What is common

in their memoirs is "an intimate acquaintance with the West; all spent some part of

their lives, especially their teen years, in the United States or in Europe" (143).

This thesis studies three texts of three different memoirists who belong to the

second wave of Iranian-American women memoirists: Tara Bahrampour, Gelareh

Asayesh and Azadeh Moaveni.

In the following chapter I will analyze Tara Bahrampour's text, accentuating

how writing her memoir helped her to attain wholeness.

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CHAPTER III

TARA BAHRAMPOUR'S TO SEE AND SEE AGAIN

Now on the WEB site and everywhere else where I find Iranians, I see a

similar sense of displacement. Strangely, it seems strongest in Iranians my

own age. Those young enough to have adjusted to America but old enough to

still remember Iran seem to have the most difficulty choosing their cultural

allegiances, perhaps because they were too young to have made their own

decisions about staying in Iran or leaving. (Bahrampour 348)

Tara Bahrampour15

, the Iranian-American author of the memoir To See and See

Again, belongs to a generation which experiences the strongest sense of

"deterritorialization" in both cultures due to the fact that they have similarities to both

first- and second-generation Iranian-Americans (Karpinski 27). First-generation

Iranian Americans are individuals who were born and raised in Iran and then migrated

to the United States whereas "second-generation Iranian Americans are Iranian-

descent individuals born and raised in the United States who have at least one foreign-

born parent" (Mahmoud 5-6). For Bahrampour, being born in the United States to an

American mother and an Iranian father makes her a second-generation Iranian

American. However, for Carmen Reza in her book, Culture Shock, Trauma, Exile and

Nostalgia in Iranian-American Memoirs (2012), Bahrampour is unlike second-

generation Iranian-Americans as she was raised in Iran, not in the United States,

surrounded by her extended family and left in the midst of the Iranian-Revolution

when she was eleven, so she is more accustomed to the Iranian culture and the Persian

15

" She is a staff writer at the Washington Post. She has written about Iranians in global limbo for the

New Yorker, the New York Times, the American Scholar, the New Republic, and other journals" (Karim

340).

69El-Rayis

language than second-generation Iranians (Reza 11). Therefore, Tara Bahrampour is

more likely to be categorized into the "one-and-a-half generation" or "sandwich

generation" (Mahmoud 6). The term "one-and-a-half generation"16

is invented by

Rubén Rumaut to describe "the immigrant children who arrived in the United States

before they reach adulthood [and thus] straddle the old and the new worlds but are

fully part of neither" (Zhou 65). Consequently, Tara Bahrampour, whose mother has

chosen her "a double-edged name" – Taraneh in Iran and Tara in America –to prevent

her from "feel[ing] strange East or West, ends up being a stranger in both (Rejali

464). According to Carl Jung, in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1989),

the sense of alienation and estrangement is the result of the lack of self-knowledge:

"In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world

has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an

unexpected unfamiliarity with myself" (359). The following lines demonstrate how

the act of memoir writing helps Bahrampour thrive on her sense of disorientation,

identify herself and eventually attain wholeness.

A. Identity Formation between Two Cultures

"At age three I felt stolen away from one kingdom; by age eleven I had

adapted so well to the new one that moving was like being stolen all over again"

states Bahrampour when she describes how her life has been interrupted twice (357).

The first time she was uprooted from America, where she was born and spent three

years with her mother who works as a singer and "makes albums in Los Angeles", to

be planted in Iran where her father –an architect –and her extended family live (8).

16

This generation is further specified by Aida Mahmoud who describes them as "individuals who were

born in Iran but immigrated to the U.S. before the age of thirteen" (Mahmoud 6).

71El-Rayis

The second time, after spending nine years in Iran, she was uprooted and exiled from

home.

As identity is culturally constructed, Bahrampour searched for her identity,

through her memoir, within the two different socio-political contexts where she has

been implanted. She tries to define herself within the Iranian context, as a child and

then as an adult when she re-visits Iran; she also tries to define herself as well within

the American context, before re-visiting Iran and after it.

As I need to distinguish between her two selves, I will use the first names: Tara and

Taraneh; I will use the last name, Bahrampour when I refer to the memoirist.

1. Taraneh's Iranian-Self (Pre-Exile Self)

"But I feel strange at this airport with the screaming women. I am tired and want

to go back to my room in Brooklyn. Instead, we are bundled into a car and driven to a

place where all of us sleep on the floor and mosquitoes buzz around us; but I am glad

because the other people are gone and it is just us four again" states the three-year-old

Taraneh (30).

Arriving in Iran for the first time, Taraneh was warmly welcomed by her

Iranian extended family. As she is not used to their high-pitched voices, and since she

does not understand any Farsi, she thought they are screaming (29). She also hates

their physical touching when they pinch her cheeks (29). Surrounded by unfamiliar

people who speak a different language, Taraneh feels "strange" and "homesick" (30).

However, these same people along with her father are the ones who convey to

Taraneh the Iranian cultural heritage through stories, food, songs, places, traditions,

customs and language.

71El-Rayis

Storytelling

There is a role reversal between her parents as it is her father, not her mother,

the one who plays the role of a storyteller. He tells her about his childhood memories

of the time when they were living in the village due to the fact that his late father,

Agha Jan was a rich land owner who was loved by all the peasants as his name

implies –his name means "Beloved Sir" (14-15). They had a driver and many servants

and the peasants used to line up to kiss his hand (15). When her father recalls these

memories he makes Taraneh feel that "nothing in the world today could ever be as

good as those early days" (14). It seems that her father is a good storyteller because

his way fascinates young Taraneh: "As Baba talked, the sunbaked mud walls of the

village, the rows of poplar trees, and the distant purple mountains would take shape in

my mind" (14). Besides, Taraneh learns, from her father, interesting things about her

grandmother, Aziz, who is Agha Jan's second wife. He married her because his first

wife was sterile (15). Aziz was not a traditional woman who agreed to be kept

indoors, cooking and raising her children. She was modern in the sense that she

complied with the new regulations. For example, when the Shah banned the chadors,

she had thrown hers off, put on a European dress and hat, and hurried out for a walk

(15). Besides, she wanted better education for her children, so she persuaded Agha

Jan to send her sons to study abroad (15). She also taught herself how to read and

write at fifty in order to keep in touch with her children (15). Furthermore, when her

son, Khosrow became ill and home remedies failed to work on him, she convinced

Agha Jan to buy a new house in Tehran (15).

In addition, Taraneh's father tells her some stories from the Shahnameh. For

example, he told her the story of King Zal who has been deserted by his father in the

desert because he was born with strange white hair (31). Then, Simorgh, a magic bird,

72El-Rayis

takes baby Zal to her nest and takes care of him till he becomes a grown-up man (31).

After that, the Simorgh returns him to the land of men, providing him with a feather to

protect him from danger and troubles (31). Beside her father, her nannies and her

grandmother, Aziz always tell her stories about past memories or about Aal, "a tall,

bird-headed monster-woman with yellow hair (43).

This storytelling enriches Taraneh's childhood memories and becomes part of

her identity. Later on when she is in the United States, she starts the habit of

storytelling. Her American friends are gravely interested in her story of the revolution

and always ask her to repeat it. She states that:

With my classmates gathered around, I search my mind for every shred of it

that I can remember, like the old ladies in Iran who include in their stories

facts like what plates Khanoum So-and-So served lunch on thirty years ago, or

what color the walls of the women's quarter were in Haji So-and-So's house in

the village. Now I see why the old ladies do this. Repeating each detail, no

matter how small, is a way to keep alive something that only they remember,

something that would disappear forever if they did not repeat it. And it works.

(125)

Bahrampour, the memoirist, understands that telling the same story over and over

helps one restore memories that one is afraid to forget. Adopting the storytelling

Iranian literal tradition puts her on the way of writing her memoir. She understands

the power of telling a story, not only in keeping memories, but also in knowing who

she is. Another thing to be noted is that the stories she mentions are not here by

chance as "The literary critic Mitchell A. Leaska once said that every word in a

finished work is there by choice, not by chance" (Desalvo 146). As for the stories

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about her parents and grandparents, they tell her about the Iran her parents and

grandparents have encountered which is different from the two Irans Taraneh

experiences: the one she experienced as a child and the other she will experience

when she returns in fifteen years. Linda Hutcheon suggests that, "[T]here are only

truths in the plural, and never one Truth" (qtd. in Karpinski 192). That is to say,

providing the readers with many Irans emphasizes the fact that Iran is not a fixed

place for everyone. However, Iran is many places according to who is experiencing it.

As for the legend of King Zal, taken from Ferdowsi's Shanameh, it sustains the idea of

wholeness as Zal is rejected and alienated from the world of men, the home country,

for being different, so he has been adopted in another world, the birds world which

signifies the host country, but in order to find his core self, he has to return to his

home country. However, when he does so, he is not the same person as he has

acquired some aspects from the other culture –represented by the feather –which help

him to survive anywhere because he now has a multi-cultural identity. According to

Mackey, Ferdowsi's book accentuates the wholeness of the Iranian identity by

underscoring the fact that the Iranian identity is formed by both pre-Islamic Persian

culture and Islam as Shahnameh "resurrects Iranian identity within the world of Islam

by celebrating the history and mythology of Persian kingship" (62). In other words,

the Shahnameh is the story of every Iranian and King Zal is the story of every Iranian-

American. Besides, hearing stories from the Persian literary tradition has influenced

Tara Bahrampour as she begins one of her parts in the memoir with Rumi's poem, The

Soft Garden: Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust. /We have a soft garden

in here (13). While in these two lines the strange, outside land is called "Landscape",

the homeland, Iran is referred to as "The Soft Garden". That explains why she uses

these metaphors henceforward in the subtitles: The Soft Garden describes her life in

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Iran; The Landscape describes her life in America; The Garden Again describes her

return visit to Iran (13-117-205). According to Desalvo, figurative language connects

feelings to experiences:

Sometimes, as we're searching for a way to represent our feelings during a

particular moment…we stumble onto an image, simile, metaphor, or symbol that

enlarges the meaning of our work. It also more completely defines our experience

by exposing the set of connections we make. Sometimes it shifts the meaning of

our work onto another plane entirely by bringing seemingly unrelated material

together. (140)

It is always there in the writings about nostalgia, the image of the homeland as a

lost Garden, Eden, or Paradise. In Bahrampour's memoir, this image reflects that her

identity is partially weaved by Persian culture conveyed to her through the stories told

by her father.

Sightseeing

Taraneh's father does not just play the role of a storyteller, but rather he plays the

role of "a cultural mediator", translating the Iranian culture to Taraneh and her

brother, Ali through visiting some places that tell the story of the country (Karpinski

51). The first destination is the holy city of Qom where Massoumeh was buried. Her

father told her that Massoumeh is the sister of Emam Reza and "she was only seven or

eight when she died while her family was traveling through Qom, so they buried her

here" (36). Young Taraneh grasps the relation between wearing a chador and visiting

the holy city. She enthusiastically says, "Tomorrow we are going to the golden dome,

the shrine of Massoumeh, and, since I'm almost seven, I am too old to go in without a

chador" (34). However, since her mother is not Iranian, she misses having a mentor

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who tells her how to wear it. That is why she starts to inspect how other women wear

it and copy them (35). She describes the experience through a vivid picture,

implementing all her senses as she moves in Qom's bazaar where "the scent of sohan,

Qom's special pistachio brittle, mingles with the exhaust of idling buses…We walk

along the crowded sidewalk…where mullahs in turbans and brown robes finger their

worry beads…old women buy prayer candles" (34). When they get into the shrine,

Taraneh notices that one of the women "ties a scrap of cloth on to one of the bars [that

surround Massomeh's coffin] and slips a damp green five-touman bill through" (36).

Her father tells her that this woman and many other come here to ask Massoumeh for

a favor (36). Tahraneh, however, does not grasp the significance of visiting the holy

city until the nanny praises her for the visit, telling her "What a good Moslem you

are" (39). She does not understand what does it mean to be a Moslem and she thinks it

is a nationality, so she denies the term, saying "My father is Iranian and my mother is

American" (39). Henceforth, another aspect is added to her identity and she

recognizes that she is Moslem.

Moreover, her father shows her a dervish who wears aba, cloak and a fez. She

notices that people give him money for his singing, so her father tells her that "People

give money to dervishes because they are special holy men who don't have a home

but wander from place to place, singing stories and telling fortunes and bringing good

luck to those who are kind to them" (47). She encounters this word when her aunt

calls Taraneh's father a dervish because he is always moving from one place to

another.

Her father also takes her to the village to see the rug-weaving girls. Taraneh is

fascinated, and the girls help her to try to weave and as she does, she feels exhilarated

that "my little row became part of the plush flowerscape" (79). As for the importance

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of the Persian carpets, Mackey argues that "Tehran's bustling carpet market displays

more than rugs. It portrays Iran itself. Like a Persian carpet, Iran is a complex pattern

of ethnic groups, languages, religions and regions. This diversity is fundamental to

Iran's character" (1-2). Thus, as Taraneh weaves a row in one of the carpet, she has

imprinted herself as part of the Iranian culture, and later on, she admits having a

plural identity like Iran.

Thus, the fact that Taraneh's father takes her to visit some places in Iran

strengthens her Iranian-ness. According to Daniel Taylor," The stories of place passed

down from generation to generation render that place unique, weight it with the

freight of human experience, and make it companionable" (26). When Bahrampour

revisits Iran she visits it through the memory of her childhood visits because these

places are imprinted in her memory, and become part of her identity as well.

Iranian Traditions

The presence of Taraneh amongst her extended family allows her to notice the

special social values that form the Iranian culture and that are different from the

American values instilled in her till she was three. For example, Taraneh learns from

her father that the title "Haji" adds respect to the person. Her grandfather has been

called "Haji-Khan, because he had journeyed to Mecca as a young man…back when

making Haj still meant a two-week camel caravan to Abadan and a ten-week boat ride

around the triangle of Arabia" (Bahrampour 15). The suffering of the long journey is

what makes it priceless and thus promotes the person's social status. Another example

is the word, "mashallah". Taraneh is puzzled by this word and she thinks it means

"good for you", but eventually she notices that "[w]henever we speak or smile or wear

new clothes –anything that is good –we get a mashallah and fingers laid on us to

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make sure the evil eye does not swoop down to take our goodness away" (45).

Another expression that conveys an aspect of the Iranian tradition is deed-o-baz-deed

which means "'seeing and seeing again.' They do it all the time, going over to each

other's houses everyday to sit and drink tea and talk. Then the next day they go to

someone else's house" (50). This way of exchanging visits aims at tightening family

ties and closeness. In addition, this tradition helps Taraneh to learn Farsi, and it

works. Taraneh admits that "[T]here are some words I only know in Farsi, words my

family uses no matter which language we are speaking" (50). Furthermore, the

hospitality that the Iranians are known for is reflected in the ritual of "ta'arof, the

Iranian politeness ritual that involves trying to guess what people want before they

ask for it" (76). Moreover, whenever they are setting off to a long journey, Taraneh's

aunt asks them to "kiss the Qoran" and she holds it up, asking them to pass under it

(47). Her father then explains that this tradition guarantees having a safe journey (47).

Choosing deed-o-baz-deed as the title for her memoir implies how these

traditions have been part of Bahrampour's identity. Besides, the idea of seeing and

seeing again implies the writing of a memoir: one has to reflect on his/her past life to

understand it in order to be able to accept the present.

Customs

In describing the social life in Iran, Jane Howard states that, "Social life in Iran

has always been centered on family parties –birthdays, weddings, funerals, New

Year's holidays and religious feast days. But there is still an urge to get out and about,

to meet new people" (qtd. in Paköz 112). Taraneh has experienced some of these

occasions. For example, she learns that the social attitude towards dating differs from

one country to another when she hears her father's humorous anecdotes. She recalls

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that "In Iran, he had once asked a girl he saw every day on the bus to meet him after

school; she had agreed, and then at the appointed time, she had sent her brothers

instead. They had surrounded Baba and punched and kicked him until a policeman

rescued him" (Bahrampour 20). By contrast, in America, when her father has invited a

girl to the cinema, she welcomed the idea and while they are there, the girl noticed her

brother, so "Baba jumped up. Then his eyes fell upon a young boy sitting a few rows

back, smiling and licking an ice-cream cone" (20). Through this story, she learns that

Iran and America differ in social codes. Like the memoirists mentioned before,

Bahrampour mentions some of the pre-Islamic celebrations and her reaction to them

as she experienced them when she was young. One of these occasions is "Chahar-

shabeh-Souri, the eve of the last Wednesday before the Iranian New Year" when they

jump over the fire, singing, "My yellow to you, your red to me" (61). Her father, the

"cultural mediator" explains that "The yellow is all your sickness and bad things

going into the fire, and the red is the healthy stuff of the fire going into you" (61-2).

He further adds that this celebration is part of Zoroastrianism, the religion of pre-

Islamic Persians. Taraneh, then, recalls her memory of how Noruz17

, New Year's Day

is celebrated:

When we go up, Aziz's apartment is packed with all aunts and uncles and cousins

in fresh haircuts and new clothes. We turn on the radio and listen for the second

counter to tick up to the moment that winter turns to spring. Just before noon, the

new year begins and everyone gets hugs and kisses. The grown-ups give the kids

crisp ten-touman bills, and soon I have a sheaf of pink money with different

17

[T]he Zoroastrian priesthood presided over minute forms of etiquette designed to create the charisma

that undergirded monarchical authority. According to its rules, only the top strata of the realm's elite

entered the king's presence. On approaching his august sovereign, the landowner, scholar, or military

man threw himself at the feet of the throne and kissed the earth until the king commanded him to rise…

For the masses of the people, the king appeared on New Year's Day as a distant, venerable figure

seated on a lofty perch to receive the homage of his subjects" (Mackey 97).

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relatives' signatures and the new year's date inked in over the watermark of the

Shah's head. (62)

She also mentions that it is believed that Seezdeh-be-dar, the thirteenth day of the

New Year has to be spent outdoors or else bad luck is going to chase them all the year

round (63). On that day, they have to collect grass and throw it into the river to take

away all the "sickness and evil thoughts" (64). Taraneh notices a girl who ties blades

of grass into knots, throwing them one by one while saying "'People whose names

start with alef… people whose names start with beh.' She quickly goes through the

Farsi alphabet" (64).

The assimilation into the Iranian culture occurs after Taraneh, her siblings and

her mother get accustomed to it. As for Karen, Taraneh's mother, there are many

incidents that underscore her assimilation into the Iranian culture. For example, when

Taraneh's American Grandma visits them in Iran, and sees Karen in an Iranian

costume, she does not like it and tells her "These clothes make you look so foreign"

(58). Besides, when three-year-old Taraneh complains to her mother about feeling

homesick and she wants to go back to America, Karen tells her, "How can you be

homesick? This is our home" (30). It is also noticeable that her mother's Farsi has

improved that "Iranians are usually surprised at how well Mama speaks Farsi" (49). In

addition, Karen admits to Taraneh that her English now sounds foreign: "Mama says

that after a few months in Iran her English always starts to sound foreign because she

speaks to so many non-Americans" (72). Taraneh has, consequently, reached the

conclusion that "Mama is turning into Iranian" (86). She has acquired not only the

language but also some beliefs and customs. One of Taraneh's cousins tells Karen that

she should cut Taraneh's hair to make her grow: "If all the energy keeps going into

their hair, they stay as short as dwarves" (86). So, Karen cuts Taraneh's hair because

81El-Rayis

she is worried about Taraneh's being the smallest one in her class (86). Beside

becoming Iranian, Karen has "an Iranian job" as she works at CBS Records where she

listens to American and European songs and adjusts them to suit Iran. It needs a

person who is conscious enough of the Iranian culture to understand what type of

songs and music will be acceptable to Iranian people (86). In addition, when Karen is

asked by Iranians about Iran and America, she always replies "both are good", but

when they do not believe her, telling her that life in America is easier and better, she

tells them, "But some things really are better in Iran" (49). Even during the political

upheaval, when Karen's producer calls from America asking her to come, she

insistently replies, "We would never let this make us leave Iran" (112). Karen also

becomes interested in painting and she paints "Qajar princes and turbaned mullahs on

a backdrop of playing-card kings and queens" (77). To fit in, Karen accepts to convert

into Islam when Agha-Jan asks her to because he wants his grandchildren to "come

out Islamic" and thus Karen's name becomes, Zohreh (46). Moreover, when they

come to choose names for the children, both Karen and Essie, Taraneh's father, agree

on choosing Iranian names. Essie wants to name Taraneh "Sheefteh", which means

"charmed" in Farsi, but since Karen was in America, she instead chooses her a

double-edged name that her American family could pronounce (30). However, after

being assimilated into the Iranian culture, she agrees to name the following children

after Persian heroes, and they agreed on Som or Zal, yet as Agha-Jan died while she

was pregnant, they decided to name the baby, Ali, after his grandfather (35). As for

Taraneh's youngest sister, Essie has chosen for her the name, Sufi. This name has

roots in the Iranian culture as Mackey puts it18

(74).

18

"Sufism took root among devout ascetics within Islam during the Umayyed caliphate (660-750).

Originally [it came as] a reaction by pious believers to the growing worldliness of the ruling

81El-Rayis

As for Taraneh and Ali, there are some incidents that show how they have

assimilated and how they have strengthened their Iranian selves. For example, their

Farsi becomes better and thus they are able to play with their cousins (87). It is also

shown when Taraneh copies the Iranian culture while she plays with her dolls with

her neighbor, Maryam: "Normally I don't play with Barbies anymore, but with

Maryam it's fun, maybe because we're playing in Farsi and my Farsi is still babyish

enough for Barbies. We make the Barbies talk like the crazy, high-voiced puppets on

the Iranian TV children's shows" (83). Using pieces of different colors of cloth, they

decide to use them to make chadors for Barbie to make the Haj: "We giggle and start

planning the Barbies' pilgrimage to Mecca" (85). She even feels flattered when her

neighbor knows her mother is American and tells Taraneh that she does not look

foreign ; happily she says, "'It's my mother who's foreign' I say in my best Farsi" (65).

Another encounter that stresses Taraneh's Iranian-ness is when their American

Grandma comes to visit them; she takes them on a ride in a horse-drawn carriage

which is very expensive as it is for tourists and when an Iranian family look at them,

Taraneh feels embarrassed : "We never do this, I want to tell them; we're Iranian too"

(59). In addition, once when they go to America with their mother as she has a

concert, they have seen on the news that "a serial killer is knifing people in

Hollywood parking lots" and his targets are the foreign people, Taraneh and Ali make

jokes about it and do not feel threatened: "Maybe we would really be scared if we

heard that news in Iran. But the bad things that happen here happen to Americans, not

to us. We can always get on an airplane and go back to Iran" (60). Thus, they feel

secure in their home, Iran. One of the incidents, however, which makes Taraneh

reflect upon her identity is when she decides to correspond with a pen-friend,

Umayyeds" (Mackey 74). Many Persian poets have adopted Sufism and adopted the mystical

movement in their poems, like Rumi, Hafez and Mawlana (74).

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fantasizing about the different friends she is going to have from different exotic

cultures. However, she is shocked because the reply she gets implies that they

consider her the "exotic one":

And it hits me. They think I am the exotic one. The Big Blue Marble people

saw my name, saw that I lived in Iran, and matched me up with an American

girl. It is an American show, and they are not linking up people from all

different parts of the world; they are linking foreigners with Americans.

Someone like me, writing from Iran, would never be matched up with a pen

pal from a mysterious, fascinating land when the center of the Big Blue

Marble is America. (71)

Nevertheless, according to Carmen Reza, Taraneh and her family are still "un-

Iranian" in comparison with her Iranian family members (11). Reza states that

"[E]ven when she spoke Persian at a young age, she was not as connected to the

language as she was to English. In her home, even in Iran, they did not speak Persian,

but rather English" (11). Moreover, at school, she has to take "a class called Quick

Farsi, which is for students who are behind their grade in Farsi" (49). Taraneh admits

that "My Farsi life swims darkly below my English life" (50). Reza believes that for

Taraneh and her brother Ali to play a game, "Fake Farsi" in which they mimic the

sounds of Iranian TV broadcasters, but with words that do not make sense,

emphasizes how they are "disconnected to the language", and thus they are

"linguistically exile" (11-12). In addition, she is exile to some part of the culture. For

example, when Homa-khanoum, Taraneh's aunt, knows that Taraneh shows her

neighbor, Gita a picture of her mother in a bathing-suit, she gets frantic and

reprimands Taraneh, telling her, "Now it's going to get around that there are pictures

of Agha Esfandiar-Khan's foreign wife with no clothes, and that their kids are

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showing them around" (Bahrampour 68). As a result, Taraneh has felt a pang of guilt

as "I want to rush back and erase the day, go back to the morning when everything is

still right" (69). She also wonders if her family along with Gita's blame Taraneh's

strange behavior upon her mother: "I wonder if they really feel sorry for me and

figure it is Mama who has made me strange and indecent" (69). In addition, Taraneh's

school adds to her un-Iranian-ness. She was sent first to an International school where

only English-speaking children are accepted and where each Saturday "we sit in rows

on the cafeteria floor so the headmistress can give speeches about how, as the 'future

elite of this country', we have 'tremendous responsibilities to shoulder'" (33). Then,

she was sent to Community School where "Morning classes are in English and

afternoons are in a different language" (72).

Taraneh's father, Essie, does not fully conform to the Iranian culture. For

example, when her father was young, he was much awed by anything American and

he always dreamed of going there: "It was not educational or professional opportunity

that Baba wanted…America was alluring simply because it was America" (19).

Moreover, when he was in college, he did not care to follow news about Iran (20).

Noticeably, her father did not comply with the Iranian tradition of marriage: "[I]t

never occurred to Baba to let his family select his wife, although that is how all his

brothers and sisters…eventually married" (21). Unexpectedly, her parents lived

together without being married: "It was 1964, and they knew of no other unmarried

couple who lived together" (24). Taraneh spots that her father's style of clothing is

different from other Iranians: "Baba doesn't dress like my friends' fathers. Instead of

suits, he wears blue jeans and sweaters. He wears his hair long and shaggy, and when

he drives he puts a terry-cloth tennis band around it" (33). Besides, although his

family does not approve of the fact that Karen is a singer who sometimes has to

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"leave Baba in Iran for months at a time …[and] sings in front of studio executives

and long-haired male-musicians", he gives her the space to do what she likes, "even if

it's different from what Iranian women do" (54). Likewise, he does not care about the

Iranian tradition of having wives who serve food hierarchically, nor does he care

about the things Iranian women are judged by: "Everyone watches to see how [Iranian

wives] serve tea and how their rice turns out. If they make a mistake, like walking in

front of Aziz [Taraneh's grandmother] instead of letting her go first, everyone

whispers about them" (54). Moreover, Essie allows them to have a dog "even though

half our relatives might never set a foot in our house again. Iranians say dogs are

najes, unclean" (82). Furthermore, when Essie wants to build a house, he chooses it to

be located in a new compound that will be built in the western style: "This patch of

desert, Baba and Mama tells us, is going to be a new section of Tehran called

Shahrak-e-Gharb, which means 'Little City in the West'. 'It is being designed like

neighborhoods in America'" (75).

As a result when Bahrampour reflects upon her past-self, trying to define

herself, she recalls:

In Farsi there is a word for a person who lets Westernness take over his

Iranianness. It is a derogatory term, coined thirty years ago to describe

Iranians who replaced their own cultural traditions with Western ones. The

word is gharb-zadeh -"West-struck"- as if it is literally a Westernizing blow

that strikes a person in the head and makes him forget who he is. (195)

Bahrampour concludes that due to "my half-American genes and my U.S.

birth certificate, I was too Western to be called West-struck. Even in Iran I was never

really on the road to becoming an Iranian woman" (195). At the same time, she does

85El-Rayis

not like it when her father blames her mother for Bahrampour's un-Iranian-ness: "You

never spoke Farsi to them"; "Well, neither did you" replied both Taraneh and her

mother (196).

However, she could not blame her father either for her being un-Iranian

because the Iran they both experienced had been on the trend of modernization and

Westernization under the Shah. She notices that:

Foreign things are what people want, and that is why the sweaters at the

bazaar have English words knitted into the patterns, and why so many shops

have signs in English, and why the fancy restaurants serve chicken Kiev and

cream of mushroom soup and fresh fries but not kabob. Iranian shopkeepers

might claim that their clothes are as good as in America and Europe, but no

one believes them; the only way to really have clothes that don't bleed or

unravel or fade is to bring them from abroad. (71)

Although it is difficult to define herself, Taraneh and her family have

accommodated in Iran: Taraneh and her siblings have been installed in a school, her

mother has a job in Iran, and her father has set his business and is building them a

house. Every day, they buy things to furnish it and fantasize about their life there:

We speak in the future tense: we'll eat pancakes in the breakfast nook; we'll

make a rec room out of the basement; on weekends we'll drive up to the villa

Baba is building for us on the Caspian. Breakfast nook and rec room and villa

are new words describing things we have never had before, and the idea of

having them is like receiving a sudden inheritance. (87-88)

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Settled in Iran, it is difficult to be uprooted, especially when leaving home is not a

matter of choice for Taraneh. Noticeably, Bahrampour wrote her past-self through the

perspective of child Taraneh, but she reflected upon it through the perspective of the

adult, present self. Writing her memoir helps her to see how her past self influences

her present self.

2. Tara's American-Self (Post-Exile Self)

[A]nother day beginning over Tehran. This was my home. It was in trouble and I

was leaving it. At that moment, Iran in all its shakiness became more precious to

me than any safe country could ever be. I looked hard at the horizon, casting out

for some building or mountain peak to keep with me while I was gone. There was

nothing. So I forced myself to take in the nothingness, to memorize the hazy sky

over Tehran, and I kept the picture burning into my mind's eye long after I walked

down the aisle and took my seat. (116)

Tara's life is interrupted for the second time. As Jasmin Darznik puts it, in her

essay "The Perils and Seductions of Home" (2008), "Tara and her siblings are

'plucked out' of their lives and forced to set out again toward an unknown future" (2).

Unlike other Iranian-Americans who immigrated due to the revolution or to get

Western education, Tara has to leave Iran when neither she, nor her family wants to

go as they have settled in Iran. They have to leave because during the revolution, her

father was threatened by an anonymous caller that if he did not close his office, it will

be bombed (Bahrampour 115). Besides, one of the revolutionaries has informed her

father that his name is on one of the lists of the people who are going to be arrested

for having a foreign wife (115). In that respect, they are exiles; Carmen Reza provides

a definition of an exile: "An exile is a person compelled to leave or remain outside his

87El-Rayis

country of origin on account of well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of

religion, race, nationality or political opinion" (2). Furthermore, Hamid Naficy

describes that to be in the state of exile "is to be in neither one place nor the other, but

to be in-between, to be 'traveling in the 'slipzone' of fusion and admixture'" (qtd. in

Malek 355). In other words, the state of exile is "a process of perpetual becoming,

involving separation from home, a period of liminality and in-betweenness that can be

temporary or permanent, and incorporation into the dominant host society that can be

partial or complete" as suggested by Hamid Naficy (355). In this sense, Naficy

disagrees with Lysgaard's and Oberg's U-curve models of adjustment in which the

first state is a state of "euphoria and excitement, followed by frustration and sadness

[culture shock]. In the final stage, people emerge from the lowest point of their

experience and reach a level of relative comfort" (qtd. in Garrett 34). Conversely,

Ward, Brown and Holloway seem to agree with Naficy as they argue that "the first

stage of the transition process is the most stressful one, with a reduction of the stress

level as time goes by" (35). These are the stages of Tara's adjustment or

acculturation19

in the host country.

Tara's Acculturation

"I miss Iran, I wrote in my diary. I miss the cats. I miss the house. I miss

school. I miss my friends. I would never tease Sufi or Ali again or ask for another toy

if we could only swing back around, reverse the last ten days, and go back to Iran"

states the eleven-year-old Tara (10).

19

Acculturation or assimilation is defined by John Berry as "cultural changes resulting from encounters

after immigration" (Mahmoud 4)

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Tara's first stage of acculturation is being reluctant to assimilate in the

American culture especially that her parents have told her that after the revolution

they were going back to Iran: "We are just going to America for a few weeks to see

Grandma and Grandpa and wait until school opens again. Schools do not shut down

for good, and neither do countries" (112). Her reluctant attitude is reflected when her

parents keep looking for a house to buy: "If we're not staying in America, then why do

we have to buy a house?" (8). Moreover, she always compares between Iran and

America. In Iran, Tara and her siblings like to time their destination and they know

every detail that distinguishes places:

We had driven in all directions from home, and we knew how long it took

before the desert sloped up into mountains in the south and the tunneled-out

rocks opened up onto the lush, rainy coastline in the north. On the way home,

too, we knew when to look out for the gray sea of smog that hung over

Tehran. But here, looking out the window didn't tell us a thing. It was all neat

and identical and unfathomable. (5)

Besides, when her mother points at school, telling her that she will join it, Tara

could not help comparing it to her school in Iran: "Compared to my school in Iran,

with its tall, shady trees and graceful brick building, this looked like a jail" (7). She

also compares between lunch time in her school now to lunch time in her school in

Tehran where "lunch was still full of wonders: dried strips of mango brought by my

Indian friend Malika; empanadas from my Argentine friend Cristina; spring rolls from

Bayette, whose American father had met her Vietnamese mother when he'd gone to

Vietnam with the army" (9-10). According to Darius Rejali, the Iran Tara has

experienced explains why America becomes unbearable to her:

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For a brief time, roughly from 1960 to 1979, there flourished in Tehran an

international community. It was a thriving community of West European

businessmen, Soviet bloc engineers, East Asian diplomats, recently exiled

Iraqi Jews, Indian doctors, Americans of every sort, and Western educated

Iranian…Tara Bahrampour grew up in this society. (463)

That is to say that the shift from a cosmopolitan Iran to Oregon, "unremitting

suburb" is so sharp (464). However, it hints at the economical state of the family after

leaving Iran. They could not afford living in Los Angeles as both her parents were

jobless; besides, they did not bring any money from Iran because of their sudden,

unplanned departure (Bahrampour 118). Moreover, they always follow the news

hoping to find that things are getting better in Iran to go back there (121). When

Massi and Zia, her aunt and uncle, come to America, they told Tara's family that back

in Iran, lots of people who were thought to be anti-revolutionaries like the pro-Shah or

the Western-educated, were taken to jail (121). Massi and Zia assure Tara's family

that "it is a different Iran from the one we know, and that it can't last long" (122).

Thus, her parents end up having menial jobs: her father becomes a carpenter and her

mother "finds a job going to old people's houses to change their sheets and feed them"

(123). Bahrampour shows that this is what happened to most Iranians who came in the

wake of the revolution as they did not bring their money along with them (141). She

mentions a man they encountered who works as a valet and tells them how his social

status has deteriorated after leaving Iran due to the revolution: "I was the Vice-

Minister of Tourism under the Shah… In Iran a car and driver came to my house for

me every morning. Now I sleep on my daughter's couch, and I have gotten this little

job to keep my head warm" (141). Tara states that "We have come across other men

like that –security guards and sandwich vendors in their fifties or sixties who hardly

91El-Rayis

speak English and who always tell us what their positions were before the revolution"

(141). Even Tara is so influenced by the revolution that she keeps telling her

American friends about it. However, she soon feels that she is odd as "It scares me to

think that I am the only one in my class to have seen these things, the only one to

whom Iran is real. A whole country, a whole life of streets and shops and shopkeepers

and bus routes that only I know" (125). She notices that most of her friends look the

same and they are only interested in clothes and dating (123). Ending up feeling that

she is the odd one out, she feels an urge to fit in.

"Extreme Assimilation" is the second stage of Tara's acculturation as she

wants to be "an unspotted American" (Karpinski 84). Min Zhou mentions that "Gans

points out that pressures of both formal acculturation (through schooling) and

informal acculturation (through American peers and the media) will impinge on the

second generation" (73). This exactly what Tara has been through after watching how

Iran is represented in the western media, for example, showing pro-Shah people being

executed (Bahrampour 121). Besides, her peers at school guide or rather dictate on

her where to buy her clothes and where to get her hair-cut to fit in. One of her peers

tells her, "And you really should get your hair feathered" (126). Eventually, Tara's

assimilation into the American culture does not only weaken her relation to Iran, but

also to her father. She starts to compare between her parents, feeling blessed for

having an American mother and feeling ashamed of her Iranian father:

She is the only adult in my family who knows anything. She knows I want to

dress like the other kids in my class, and she doesn't pay any attention when

Baba says those clothes are too expensive. She also knows things like what to

do when we have a fifties dance at school…The Iranian mothers I know would

never have known how to do this. (127)

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In contrast, her father's Iranian behavior embarrasses her. For example, when

she goes to the supermarket with her father and her aunt, who has recently come to

America, her aunt wants to bargain as she used to do in Iran and thus Tara asks her

father to stop her because she is "acting like beggars" (128). Instead of stopping her,

Tara's father starts to push the cash register to accept the bargain (128). Furthermore,

when her father tells her that they are going to attend a wedding of one of her Iranian

relatives, she refuses and when he asks her why she hates his family, she strikes him

with her reply: "Because they're rude and obnoxious and they don't know how to act"

(145). Moreover, she never tells anyone that her father is a carpenter; she tells them

instead that he is an architect: "All the fathers in my neighborhood wear suits and go

to offices with telephones where their kids can call them during the day. They come

home from work clean and dry…If they saw Baba come with his three-day beard and

his matted hair, they would know I'd been lying" (136). She is also embarrassed of his

thick accent and, further, wishes her parents to get a divorce to get rid of her Iranian

father, so that her mother would marry an American one "and then our lives would

click into the easy way …As far as I can see, if we do not fit into this life, our Iranian

father is the one to blame" (136-7).

Conversely, she is proud of her mother because she is part of the culture Tara

wants to belong to; when she sees her mother's name in the yellow book of singers,

she exclaims with exhilaration: "I have something no one else has –a mother who is a

singer" (139). As for Iran, Tara never tells her friends in the new school that she is

Iranian, especially when Iran is shown again in the news; this time they are "hostage

takers", shouting, "Marg bar Amreeka" (133). Consequently, Tara decides to distance

herself from Iran; for example, when she knows that Esfaneh is a new student who

has just arrived from Iran, she tries to stay away from her (141). It seems that Tara

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believes that she has to be one thing or the other, either Iranian or American and

further she thinks that choosing between Iran and America means choosing between

her parents (Rejali 465).

Fortunately, her extreme assimilation comes to a stop when some incidents,

that entail her Iranian self to surface, take place. One of these incidents is when she

tried to convince Ali to change his looks to fit in, and he tells her "he likes his old T-

shirts from Iran" (Bahrampour 137). She then feels ashamed for two reasons: first,

while she is so demanding, nagging for new clothes and piano lessons, Ali "has

stopped asking for anything at all" because he is aware of their parents' financial

status (137). Secondly, she feels ashamed because while she struggles to fit in, Ali

enjoys being Iranian: "suddenly I feel silly. I look in the mirror at my own chopped-

up hair. I don't regret cutting it, but I wonder what Ali thinks of me looking so

different from when we left Iran. I hope he doesn't think I have changed" (126). The

second incident that underscores where she belongs is the hostage crisis. When she

watched the news, her reaction was unexpected because she smiled:

I look around at my family, watching the TV with such serious, attentive

expressions. Lately, I've noticed something else on their faces, or maybe it's

just that I feel it on mine. It is an almost invisible smile tugging at the corner

of my mouth. I know it is bad to take over an embassy. But it is hard not to

feel a twinge of pride, seeing what Iran can do. It can have a revolution that no

one expected would succeed; it can bring down the Shahanshah…and it can

scare the Americans so badly that they flood into their own streets and shout

slogans, just like the Iranians. (133)

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Actually her reaction is similar to that of Changez, the Pakistani protagonist in

Mohsin Hamid20

's autobiographical novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) who

also smiled when he watched the news of the collapse of New York's World Trade

Center: "But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack –no,

I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought

America to her knees" (73). Both gloat over America's misfortune. A third incident

that awakens Tara is the letter she received from her childhood Iranian friend

Shahrzad. In the letter, Shahrzad admits that after the hostage crisis, she changed her

name and her identity. Tara is stunned: "I might be embarrassed by my relatives. I

might not tell people at school that I am Iranian. But this letter is like a slap in the

face…Why Catholic? I want to ask. Why Italian? How can you say you miss Iran if

this is what you do...she can't just cut away her Iranianness" (Bahrampour 133-4).

Furthermore, when she reads the novel her mother has written, but failed to

publish, about an American woman who is married to an Iranian architect, she cries

hard because through her mother's writing, despite being fictional, Tara sees her

father through a different perspective, realizing that she has been so mean to him

(144). Thus she feels sorry for her father: "But I knew that since we had left Iran

something in him had become fragile. And I knew that people could be mean to him; I

knew this because I had been mean myself" (156).

Thus the third stage of Tara's acculturation takes place when Tara's Iranian self is

brought to the surface in reaction to her assimilation when she tries hard to suppress

her Iranian self and be American. According to Zhou, some immigrants tend to

"reconstruct an ethnicity in resistance to the oppressing structure" (79). As she feels

threatened by her American peers at school after the hostage crisis, she decides to

20

Mohsin Hamid (1971- )

94El-Rayis

accentuate her Iranian self. She starts to go to the library to read about the revolution

and the Iran-Iraq war to understand the things that the media do not tell (Bahrampour

162). She also signs up for Farsi class (186). Moreover, she starts to love Iranian food,

"It was not until we moved to America that I began to like Iranian food" (181-2).

While previously she tried to stay away from Iranians, now she tries to spot them on

the campus and socialize with them (189). Although she tries to create an Iran in

America, she still feels that part of her is missing: "But after Aziz visited I began to

feel I was missing something – a connection to the cousins who might have been like

extra brothers and sisters to me, and the aunts and uncles who might have taken me

beyond what Baba taught me of Iran" (183-4). According to Castro-Borrego, a figure

of the ancestor acts "as a mediator between the present and the past" through the

process of "re-memory" (4). It is the process which "involves taking apart or

deconstructing the past: on the one hand, identifying the gaps –the something

somebody forgot to tell somebody –and on the other, reconstructing the understanding

of the past and the present by filling in those gaps" (2). It seems that Aziz, her

grandmother, along with Tara's other Iranian family members are the figures who are

going to fill in the gaps her parents failed to fill: "When Ammejun [her aunt] puts a

chador over my head and offers to teach me how to cook, I feel like I am discovering

a lost side of myself, a side that, in moving away from our relatives…all those years

ago, my family chose to put aside" (Bahrampour 183). Henceforward, Tara decides to

bring out her core self that she has long been suppressing in America.

B. The Core Self and The Sense of Belonging

People might tell me stories about what Iran was really like, but they were not

talking about "my" Iran. We had left at the end of my childhood, and like

childhood it had frozen in my mind into a mythical land. Once we landed in

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America, I lost the power to separate Iran from my memories of what it had

been. The only way to do that would be to go back and see it for myself. (203)

After fifteen years of being away from her home country Iran, Tara feels the

urge to reclaim her Iran, especially after finding out that the Iran of her memory has

been created by her parents, relatives and Western media: "But now I began to

wonder how much of my perception of Iran was shaded by Mama and Baba's

presentation of it –both before the revolution and afterward, when Iran continued to

be filtered to me through the eyes of adults" (203). Besides, Iranian media has been

strictly censored and thus Iranian exiles have to depend on the Western media to

know what is happening in Iran: "Iranians living outside Iran were not aware of some

of the events that occurred while they were away from their country. Because of the

extreme censorship that the government of Iran imposes, Iranians and others around

the world must look outside the country to find out what is happening in Iran" (Ebadi

219). Tara wants to see the Iran that she does not know; she wants to experience it

first hand, instead of passively receiving the one handed down to her. This meaning is

expressed in Zara Houshmad's poem "Home stories":

Home? What home?

Hey, Great Satan, Sheitan-e-Bozorg,

Better the devil you know.

Better the stories we tell ourselves

Than the story we've been sold. (quoted in Karim 6)

Thus Tara decides to re-write or re-create her memory of Iran, not through the

eyes of her relatives, but through experiencing the other Iran that she hears about.

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Through this process of re-memory or deconstructing the past, Tara enters into a

spiritual journey that leads her closer to her roots (Castro-Borrego 4). In her spiritual

journey, Tara is accompanied by her family members, ancestors who "function as

bridges between history and myth because they join present experiences with those of

the past, affirming cultural continuity and 'instructing new generations in survival

techniques' which are vital for the achievement of wholeness and for spiritual and

moral growth" as it provides individuals with a "sense of belonging to a spiritual

homeland" (8-10).

In her journey back to Iran, Tara's acculturation takes another U-curve pattern.

That is why Gullahorn stretches out the U-curve model of adjustment in a new culture

to a W-curve "to reflect the experience of the students re-entering their home culture

and going through another U-curve period" (qtd. in Garrett 34). In Tara's case the first

phase of adaptation is plagued by distress as a result of culture shock. According to

Carmen Reza, "This combination of trauma, nostalgia, and exile creates a state of

culture shock that manifests itself when Tara goes back to Iran after being gone for

over a decade" (16).

As for trauma, Tara admits in several ways that the Islamic Revolution is the

traumatic experience that has changed the course of her life. Not only did it separate

Tara from her home country, but it also uprooted her from her traditions, customs and

way of life. Reza quotes Cathy Caruth who clarifies that "trauma is not locatable in

the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that

it's very unassimilated in nature –the way it was precisely not known in the first

instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on" (15-16). This is presented in the

several occasions when Tara admits how different her life would have been if it were

not for the revolution. For instance, when her cousin, Fereidoon who has also been

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raised in America, asks her if she had a boyfriend and whether she slept with him, she

tells him everything assuming that he will not judge her as long as he himself has told

her about his girlfriend (Bahrampour 170). However, Fereidoon, like most Iranian

men21

, has double standards as he tells her that he believes that girls who sleep with

their boyfriends are "slutty" (171). She felt guilty and her parents reprimanded her for

telling him and as a result she implicitly blames it on the revolution. She wishes she

had not been to America, "wishing I could go back fifteen years to when we were all

in Iran and none of this had started" (173). Another incident is when her American

passport was confiscated at the airport; she starts to blame it on her "bad Farsi" and

her "honesty" as her family always tells her "In Iran, you must learn one thing. Never

tell the truth" when they warn her not to show her American passport (218).

Moreover, when she goes to the carpet section in the bazaar, the man takes her for a

foreigner, asking her where she is from (255). Tara feels insulted: "But why has this

man picked me out? Is it my flowered scarf, so different from the black chadors of

South Tehran? Or the aimlessness of my walk? Or is it my very presence, the

strangeness of a girl alone, that says I must not belong?" (255). Furthermore, when

she attended "a ta'azieh- a passion play honoring the martyrs of Shiism", everyone

was crying and wailing, but Tara feels "left out, as if a great release has taken place all

around me but passed me over, leaving me empty of sorrow and devoid of the

catharsis that is the reward for giving oneself over to a common story" (294-5). In

addition, when she went sightseeing in Iran and she saw two American men, she feels

exhilarated and invited them to lunch with her. The morality police arrest her for

talking to strangers and thus she feels guilty: "Why should I have felt I could run after

21

A study about Iranian men in Los Angeles proves that "it is not only the older generation that

promotes double standards, but also some young men themselves. While some feel it is their right to

take advantage of opportunities here to date and have intimate relations, they criticized Iranian women

for taking or even wanting the same opportunities" (Reza 15).

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these exotic beings, talk to them and take them to lunch when no other Iranian was

doing this? Have I insulted Iranians by choosing to talk to foreigners?…Had I

casually approached two Iranian men in a mosque they would have thought I was a

madwoman or a prostitute" (303).

She is shocked when she wants to kiss her uncle and he jumps back,

reprimanding her for doing this in public (217). Tara then becomes nostalgic for an

Iran where "there was not so much segregation between the sexes; a society in which

morals were not so rigidly enforced and observed by the governmental authorities"

(Reza 17-18). She then mentions the "survival techniques" Iranians implement to

evade the Komiteh, morality police. For example, during a wedding party, she notices

how suddenly the music is stopped and the women put on their coats and scarves

around their party dresses when the Komiteh comes in (Bahrampour 226). She also

notices that there is a camera woman in every party and she learns that "every video

crew has to have one. That way if the Komiteh raids the studio and asks who took all

the pictures of women they can say it was her" (225). Only then does she realize that

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" as Leslie P. Hartley

puts it in the opening of his novel, The Go-Between (XIII). That is why Juffer puts

forth that culture shock is "a positive experience which results in personal growth,

development and learning" (qtd. in Reza 7). Once the person realizes that the place

they are going to is different from the place they have once been to, they are more

likely to experience culture shock positively. Tara states that "Walking alone in

Tehran for the first time in fifteen years, I feel as if I've been given the key to a locked

garden" (Bahrampour 234). Thus, instead of seeing Iran from the point of view of a

foreigner or a traveler, she experiences the Iran that her Iranian ancestors know (255).

She visits her family house, her school, Shahrak where her father built their house,

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and her father's village where he was born. She notices that the places look different

and are housed by different people. But she feels happy that the places are still there:

"A tightness wells up in my throat –a sadness shot through with elation. Almost

nothing of ours remains, and yet I am wildly happy, simply for the fact that this house

is still here and I am standing inside it" (251). This self-acceptance is the second

phase of adaptation and leads to healing from the trauma. Along with accepting

herself, she accepts the other Iran. She accepts that as she has changed, Iran has.

Desalvo mentions that according to Henri Ellenberger, "when recovery occurs, it

happens 'spontaneously and rapidly. It is marked by feeling of euphoria, and is

followed by a transformation of the personality'" (156). Tara's change in personality is

noticed in her change of perspectives. For example, she feels that the veil is liberating

women rather than imprisoning them: "The scarf and raincoat are like a disguise, a

protective shield that can make women feel bolder than they otherwise might"

(Bahrampour 268). Back in America, Tara wears the scarf as a symbol that reminds

her of Iran: "when I was missing Iran, I would wear the scarf alone in the bedroom

like a secret vice" (348). Her personal growth is also noticed in the way she has

changed her perspective towards the revolution. Through writing her memoir, she

eventually admits that a positive side of the revolution does exist:

After the revolution, filmmakers had to abandon the sex-and-violence film

themes of the Shah era. They took up current Iranian issues, like postwar

readjustment and the ideology gap between aging revolutionaries and their

children. And the new films were well received. The banning of Western

influences, for all its extreme consequences, forced many middle-class,

Westernized Iranians to turn to Iranian influences, and often they discovered

that they liked them. (293)

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She also becomes more understanding of the Iranian lifestyle. While she

criticizes the fact that Iranian women are occupied with shopping and babies, she

appreciates "the way Reza [her cousin] remembers playing school with us on Aziz's

stairs, the way Zia [her uncle] claims me as his own daughter –these move me in

deeper ways than our different tastes and lifestyles" (Bahrampour 292). While she

hates the submissiveness of Iranians, she eventually comes to understand that it is part

of the culture. Her first impression is that "It is that "enshallah" that "God willing"

tacked on at the end, that bothers me. It is hard to pin things down when everything

depends on the will of God" (228-9). However, she then realizes that: "Imagining

Iranians to all be terrorists and fanatics, Westerners do not always notice their

submissiveness, although it is elemental to Shiism. Within the 'fanaticism', within the

willingness to be martyred and bend to the will of God, lies a simple desire to get

from one day to the next without interference from the evil eye" (337). In addition,

although she used to hate the fact that her family pinched her cheek when she was a

child, she now appreciates the touching between women that used to bother her

mother: "But none of this bothers me" (341).

Despite the fact that she enjoys her visit to Iran, she admits that "If I were to

stay here I would probably be only partly satisfied. I would always feel I belonged; I

would always feel glad to run into those old ladies who remembered the child my

father was. But being away from America, I might also start to feel more American,

more trapped" (342). She also adds that "I want it both ways –to enter Iran as easily as

an Iranian and to leave it as easily as an American" (228). In the last phase of her

acculturation in her home, she knows her roots, harbors her center –her core self –and

realizes where she belongs, but she yearns to go to America where she resides and

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where she has a sense of freedom. Garrett suggests that the sense of freedom that she

feels in America originates in having a home where one belongs:

The sense of freedom can come not only from the self-designed nature of the

new home, but also, unexpectedly, from the home one leaves behind. The

knowledge that there is a permanent base somewhere else, always available,

always willing to take you back, allows for a greater willingness to experiment

with new homes: "knowing that this place exists unchanged, even in another

part of the world, offers a base for venturing out into the world". Interesting

how the original home is both a source of security and a source of freedom,

both roots and wings. (56)

Tara points out that "In Iran your place becomes empty when you leave and

stays empty as long as you are away" (194). Going back to America, Tara is secure as

she knows that Iran is where she always belongs.

Writing retrospectively about her experiences has greatly helped her to heal

from the trauma of leaving home and has also provided her with a prospective view

that in turn allows her to see the host culture as home. Peyman Vahabzadeh explains:

From the retrospective view that lamented –for good reason –the agonizing

loss of familiar and the interruption of the original life projects in the

homeland, there emerged a prospective outlook that gradually overcome the

debilitating trauma…The latter view bridged over the cut in the lifeworld, so

to speak, and resuscitated, as much as possible, components of the interrupted

original life projects. Many of the exiled and banished of yesterday who

longed for a vindicating return to their homeland transformed into today's

112El-Rayis

emigrants who have come to terms with their permanent conditions of alterity

and foreignness in Outlandia. (595-6)

In other words, the process of writing her memoir has given her a broader view of

her life, allowing her to accept the present-self and to have a better future-self that

will emerge eventually in the process of writing. For George F. Simons, the memoir is

"a word and a deed of a self in dialogue with itself seeking to articulate its inner word

and to embrace it. In retrospect it is our story but in its moment of making it is our

very process and our being" (11). After anchoring her core self, Tara's acculturation in

the host country will take a more stable pattern which helps her to reconcile between

her two selves: her Iranian self and her American self.

C. Healing and Wholeness: Reconciliation

"Engaging in writing, in creative work, permits us to pass from numbness to

feeling, from denial to acceptance, from conflict and chaos to order and resolution,

from rage and loss to profound growth, from grief to joy" pointed out by Desalvo

(57). Through writing her memoir, Bahrampour manages not only to heal herself from

the traumatic experience of the Islamic Revolution that distanced her from her home

but also to turn this experience into a journey of personal growth by accepting her

past and present selves and reconciling between them. As a result, she attains her

wholeness which is clarified in her acculturation model in America after her spiritual

journey back to Iran –not the physical journey, but the spiritual journey she has while

writing. She realizes that in order to adapt, she does not have to replace her culture of

origin with another, but rather she could have a combination of both. This model of

acculturation is called "bicultural eclecticism", a term used by C. B. Paulston "to

describe the process through which individuals pick and choose elements of the two

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cultures that best suit their particular circumstances, preference or personality" (qtd. in

Garrett 35). Through her memoir, Bahrampour proves in several ways that she

"dramatizes the impossibility of being completely one thing or another –neither fish

nor fowl" (Karpinski 75).

The way with which she reconciles between her two selves is through cultural

translation. According to Robert J. C. Young in his book, Postcolonialism, "Literally,

according to its Latin etymology, translation means to carry or to bear across" (138).

In that sense, Bahrampour, being Iranian-American, translates both ways. In the

process, she uses many techniques. First, her text is considered "a dialectic of

foreignizing and domesticating through bringing the reader to the foreign source and

bringing the foreign source to the reader, which can be seen as compatible with the

conflicting goals of cultural pluralism and assimilation" (Karpinski 43). That is why

in reviewing this memoir, Darius Rejali states that "Bahrampour has written a book so

Iranian that no Iranian could have written it. And it is a book so accessible to ordinary

Americans that no American could have written it" (465).

Another technique she uses is "creolization": "As the word 'creole' implies, here

translation involves displacement, the carrying over and transformation of the

dominant culture into new identities that take on material elements from the culture of

their new location. Both sides of exchange get creolized, transformed, as a result"

(Young 142). Bahrampour presents the "creolization" or combination of both

languages in one sentence –"Farglish22

": "It is fun to speak like this, to lazily pick the

best words from each side and form a fused language you'd have to be one of us to

understand" (Bahrampour 191). For Mohammad A. Chaichian, this interjection of

22

Maryam Daha. "Contextual Factors Contributing to Ethnic Identity Development of Second-

Generation Iranian American Adolescents". P 16

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English words and phrases in Farsi is "a process of cultural mediation or translation,

creating an intercultural perspective that allows Iranians to integrate certain dynamics

of meaning and value from American culture within an Iranian frame of reference"

(618). Yaëlle Azagury, who has a multi-cultural identity, similarly uses this technique

by using words from different languages in the same sentence: "[W]e understood how

different languages do not seize reality in the same way; instinctively, we favored the

word that was closest to what we needed to say. The result was a sentence built like

those odd mythological animals with the head of a lion and the tail of a snake" (392).

Furthermore, Bahrampour transliterates some Farsi words, phrases, proverbs into

english, such as do-rageh. Bahrampour uses this word when she tells the shopkeeper

that she is half Iranian and half American, he tells her that she is do-rageh;

Bahrampour provides its translation "Do-rageh means two-veined, or two kinds of

blood in one vein, and whenever people say it I think of my two bloods swirling

together like a two-colored lollipop" (48). However, some phrases or proverbs are

"untranslatable" as they have to be understood within their cultural context (Karpinski

50). In that case, Bahrampour provides a literal translation in addition to a cultural

context to convey the meaning. For example, deed-o-baz-deed, as previously

mentioned, resembles part of the Iranian cultural tradition of repeatedly visiting each

other to imply the importance of family ties. Bahrampour presents the literal

translation which is "seeing and seeing again" and further chooses it as the title for her

memoir, To See and See Again to reflect how she reconciles between her two cultures;

the title is English, but it also has a deep cultural meaning in Iran. Her insistence on

translating one culture into another underlines how she stresses the co-existence of

both cultures. According to Antoine Berman:

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Every culture resists translation, even if it has an essential need for it. The very

aim of translation –to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to

fertilize what is one's Own through the mediation of what is foreign –is

diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture, that species of

narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and unadulterated Whole.

(qtd. in Karpinski 42-3)

It seems that Bahrampour agrees with Derrida on the idea that "Translation

promises the reconciliation of languages" as quoted by Karpiniski (33).

In conclusion, it is the writing of memoir that allows Bahrampour to reflect

upon her spiritual and physical journeys to the other Iran and upon her past self that in

turn helps her to both accept her present self, and reconcile between the two different

and contesting cultures to which she belongs. Her memoir is the voice of a generation

of Iranians who belong to both first and second generation immigrants. Through

healing herself and the way she perceives her culture, she heals the readers who have

been through the same experiences.

While Bahrampour attains wholeness through re-visiting Iran of her ancestors,

Azadeh Moaveni, in the following chapter, attains it through visiting Iran of the

generation of Iranians whom she would have belonged to if it were not for the

revolution –"the lost generation."

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CHAPTER IV

AZADEH MOAVENI'S LIPSTICK JIHAD

Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in

Iran (2005) is Azadeh Moaveni's first memoir. Her second memoir is Honeymoon in

Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (2009). In her first memoir, which is

the focus of my study, Moaveni writes about her first visit to Iran after eighteen years.

Unlike Tara Bahrampour who was born in America, but raised in Iran, Moaveni was

born and raised in America to Iranian parents who left Iran in 1976, two years before

the Iranian Revolution. Therefore, Moaveni belongs to second-generation Iranian-

Americans who differ from their immigrant parents in lacking "meaningful

connections to their 'old' world. They are thus unlikely to consider a foreign country

as a place to return to or as a point of reference. They instead are prone to evaluate

themselves or to be evaluated by others by the standards of their new country" (Zhou

64). Consequently, Moaveni has many clashes with her mother who tries to raise her

as an Iranian in America, imposing on her the Iranian cultural values which are

different from the values she acquires living in America. Moaveni ends up feeling that

she is floating somewhere in-between, not belonging in either.

Moaveni admits that her two-year visit to Iran was meant to be professional as

she was sent in 1998 as a journalist for Time magazine to report on the political

upheaval and the election taking place in modern Iran (Moaveni vii). However, her

visit helps her to dig out a new self: "I never intended my Iranian odyssey as a search

for self, but a very different me emerged at its end" (viii). That is to say writing a

memoir about her professional journey has helped her to decipher not only the new

Iran she encounters but also her new self that evolves during her spiritual journey

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back to Iran. These encounters eventually lead her to attain her wholeness. As

Desalvo puts it, "It is not what you write or what you produce as you write that is

important. It is what happens to you while you are writing that is important. It is who

you become while you are writing that is important" (74).

A. Identity Formation between Two Cultures

The subtitle of Moaveni's memoir implies how Moaveni's "identity shifts from

being an Iranian in California to being an American in Iran" (Williams 11-12).

1. Growing up Iranian in America

I was born in Palo Alto, California, into the lap of an Iranian diaspora

community awash in nostalgia and longing for an Iran many thousands of

miles away. As a girl, raised on the distorting myths of exile, I imagined

myself a Persian princess, estranged from my homeland –a place of light,

poetry, and nightingales –by a dark, evil force called the Revolution. (Moaveni

vii)

The opening sentence of Moaveni's memoir explicates her sense of

displacement instilled in her by the Iranian community that surrounds her. Like Tara

Bahrampour, Azadeh Moaveni understands that she has been uprooted due to the

revolution. Even her name Azadeh, which means "the one who is free", is a constant

reminder of the revolution because it is "a name that became popular right before and

after the revolution" (9). The difference between them lies in the fact that Bahrampour

has experienced the Iranian Revolution first hand while Moaveni inherits this sense of

displacement and uprooted-ness from her family. Even when she describes herself as

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a Persian princess, the word Persian for Azadeh23

is "a vaguely Oriental notion

belonging to history, untraceable on a map" (vii). It is a word that she uses to describe

things like "a fluffy cat or a silky carpet" (vii). That is why Azadeh, like second

generation Iranian exiles, is so alienated from her own culture since "she never lived

in Iran; she only visited while she was a young child. During that time, she stayed

with her close relatives, and that is the most exposure to Iran, its culture, and the

people she had ever experienced" (Reza 22). At the same time, her family always

feeds her with the idea that America is not home; it is a "foreign country" (Moaveni

3). Estranged from both cultures, Azadeh Moaveni ends up impersonating the figure

of "Resident Alien", a figure created by Rushdie in his texts to describe the person

who lives between two worlds (Manecke 113). To understand how Azadeh Moaveni

becomes a "Resident Alien" or an Iranian in America, there is a need to investigate

the Iranian diaspora community that her family, especially her mother, forges for her.

According to Larson, "To flesh out the author, it is important to know who the

parents were, their class, their proclivities. It is more crucial, however, to know the

perception of the rememberer" (29). That is to say that Azadeh's parents play a central

role in forming her identity, but what is more important is how Azadeh Moaveni

remembers them.

Moaveni's parents, like many upper middle class and wealthy Iranians, are

educated in America, but they returned home to benefit the country. They got married

and went back to America to accompany Azadeh's maternal grandparents who were

"medical exiles" (Moaveni 7). However, they never intended to stay in America for

good if it were not for the revolution: "Until 1979, the year of the great catastrophe

23

I use her last name, Moaveni when I refer to the memoirist; otherwise, I use her first name, Azadeh

to refer to her narrated selves. The same applies to Gelareh Asayesh in the following chapter.

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that tossed our lives up into the air, scattering us haphazardly like leaves in a storm"

(7).

Like Tara Bahrampour's parents who belong to two different worlds,

Moaveni's divorced parents, although both are Iranians, extremely differ in their

beliefs and their Iranian-ness. As for her father, he is similar to many Iranians who

dissociate themselves from Iran, preferring instead to describe themselves as Persians,

especially after the hostage crisis. When Azadeh describes him, she says:

My father was an atheist who called the Prophet Mohammad a pedophile for

marrying a nine-year-old girl. He thought the defining characteristics of

Iranian culture –fatalism, political paranoia, social obligations, an enthusiasm

for guilt –were responsible for the failures of modern Iran. He wouldn't even

condescend to use the term "Iranian culture", preferring to refer , to this day,

to "that stinking culture"; he refused to return to Iran, even for his mother's

funeral, and wouldn't help me with my Persian homework, a language, he

pronounced direly, "you will never use." (22)

Nevertheless, her father holds on to some aspects of the Iranian culture. For

example, like the Iranians who treasure gardens, her father plants some Persian herbs

in his garden in Saratoga (14). Besides, he names the license plate of his car

"RAKSH" after the name of the hero Rostam's horse in the Shahnameh (15). He also

teaches Azadeh how to draw "the proper dimensions of the cat, which he informed me

was the accurate geographic contour of Iran" (15).

While Azadeh spends the weekends with her father, she lives with her single

mother and maternal parents who try to reinforce her Iranian-ness by creating an

Iranian diaspora community in America to connect Azadeh to the Iranian culture to

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which she is as reluctant as her father to associate with. The Iranian community

among which Azadeh has been raised acts typically according to William Saffran's

definition of the diaspora communities:

They retain a memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland –its

physical location, history, and achievements; they believe that they are not –

and perhaps cannot be –fully accepted by their host country and therefore feel

partly alienated and insulated from it; they regard their ancestral home as their

true ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would

eventually return –when conditions are appropriate; they believe that they

should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their

original homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and they continue to relate

personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their

ethno-communal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the

existence of such a relationship. (quoted in Mostofi 686)

Unlike Azadeh's father, Azadeh's mother makes sure to underpin Azadeh's

Iranian-ness, and thus Azadeh's mother is a typical model of Saffran's definition.

Azadeh notices that after the hostage crisis, immigrant Iranians resorted to extreme

assimilation in order to avoid being harassed: "Many Iranians dealt with this by

becoming the perfect immigrants: successful, assimilated, with flawless, relaxed

American English and cheerfully pro-American political sentiments. Not Maman"

(Moaveni 8). Her mother chooses for them to live in "an apartment complex that was

overrun with other Iranian exiles" (18). Besides, her mother holds an émigré political

salon each Sunday to discuss the state of Iran and how it becomes ruined (19).

Furthermore, Azadeh's mother always helps Iranian exiles: "Often I'd come home

from school to find a perfect stranger at the kitchen table, the latest Iranian charity

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case –an abused wife, a teenage runaway –she'd taken up to rescue" (8). In addition,

each year, Azadeh's mother gives a presentation on Persian New Year (Noruz),

describing how they celebrate the occasion and the food they prepare for it (9). In

contradiction to her mother's effort, Azadeh develops an anti-Iranian-culture attitude,

leading to "intensified parent-child conflicts" (Zhou 84). Portes and Rumbaut explain

that these conflicts are the result of "the acculturation gap between immigrant parents

and their children"; they divide this "acculturation gap" into two types: "generational

consonance versus dissonance": "Generational consonance occurs when parents and

children both remain un-acculturated, or both acculturate at the same rate, or both

agree on selective acculturation. Generational dissonance occurs when children

neither correspond to levels of parental acculturation nor conform to parental

guidance" (quoted in Zhou 84).

It seems that Azadeh's relation to her mother falls under the category of

"generational dissonance". She criticizes the fact that her mother's acculturation is

eclectic: "Maman thought values were like groceries; you'd cruise through the aisles,

toss the ones you fancied into your cart, and leave the unappealing ones on the shelf"

(Moaveni 20). Unlike her mother who "didn't want to sacrifice anything: neither her

Iranian values, nor her American independence", Azadeh yearns to choose one and

reject the other (19). She starts to reject the Iranian culture as it restricts her from

assimilation, accentuating her alienation. For example, when Azadeh comes home

from school finding her mother busy with an Iranian acquaintance, discussing politics,

she feels estranged from her friends at schools, whose American mothers bake

cookies or take them out to baseball games (8). She hates the fact that after the

hostage crisis, her name causes her much discomfort when the teacher slows down

before pronouncing it, stressing its foreignness which entails explaining its origin. She

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states: "For many years my overriding objective in meeting new people was to avoid

mention of my Iranianness. That my name gave me away, that people would ask in a

smiley, kind way where I was from, and that I would have to say it, 'Iran', and watch

their faces settle into a blank, this was a permanent source of discomfort" (9).

She also does not like the fact that she only feels comfortable among "the

hippie, hyper-educated liberals" who believe that being Iranian is wonderful or among

"people fond of the exotic" (10). She hates it when her friends visit while her

grandfather listens to Banaan, "the classical Persian singer whose voice ached with

melancholy…I didn't want them to hear foreign wailing in the background" (16). She

also resists her grandmother when she tries to teach her Koran. Besides, she feels

embarrassed when she takes her grandmother to the grocery store as she gets

"backward glances" from people "who only saw a strange old woman in a veil in the

line at the grocery store, taking too long to fumble the bills out of her clasp purse,

counting them out slowly" (17). She also resents her mother when she acts Iranian.

For example, when her mother heard the crying of her neighbor's two girls who are

left alone; she decides to take them in her house, giving them sandwiches and putting

them to sleep. Coming home, the mother was about to call the police because her

neighbor "kidnapped" her children (20). She also hates her mother's duality. Her

mother believes that pre-marital sex is wrong for women, but right for men (21).

Azadeh ridicules this duality, saying "The men she forgave, offering an explanation

worthy of an Iranian villager: "'They can't help themselves'. Women, it seemed, were

physiologically better equipped for deprivation" (21). At the same time, Azadeh

realizes that her mother gets disappointed when she finds out that Azadeh is growing

up American, not Iranian as she wishes her to be, especially when Azadeh fails to

conform to the Iranian tradition. For example, her mother gets upset when Azadeh

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"forget[s] which elder in a room full of aging relatives [she] should have served tea to

first, or when [she]'d refuse to interrupt an afternoon with a friend to take vitamins to

an elderly Iranian lady who couldn't drive" (20-21). Azadeh's mother gets infuriated

when she knows that Azadeh has a boyfriend, wondering why her daughter is

unquestioningly accepting "this decadent culture's corrupt way" (21). Azadeh

reproaches her mother, saying, "It's all your fault for raising me here; what did you

expect?" (21). Azadeh then arrives at the conclusion that being Iranian in America is a

burden:

Being Iranian amounted to psychological torture. It meant bringing a friend

home from school, to find an old woman with a flowered bonnet on her head

kneeling in prayer, or sifting through a vast pile of dried herbs like a

prehistoric gatherer. It demanded a rejection of the only lifestyle I knew and

wanted and offered only vague promises of community inclusion in exchange.

And so I decided then and there that Iranianness and I must part. (24-25)

What annoys her the most is the invisibility of her generation. Her parents'

generation is preoccupied with the revolution and sense of exile that they take no

notice of "the second generation's delicate cultural transition. We were on our own, as

our parents struggled with their nostalgia and political anger…I often felt invisible,

alone with my two irreconcilable halves" (26). In addition to being invisible to their

parents' generation, they felt invisible in the main-stream culture: "We weren't

reflected anywhere –not on television, not on radio; we didn't even have our ethnic

slur" (26). Besides, when she went to the University of California, "there was no

space for Iranians within the multicultural dialogue everyone seemed so bent on

having. We were too new, and didn't have a place yet" (26). In this sense, Azadeh

represents the second-generation's feeling: they feel "like outcasts from both

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countries, Iran and the United States, because they are physically separated from Iran

and socially and culturally separated from America" (Williams 4). That is why Laurie

Stone, the editor of the memoir anthology Close to the Bone (1997), suggests that "the

contemporary Iranian-American memoirists typically portray themselves as victims

both of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the invisibility of their community in the

American schema of multiculturalism" (qtd. in Motlagh 28).

Azadeh, then, tries to identify herself; she finds out that she is not brown, but

she is not white as "All the Iranians I knew considered themselves European with a

tan" (Moaveni 26). She also does not consider herself an immigrant because "My

family had always insisted we weren't really immigrants as such, but rather a special

tribe who had been temporarily displaced" (26). However, she explains that she only

identifies herself when she compares herself to her American peers. In comparison to

them, she discovers that her exposition to the Iranian culture has granted her "an extra

life": "There was Azadeh at school, who managed to look and sound like the other

kids…and there was Azadeh at home, who lived in a separate world, with its own

special language and rituals" (19). The fact that her mother introduces her to opera,

hippies, yoga classes, hiking groups, discos, political soirees, Buddhism, Hinduism,

Mormonism and Islam, provided Azadeh with enough experience to make her act

with ease in any environment (23). She admits, "For the first time ever it occurred to

me I'd actually been buffered against the degree of alienation it was possible to feel as

a new comer in America" (27). Hence, she starts to strongly believe that her otherness

is a privilege, and that her Iranian-ness is not a burden, "but a sense of self anchored

in history" (27). Henceforward, she decides to read about the Middle East, the

relationship between the East and West, and above all, about Iran, its history and

culture (28). She announces that:

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Iran was demystified –it became a subject I could learn about on my own, a

civilization that I could approach from whatever direction I chose. It stopped

being only the emotional place and set of rigid norms Maman could use to pull

at my heartstrings and play on my guilt. As I discovered contemporary Iranian

poetry, some of which I could read on my own, I began to feel for the first

time in my life, that Iranianness was not an obstacle to my independence. (28)

After struggling for her identity, Azadeh comes to acknowledge to herself and to

anyone who asks her where she is from that she is from Iran with much confidence.

Rather, she is convinced that she is not a hyphenated American, but "just plain

Iranian" in America, assuming that "since I was Iranian, I would feel at home in the

one place I was meant to belong –Iran" (28).

2. Being American in Iran

Originating from a troubled country, but growing up outside it, came with

many complications. Worst of all, at least on a personal level, was that you

grew up assuming everything about you was related to that place, but you

never got to test that out, since the place was unstable and sort of dangerous,

and you never actually went there…That, really, was why I wanted to go to

Iran. To see whether the ties that bound me were real, or flimsy threads of

inherited nostalgia. (Moaveni 32-33)

Conscious of the two different Irans, Azadeh –along with the generation of

Iranians born "just before the revolution or along with it" –knows next to nothing

about the traumatic experience of the first generation in the aftermath of the Iranian

Revolution (viii). In America, she has been harassed for being Iranian –a hostage

taker –so she wants to go to Iran to experience it among the "lost generation" who

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learned about the revolution at "Kitchen tables"; that is exactly why they are called

the "lost generation" (170). Rushdie further represents the worst thing about this

generation: "And what is the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage…We

have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time" (qtd. in Ahmad 1464).

She shares this generation in having "post memory" –a term coined by Marianne

Hirsch to reflect "the response of the second generation to the trauma of the first".

Hirsch declares that the memory of the second generation consists of representations

rather than events:

Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to

its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through

representation, projection, and creation –often based on silence rather than

speech, on the invisible rather than the visible. That is not, of course, to say

that survivor memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly-

chronologically- connected to the past. (quoted in Pas 165)

In other words, even if Azadeh identifies with her family and how their lives

have been impacted by the Iranian Revolution and their memory of it, she will never

be able to truly share their feeling towards the Iranian Revolution unless she

experiences it.

Going to Iran with the assumption that she is as Iranian as those who have

never left, Azadeh experiences culture shock when she figures out that "Being a

Persian girl in California, it turned out, was like, a totally different thing than being a

young Iranian woman in the Islamic Republic of Iran" (Moaveni vii). According to

Natasha Garrett what Azadeh experiences is "a reverse culture shock" as she

encounters this culture shock in her home country (58). Garrett explains that it results

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from "a sudden immersion into a place and culture that is supposed to be my own, but

ends up being as unfamiliar and overwhelming as if it is a foreign one, even for a brief

moment" (58).

Azadeh's Acculturation in Iran

Azadeh's visit to Iran consists of a series of episodes of wrestling with her

identity within the Islamic Republic:

Every morning, getting dressed had involved a me vs. the regime calculus.

Shall I look remotely like myself, or shall I pass through all this

unpleasantness as a ghost, invisible in a wash of grey or black? One's

relationship to the veil had been a truly existential question: How important is

it to be myself, to have my outside reflect my identity? (43)

Azadeh experiences being alienated from her identity because of the imposed

veiling. However, according to Jennifer Worth, imposed veiling in Iran does not differ

much from the imposed assimilation in the West (155). For Azadeh, to assimilate in

the Iran of the Islamic Republic, she has to wear the veil and comply with the norms

of this new Iran.

Azadeh, then, realizes that this Iran is different from the Iran she used to watch

in the old Iranian movies: "Iran, fountain of my memories, the leisurely black and

white world of old films like My Uncle Napoleon, had been wiped away, replaced by

the Islamic Republic" (44). This is what Cathy Caruth calls "belated trauma": "[T]he

structure of trauma consists 'not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be

fully known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself [which means that]

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the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, [but] it is fully evident only in

connection with another place, and in another time'" (qtd. in Karpinski 133-4).

Consequently, Azadeh admits that "life in Iran was more a firsthand lesson in

the evolution of a tyrannical regime than an ephemeral homecoming to a poetic world

of nightingales" (Moaveni 46). Since then, Azadeh feels exiled at home as Reza puts

it: "Her form of exile that she experiences is not that of being an Iranian exile living

abroad, but rather, she encounters this state of exile once she returns to Iran" (Reza

25). Azadeh expresses her sense of exile:

I reeled, not because the chaos of Iran was shocking, but because it was of all

things, terribly foreign…In private places, inside homes, I felt perfectly at

home as an Iranian. At dinners, I knew the ideal texture and color of fesenjoon

sauce, a dish of walnut-pomegranate chicken; I could predict the tribal origin

of a Kilim; I could sing tarof, the flowery, elaborate expressions of courtesy

native to Persian conversation. In California, these Persian sensibilities had

distinguished me as Iranian. But in Iran, in the bosom of homeland, they were

tangential, and reached not even a fraction of the savvy required to live in the

Islamic Republic. (49-50)

One of the survival strategies required in the Islamic Republic is the "as-if"

lifestyle. Azadeh learns it the hard way. She recounts going out with her friend, Nikki

who brings along her boyfriend (53). The Komiteh asks Nikki and her boyfriend about

their relation, but they act "as if" they do not know each other (54). To make sure that

they are unacquainted, the Komiteh hits Nikki's boyfriend to see Nikki's reaction, but

when she acts coldly, they let them go. For Azadeh, this is:

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[A]n encounter of shockingly casual violence. I thought Nikki would need

months of therapy to recover…Not at all, it turned out. To them, it was just

another Friday night in the Islamic Republic. Young people anticipated these

sorts of incidents, and had confronted them so many times that they were

almost taken for granted. They considered the morality police part of the

geography of the city, like the Alborz Mountains and the long boulevards. (54-

5)

Young Iranians resist the oppressive regime by their "as-if" lifestyle: "They

chose to act 'as if' it was permitted to hold hands on the street, blast music at parties,

speak your mind, challenge authority, take your drug of choice, grow your hair long,

wear too much lipstick" (ix). Besides, they turn some Islamic celebration into wild

parties where they exchange phone numbers. This is also a form of resisting the

Islamic Republic. Azadeh gets shocked when she sees how the young people

celebrated Ashoura (a celebration of mourning the prophet's grandson Hossein who

was martyred in the holy city of Karbala), by calling it "Hossein Party" or "techno-

Ashoura" (57-59). Azadeh denounces "how the Islamic Republic not only dissolved

the ties between exiles and Iran, but those between Iranians and their own culture"

(59).

Another thing that amplifies her shock is what young people call "sexual

revolution" as a way to defy the Islamic Republic: "The major social aim of the

revolution had been to impose Islamic faith on Iranian society. But the catalog of

restrictions –on dress, behavior, speech—meant to instill a solemn decency instead

inflamed people's carnal instincts" (70-71). She also learns that some young people

turn to sigheh, a temporary marriage, which she considers "a form of prostitution"

(73-74). Furthermore, she comes to the conclusion that a wild birthday party is "a

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cultural rebellion waged indoors against the regime's rigid codes of behavior" (83).

Azadeh, then, recoils from the Iran of the Islamic republic and starts to appreciate the

American sort of freedom that she has taken for granted: "As the gravity of the

Islamic Republic's hypocrisy revealed itself, I came to the slow realization that Iranian

society was sick. Not in a facetious, sloganny [sic] way, exaggerating the extent of

culture wars and social tensions, but truly sick. The Iran I had found was spiritually

and psychologically wrecked, and it was appalling" (101).

According to Reza, "'Azadeh's experience is one of surprise, anxiety, even

disgust and indignation after becoming aware of cultural differences'. She shows this

by her disgust at how morally corrupt the Islamic Republic is" (Reza 27). These

episodes resemble what Oberg calls the "Crisis Stage": "initial differences in

languages, concepts, values, familiar signs and symbols lead to feelings of

inadequacy, frustration, anxiety and anger" (qtd. in Reza 28).

That is why one of her friends, Siamak, who has never left Iran, advises her to

love Iran realistically: "If you are a nostalgic lover of Iran, he said, you love your own

remembrance of the past, the passions in your own life that are intertwined with Iran.

If you love Iran realistically, you do so despite its flaws, because an affection that

can't look its object in the face is a selfish one" (Moaveni 45). Therein lies the

difference between the reaction of the exiles and that of the "stayees". According to

Reza, "the stayees accepted the status quo…those living there had time to deal with

the upheaval naturally and out of necessity and that it was they who 'stuck' in the time

when it happened" (26). That is why Azadeh declares to herself and to her exile

family that "If we wanted to deal with Iran as patriots, it would have to be the Iran

that existed now, wounded and ugly with its pimples and scars" (37).

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Henceforward, Azadeh decides to fit in; she urges herself to stop complaining:

"Iranians didn't make a big deal out of it, and I didn't want to be like one of the

strident European expatriates who perpetually complained about the harsh

backwardness of life in Iran" (56). However, she gets annoyed at people who stick her

out as a foreigner, not Iranian: "I sought to decipher exactly what it was that made me

feel, and seem so different from other Tehrani women my age…I felt eyes on me

constantly, and I wanted to pinpoint precisely what it was that gave me away as a

foreigner" (69). Implicitly, she admits to herself that she is different due to the

revolution that tears her apart from her country; she wonders at how different she

would have been if she had never left Iran, looking at her photo when she was a child

on one of her short visits to Iran: "I wondered what my personality would have been

like if the small girl staring back at me from the picture had never left. I tried to

imagine her as a twenty-four-year-old woman, her worries and dreams and

sensibilities. As I sketched in her mind, filling in her thoughts, I saw so clearly that

she was not me" (87).

Consequently, Azadeh realizes that she will never be considered as Iranian as

the women at her age whose story she comes to write, thinking it is her story as well.

She states in the introduction that "That is why I cannot write about them without

writing about myself. That is why this is both their story, and my own" (ix). The

dilemma of Azadeh is that she believes she is not Iranian, nor American, but she

keeps oscillating between her two identities, searching for her core self. Actually,

Azadeh's problem is that she has a split identity; she does not try to reconcile between

them, but rather she keeps them at a safe distance from each other. This is what Jung

calls "split consciousness":

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It is as if two different persons were making statements about the same thing,

each from his own point of view, or as if one person in two different frames of

mind were sketching a picture of his experience…it is evident that [this

person] is suffering from a mental dissociation, i.e., a neurotic disturbance. In

view of this, it does not help matters at all if one party pulls obstinately to the

right and the other to the left. (The Undiscovered Self 53)

Thus, Azadeh suffers from mental dissociation as she tries to live with one

part of her identity, suppressing the other. According to Jung, to heal mental

dissociation, one has to establish a relationship with both halves "because only from

them both, and not merely from one half with the suppression of the other, can he put

together a whole and complete man" (54). In order to attain her wholeness, Azadeh

needs first to anchor her core self, yet when the country of origin is unstable, it is hard

to put down roots.

B. The Core Self and The Sense of Belonging

"I had stepped into this Iran partly as an Iranian, reading the grinds of coffee

cups, burning esfand to ward away the evil eye, but also as an American, constricted

by the absence of horizons, genuinely shocked by the grim ordinariness of violence

and lies" declares Azadeh (88). Trying to identify herself, Azadeh assumes that she

has to accept her split personality, rather than reconcile her two selves. Since

language is an important part of culture, she decides that to heal this dilemma, all she

needs is to express herself in two languages, till she finds where her allegiance lays

and thus puts down her roots:

People who were right-handed could learn to write with the left, I thought, so

why should I not be able to recast my personality in Farsi? Only by being free

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and effortless in both languages, I decided, could I discover in which direction

my true nature [core self] leaned…I dedicated my existence to a sole purpose:

learning Farsi properly. (90)

She even experiences different feelings while recounting the same encounter

in the two languages:

[T]he very act of speaking English invoked a sense of freedom. It was the

language in which I had fought many battles, but it was also the language of

an alternate existence in which I had never felt fear. It was unpolluted by the

brutality of the things I heard and spoke about in Farsi, like arrests of activists

and the killings of dissidents. Of course I wrote about them in English, but

exported across the border of another language, their horror was somehow

muted. (89)

In the same sense, she fails to translate Farsi into English: "I traced the Farsi

words under my finger, in frustration, wanting to tear them off the page, command

them to cross the border and not cling so willfully to just one world" (241).

Confronted with the untranslatability of her languages, Azadeh states: "If I could only

have conquered words, purged from my Farsi any trace of accent, imported the

imagery of Persian verse into English prose, I had thought, then the feeling of

displacement would go away" (243).

Living with a split personality with two different languages, Azadeh

speculates about how to reconcile between her two selves through politics. Admitting

that she belongs to two different worlds, Azadeh seeks to think of how she could use

her American culture in healing her sick Iranian culture. When she goes to meet

Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, one of the reformist candidates who would run for president in

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the 2001 election, she fantasizes that if he wins, she could offer him help by becoming

"his press aide, writing speeches for his trips abroad…My American side would stop

being a mark of difference, but an asset to the nation" (105). Unfortunately, she

notices that when he talks about Iran, he says, "[In my country]. Not words one would

use in conversation with another Iranian" (105-6). What adds insult to the injury is

that he gives her a present that strengthens her foreignness: "a glossy book of

photographs of Iran, the sort that's sold at the Tehran airport to tourists" (106).

Another encounter is when she meets Mr. Abtahi, the president's chief of staff,

to talk about women's rights and she happens to ask him "when I might hope to

become Iran's first female ambassador. I expect him to say 'Inshaallah'…He said

nothing" (120). Azadeh assumes that his silence means: "No, Azadeh Khanoum, in

your lifetime, you will never be an Iranian ambassador. If there are any female

ambassadors at all, they will be Islamist, chadori women, certainly not you, a secular,

partial Iranian…His silence cut me deeply" (121).

Estranged from herself, she desperately asks her aunt, "At what point will I

stop being considered an outsider? I live here, I breathe the pollution, I suffer the

bureaucracy, I carry the passport, both my parents are Iranian, and I know more about

Shiism and Iranian poetry than half the girls my age" (108). However, this is not how

Iranians who have never left Iran see her. From their perspective, Azadeh is

demanding what is not hers: "You weren't here during the war, when Iraqi warplanes

were flying over Tehran. You didn't have to run into bomb shelters, or duck when

windows shattered, or call around to see if your relatives and friends were alive, the

morning after. You don't know what we endured. So don't show up here and start

calling yourself Iranian" (108).

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Being confronted with this reality helps her to change perspectives. She

decides to identify herself instead of giving others the chance to label her. She

reverses the situation by imposing the question on her family in America. If they

consider themselves Americans, it does not mean that Americans are going to stop

considering them foreigners: "Maybe identity, to an extent, was an interior condition.

But wasn't it also in the eye of the beholder? It seemed delusional to go about

convinced you were a peacock, when everyone treated you like a bear. ..What

percentage of identity was exterior, what percentage self-defined?" (115). Unable to

anchor her core self, she concludes "how to put down roots in ground that was so

unstable, in ground that was either meant to be temporary, or susceptible to shifts, in

response to decisions made by politicians or generals or clerics" (205).

However, when her mother comes to visit her in Iran, Azadeh proves to be

more familiar with the existing Iran than her mother who was born and raised in Iran:

"After months of dislocation, my mother's arrival demystified what I had been seeking

all along—a shared history with Iranians living inside, a history in modern Iran"

(212). Anke Johannmeyer states that: "to know one's place in history, one's roots, is

the essential basis for everyone's development of self. Being denied this knowledge

means being denied an identity" (22). Like Tara who finds her core self when she

weaves a line in a Persian rug, Azadeh finds her core self when she guides her mother

in modern Iran. Only then does Azadeh consider herself Iranian. Finding her core self,

registering her place in the Iranian history helps Azadeh to heal the trauma of being

estranged from the Iran of the Islamic Republic.

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C. Healing and Wholeness: Reconciliation

Anchoring her identity, Azadeh feels relaxed in admitting her hyphenated

identity as Iranian-American. She further realizes that her American self helps her to

tolerate the existing Iran: "Ironically, it was my American side that was helping me

cope with Iran. As an American, I believe in unconditional love…I loved this Iran,

with all its dysfunction and unruliness, just as I would one day love my child, even if

she had had a baby out of wedlock, decided she wanted to be a musician, or told me

she was a lesbian" (136-7).

According to Reza, this stage is called the "Autonomy Stage" in which "the

person begins to establish an objective, balanced, and impartial view of the whole

situation. It is now possible to experience both the positive and the negative aspects of

the host culture" (29-30). She then decides to vote as she has been hesitant about

whether or not to vote in Iran's 2001 election: "Not voting meant drawing another line

in the sand, separating myself from the Iranians who were part of my world, and who

would vote because this was the country they would spend the rest of their lives in"

(Moaveni 134). With this autonomous act, she declares her Iranian-ness and further

she legitimizes being part of the modern Iran; she has a voice.

Going back to America, Azadeh misses Iran. She decides to create Iran in

America through different things. For example, she makes it a habit to go to Persian

restaurants once a month (232). She could not tolerate being in the company of

American people who know nothing about Iran, asking questions about whether

women are allowed to go out or drive cars (232). She even misses the adventures of

trying to evade the Komiteh. She also moves to live closer to her cousins to form an

Iranian community as the one her mother provided for her in her childhood (234).

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However, in the aftermath of 9/11, Azadeh experiences another trauma, like the one

her parents experienced –the hostage crisis –which entails re-identifying herself. She

states: "Thinking of myself as a hyphenated entity, an Iranian-American, didn't help in

the slightest. It was a sense of self that helped in the banal, day-to-day course of

things, but it didn't erase the question of loyalty at all. It didn't help you when two

things you loved, countries or people, existed at odds with one another" (175).

She then recalls that a Muslim man is allowed to have "more than one wife on

the condition that he treats all of them exactly equally. Their quarters must be

furnished with elegance or simplicity; he must spend an equal number of nights with

each" (176). Thus, the tradition of bigamy gives her an excuse not to have loyalty

towards one culture, but rather to love them both equally. As Barbara Johnson argues,

"the bigamist is thus necessarily doubly unfaithful, but in such a way that he or she

must push to its utmost limits the very capacity for faithfulness" (qtd. in Bohórequez

100).

It seems that her Iranian self helps her to tolerate living in America, especially

after 9/11 when Iran was branded one of the Axes of Evil. At the same time, her

American self helps her to tolerate the modern Iran of the Islamic Republic. Azadeh

states that "I now realized that I would perpetually exist in each world feeling the tug

of the other. The yearning, which I must embrace and stop assaulting, was a perpetual

reminder of the truth, that I was [whole], but composed of both" (243).

According to Azadeh, writing her memoir about her journey to Iran is "a quest

for self" (245). She likens her quest to the quest made by the birds to find the

Simorgh. It is a twelfth-century Persian epic poem by Farid Ud-Din Attar; the poem is

called, "The Conference of the Birds" (244). The story is about a conference held

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among the birds, urging them to go on a long, tiring journey to search for their king,

the Simorgh (244). In the final destination, the birds waited for their king to arrive,

but then their guide who asked them to go on this journey, turned to tell them that

there is no king (245). Asking them to look around, they would grasp the reality that

they are the Simorgh (245). Azadeh narrates, "The tale relied on a play of words; in

Farsi, si-means thirty, and morgh- means bird. The birds looked around, and realized

there were thirty of them. The goal of their journey, which they had imagined as a

quest for their king, was actually their quest for self" (245).

Through her memoir, Azadeh Moaveni tries to reconcile her two worlds

through different strategies. For example, she speaks what she calls "kitchen Farsi"

with her Iranian friends in America: "sprinkl[ing] my Farsi liberally with English

words and expressions, or vice versa" (89). Moreover, she transliterates some Farsi

words, titles, phrases, proverbs into english. For example, she mentions the Persian

expression "nafasat az jayeh garm darmiyad" providing its translation as meaning

"You're judging the coldness of a place from a warm spot" (174). She gets this

expression when she argues with Iranians that "life in Iran, for all its oppressiveness,

had a sweet, singular appeal" (173). They are not ready to accept her opinion because

she lives in America and her stay in Iran is temporary which means that she does not

have to deal with life in Iran on daily basis (174). Furthermore, she begins every

chapter in her memoir with Persian poetry by contemporary Iranian women poets, like

Simin Behbehani (1927- ) and Forough Farrokhzad (1935-1967). She also uses poems

written by Rumi (1207- 1273) (Turkish), Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

(Palestinian), Adonis (1930- ) (Syrian) and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) (Pakistani)

to broaden the experience. Besides, in her apartment in Iran, she makes sure to

reconcile the East and West by using traditional architecture, including a central

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garden and instilling a bronze statue of Antigone. She announces, "The objective was

to create an interior space where East and West fused with elegance" (112). In

addition, as Andrea Nort puts it, "the title itself is intriguing, West colorfully colliding

with East" (342). She illustrates that "Lipstick that is worn as 'war-paint': a war waged

with symbolic yet innocuous arms deemed dangerous to Iran's official Islamic mores"

(343). Stephanie Chaban explains the different interpretations of the word Jihad:

Jihad is an evocative word. Recent decades have seen the corruption of the

word to the point where its primary definition (at least in Western media) is

that of 'holy war'. Far from such a bellicose summoning, jihad, the Arabic

word for 'struggle', has a more personal, religious meaning. For the practicing

Muslim, jihad can represent a spiritual struggle from within…female activists

and authors discussing women's lives in the Muslim world have, in recent

years, taken pains to provide an innovative spin on jihad, proposing a new,

woman-centered position for its interpretation and practice…documenting the

ways in which Muslim women living under the Islamic fundamentalism and

within patriarchal cultures have confronted and resisted their oppression. (336)

Furthermore, according to Hélène Cixous (1937- ), writing reconciles

languages and thus reconciles cultures and she represents her idea, drawing the letter

H: "This is what writing is: ׀ one language ׀ another language, and between the two,

the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores"

(qtd. in Karpinski 26). The same idea is expressed by Ariel Dorman in his memoir,

Heading North, Looking South (1998): "The ultimate reconciliation of my languages

is in this memoir, perhaps in this commentary as I write it. The very fact that I can

write it may be proof that they are finally beginning to trust one another" (qtd. in

Bohórquez 97-8). Likewise, Moaveni's memoir also reconciles both cultures as her

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readers are both Iranians and Americans. In her review of the memoir, Behjat

Henderson mentions that "Iranian-Americans, especially those who reject their

parents' standards and values, will identify. Her timely book will be of interest to

Americans who want to know more about daily life in the Islamic Republic for

younger Iranians, particularly women" (61).

However, in comparison with Bahrampour's text which is so culturally-bound,

Azadeh's text is "transparent", domesticating rather than "foreignizing" the text

(Karpinski 70). According to Karpinski, the goal of this strategy is "to produce a text

that is immediately intelligible to the receiving readership and that can be easily

consumed in the cultural marketplace" (70). As a second-generation exile that was

born and raised outside her native country, Moaveni's ethnic identity is not as

accentuated as Bahrampour's who has been raised in Iran among her extended family.

In conclusion, Azadeh Moaveni's memoir is different from Tara Bahrampour's

in the way Moaveni, who voices second-generation, was so unaccustomed to Iran.

However, both Moaveni and Bahrampour use their memoirs as a medium through

which they reflect upon their lives, heal their relation to their cultures, anchor their

core self and attain wholeness by accepting where they belong and where they live.

While Moaveni's journey represents how she shifts from being Iranian in

America and American in Iran, Gelareh Asayesh's journey, in the following chapter,

reflects her in-between-ness.

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CHAPTER V

GELAREH ASAYESH'S SAFFRON SKY

Saffron Sky: A Life between Iran and America (1999) is a memoir authored by

Gelareh Asayesh24

who immigrated to America, with her family, for good prior to the

revolution in 1977 when she was fifteen. In this respect, Asayesh is a first-generation

Iranian-American as she was born and raised in Iran to Iranian parents (Mahmud 5).

Deracinated from her core self, Asayesh resolves to re-visit her childhood Iran after

fourteen years. Arriving at a different Iran, her sense of exile is aggravated. She finds

out that her first visit was not enough to heal her alienation or put her fragmented

being together; thus frequent visits were made. With each visit, Asayesh unfolds the

layers that have accumulated over the years, hiding her true self. Describing her

memoir as A Life between Iran and America pinpoints her in-between-ness, going

back and forth between Iran and America, and writing from a "liminal" position. In

her essay "Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir" (2003), Margaret

K. Willard-Traub describes "liminality" as the following:

The liminal point is where we transit, a point of neither movement nor stasis,

"that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both"…The peculiar point of

liminality (that borderline) is exactly that spot where we are between facing

backward and forward. We have "turned" or "bent" away from where we were

but have not yet arrived at where we're going. (522-3)

Through her frequent visits, Asayesh negotiates for her identity among the

three selves in her memoir: her past self "narrated self", her present self "narrating

24

She works as a journalist for the Miami Herald and the Balitmore Sun. She also contributes articles

and commentaries to the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times as well as

National Public Radio. She lives in Florida with her family (Karim 339).

132El-Rayis

self" and the "third voice", that Virginia Woolf gave birth to, which is created

through writing memoirs where the past and present interwove in the liminal position

(Larson 31-33). This is "a narrative method" that is called "triangulation" (Karpiniski

150). To "'triangulate' is to project herself into different cultural spaces until all

versions of reality appear arbitrary" (145). The same idea is presented by Vaclav

Havel who says, "I exist ...as the tension between all my 'versions', for that tension,

too (and perhaps that above all), is me" (qtd. in Ochs and Capps 29). Ochs and Capps

further describe this narrative as the following:

Narrative is born out of such tension in that narrative activity seeks to bridge a

self that felt and acted in the past, a self that feels and acts in the present, and

an anticipated or hypothetical self that is projected to feel and act in some as

yet unrealized moment –any one of which may be alienated from the

other…We use narrative as a tool for probing and forging connections

between our unstable, situated selves. (29)

Therefore, through the act of writing her memoir, Asayesh buries one self,

exfoliates another, and ends up creating a third self that makes peace with the two

polar selves and puts an end to her fragmented identity, creating a whole entity.

Castro-Borrego clarifies that "The search for wholeness is informed by the principle

of polarity, which dictates that the different parts of a whole complement each other,

once we approach them with the right frame of mind" (11). That is to say that

Asayesh would not have become a whole had not she digested her different selves.

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A. Identity Formation Between Two Cultures

As previously mentioned, Gelareh's frequent movement between the two polar

cultures has instigated identity crisis as Barbara Loh points out:

In moving back and forth from host country to country of origin, the respondents

are no longer sure of where they "come from". Intellectually, they know they

"came from" their country of origin; but this place no longer determines their

personhood. Their sense of belonging now becomes one of non-belonging and as

a result they experience identity crises. (110)

In order for Gelareh to heal her identity crisis, she needs to set forth her different

selves.

1. Gelareh's Iranian Self (Pre-Exile Self)

Sheldon Kopp notes that "Each man's identity is an emergent of the myths, rituals,

and corporate legends of his culture, compounded with the epic of his own personal

history" (qtd. in Simons 9). Being born and raised in Iran surrounded by her extended

family, Gelareh, like Bahrampour, has been instilled with the cultural values of her

country of origin, Iran. Herbert Blumer stratifies these values or symbols into three

categories: "social objects (parents, friends); physical objects (tables, pictures) and

abstract objects (moral principles, ideas)" (qtd. in Loh 3).

Social Objects

"The family provides our first set of social relationships (and is thus said to

provide a semiotic background for virtually all our stories); it also remains a

traditional nexus of social life and cultural meaning for many women" states Deborah

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Schiffrin (170). Thus, Gelareh's family has played an important role in shaping her

identity.

Gelareh's family belongs to the upper middle class (Asayesh 67). She lives in

Tehran with her parents and sister, Asfaneh. Khalil Asayesh, her father, is a

prominent doctor and a poet. Asayesh justifies her father's "prestigious position" in

Iran: "First of all, he was a doctor –the most prestigious profession in Iran. Second, as

managing director in the Shah's Ministry of Health, he held a position of power" (78).

Her mother, Homajoon, also has a powerful position as "head of the medical library in

the health ministry" (78). Gelareh also mentions how her parents take responsibilities

by offering help to the unfortunate members of their family: "Acquaintances and

friends who were down on their luck always turned to my parents for help…My

parents doled out tea, cash, medicine, and job references" (79). Actually, Helen Metz,

in her study of Iran, refers to this custom among Iranian families: "Successful

members were expected to assist less successful ones to get their start. Iranians have

viewed this inherent nepotism as a positive value, not as a form of corruption" (109-

110). Gelareh recalls how the people showed their gratitude to her parents "by calling

down blessings upon their daughters. It was the way in Iran: prayers and subservience

in exchange for patronage" (Asayesh 79).

As for her extended family, they live in Mashad. Her grandfather, Abdolrahim

Ghassemi, Aghajoon, her mother's father, was a doctor who also enjoyed a great

position not only because he was a doctor, but also because he was a rich landowner

(91). Asayesh does not remember much of her grandmothers. Her maternal

grandmother died of leukemia before Gelareh was born; she was told that she was a

beauty and she used to help her husband, supervising the field beside taking care of

the children: "In the few black-and-white photographs that remain of her, I am struck

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by her presence –which eclipsed her husband's" (91). Asayesh is stunned by her

grandmother's strong personality. As for her paternal grandmother, she used to live

with them before she died. Asayesh recalls her ritual while praying: "[S]he liked to set

a bowl of star-shaped flowers nearby while she prayed. When the bending and

straitening of the namaz was done, she would sit kneeling for long moments, wrapped

in clean white cotton and the scent of jasmine, her fingers clicking through her worry

beads and her dry lips murmuring: "God is Great" (71).

Zabihollah Asayesh is her paternal grandfather, Aghajan, who died when she

was three. He was "a mid-level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance" (92). After

retirement, he was deeply involved in politics as he was the "founder and leader of the

Mashad branch of the Iranian Liberation Movement, a group dedicated to democracy

and the end of foreign domination in Iran" (92). What Gelareh grows up oblivious to

is her father's involvement in politics, like his own father. Her father used to write

anti-Shah poems under the pen name Arezoo to evade the SAVAK, the Shah's secret

police (93). However, when her grandfather was imprisoned three times, her father

decided to deviate from politics and stop publishing poetry to protect his daughters.

Henceforward, he planned to move to America when his daughters join University

because most of the SAVAK's victims were Tehran University students. Asayesh

reflects on her father's sacrifices: "He sheltered us from the politics that were once his

life's blood. His secret fear was that we would be like him, willing to risk safety and

security for an ideal" (97). In that case, Gelareh's family is refugees, not exiles, as

they migrate to America to escape the Shah's censorship. According to Justine M. Pas,

"Refugees are seeking physical safety or freedom from censorship. Exiles are ordered

to leave their native countries" (36).

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That is to say that Gelareh belongs to an upper-middle-class family who are

heterogeneous in the sense that they both enjoy free style of living and perform

religious rituals; they are political activists and poets25

.

Physical Objects

For young Asayesh, the physical objects that have shaped her Iranian identity are

connected to the three places to which her innermost identity belongs: Tehran,

Mashad and Gonabad.

Tehran is where their house with its garden and her school hold her childhood

memories. Asayesh provides detailed description of their house, especially her

parents' room where they spent most of the time: "Their bedroom wall was painted a

pale yellow. I sat there in total contentment, warmed by the light, yellow walls, the

presence of Homajoon and Baba" (68). Recalling the place, she recalls the feeling

attached to it. In her parents' room, on Fridays –weekend in Iran –her father tells his

girls the story of the lion and the mouse. Asayesh forgets the story, but only

remembers one detail: "It is a story that is lost to all of us now, though I still

remember my delight at the ingenious rope pulley the two friends rigged, somehow

saving the day. A rope pulley gleaming whitely in the green jungle haze, just as that

one detail of a forgotten story gleams in the murk of my memory" (68). Her father

takes the role of the storyteller which is part of the Iranian cultural tradition. Maybe

what makes this detail memorable is her father's poetic language. It could be the

significance of the rope that keeps the mouse and the lion friends; it could signify

bridging between two different beings, two different worlds.

25

Gelareh's father's great cousin was a prominent poet, Malek al Sho'ra-e-Bahar, "the country's

premier poet at the time" (Asayesh 93).

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Asayesh also mentions the activities that took place within their house. For

example, she remembers at winter time when a paroo-zan, a man who sweeps roofs

and driveways from snow, was called and when he piles snow, her cousins, Asfaneh

and Gelareh "took turns leaping into the pile of snow" (68-69). She recalls when in

summer they slept on the roof, watching and counting the stars: "If there were too

many to count, Baba would say the stars were holding a wedding" (72). From the

roof, she could see the mountains, describing them as "the silent sentinels of my

childhood, dun gray in the summer and snowcapped in winter" (70).

As previously mentioned, Iranian houses are characterized by two things: walls

and gardens. Asayesh educates the readers that "Iranian houses are walled for

privacy" (69); as for the garden, Asayesh "dreamed about the garden for years after

[they] left … [She] loved to comb [her] fingers through the willow leaves, feeling

their smooth texture. The trees were as important to [her] world as [her] friends" (71).

She remembers when she would climb a cherry tree and "sit, in [her] gray and white

uniform, [her] fingers questing greedily through the dusty leaves, [her] hands and

mouth sticky with the sweet red fruit. It tasted of dust. It tasted of summer. It tasted of

joy" (71). She also describes the sight and sounds connected to the porch of their

house where several parties took place: "[O]ur guests would assemble on the porch

where pots of jasmine scented the twilight and Homajoon served cold concoctions of

crushed melon and ice or tall, chill glasses of syrups –sour cherry, lemon, mint, and

quince. I liked to listen to the sound of teaspoons, clinking against glass as our guests

stirred their drinks" (70).

She also remembers her school in Tehran: "Six days a week, my cousins and sister

and I would pile into the blue bus station wagon to go to school" (67-68). She casts

her mind back, remembering all the details of her school: "I loved school, the

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mandatory uniforms, the asphalt playground where we played dodgeball, the half-

days on Thursday –the beginning of the Iranian weekend –that invariably ended in

unsanctioned water fights" (65). She recollects how parents collect their children from

school: "Adults would bend and speak one word in the ear of the doorman … He

would lift his red megaphone to his lips and call out the name ("ASAYESHHHH!"),

nodding us through the gate" (65). She even recalls when they stop to buy lavashak,

handmade fruit rolls, from street vendors regardless of the warnings of their teachers

and parents that these fruit "was likely to be dirty, washed in ditch water. But it was

crisp and delicious and we didn't care" (65).

Beside Tehran, Mashad holds memories attached to her two aunts, Khaleh Farah

and Khaleh Mina and her cousins: "Although I was born in Tehran, my roots were in

Mashad. As a child, I knew this instinctively. I learned it with the rocking rhythm of

the train across the Kavir that we rode each spring and summer, breaching the

darkness.… it was in my aunts' embrace that I recognized the journey's end" (83). She

also recounts how they spent their time in Khaleh Farah's house and how she felt

about it:

[M]y mother and her sisters [were] exchanging news and laughter amid a welter

of clothes and presents. For the next few weeks, meals rotated through the houses

of our closest relatives. They were all close by, and at night we would walk

through the quiet streets of the city on the way home, the children jostling each

other playfully, the adults talking and smoking. The streetlights shone on the

empty streets, the Kavir air was night-cool, and my heart expanded with the joy of

being surrounded by family once again. (83)

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The third place that warms Asayesh's heart and defines her Iranian self is Gonabad

–a small town where her grandfather's house and orchard exist. Even the bus ride

from Mashad to Gonabad stands for a special occasion for Asayesh because they

"chartered [their] own bus": "The four-hour bus rides were like family parties –the

children playing games at the back of the bus, the men talking to the driver up front,

the women in between reading the Koran and passing around fruit and cakes" (84).

Then, she provides a detailed description of her grandfather's house: "I loved the

house. Its whitewashed façade rose gracefully over the tiled courtyard and garden, the

dome at the center arching over the porch beneath. The high ceilings made it airy and

cool inside, and the windows with their bamboo blinds had deep window seats

covered with small Persian carpets" (85).

She writes reminiscently about how they passed their time in Aghajoon's house.

At the same time, she gives the reader an idea about the Iranian countryside. For

example, she mentions the town's ab-anbar, "water storehouse" where they get

drinking water (85). On Fridays, because of the shortage of water, they took a weekly

bath in the bathhouse: "Dried and dressed, we emerged at last exhausted and squeaky

clean, our wet hair covered by white cotton kerchiefs to keep us from catching cold.

Homajoon would reward us with cold orange sodas … Soda never tasted as good as it

did after a visit to the baths" (89). She also mentions that her aunts sometimes call a

band-andaz to the house. Because this job does not have an equivalent in English,

Asayesh provides a description of her work: "The band-andaz knelt before them, her

practiced fingers sending a crisscross of twine rolling over their exposed legs,

plucking swaths of hair in each pass of the string" (87). At night, they put up pasheh-

band, "a square tent of mosquito netting" when they sleep (89). Above all, her visit to

Aghajoon's orchard is instilled deep inside Asayesh's memory:

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I remember soft yellow dust gathering in my shoes as I followed a dry

streambed to the mud wall that enclosed the fruit trees. Tiny beetles with gray

and white stripes crawled on this wall. Inside were plum trees and sticky

creepers abloom with huge pink and white flowers…At the end were the

melons. I remember the sense of wonder I felt the first time I pushed away the

dusty leaves of a melon bush to find the fruit nestled beneath, whole and round

and perfect. (90)

It seems that by providing detailed descriptions, Asayesh tries to register the

memory of the places of her childhood self. According to Atkinson, "We keep

memories, experiences, and collective values alive by telling others about them or

putting them in a form that may last longer than ourselves" (126). Writing about her

memories of the objects or symbols of her culture, Asayesh wants these memories to

outlive her in her memoir. In addition, these memories are what Woolf labels

"exceptional moments" and what Larson calls "moments of being": "They are

physically overwhelming and, over time, represent a legendary quality about the self"

(30). That explains why grown-up Asayesh will return to these places to retrieve these

"moments of being" to attain her wholeness.

Abstract objects

For Asayesh, the abstract objects that define her Iranian self are divided into two

principles which are interdependent: spirituality and superiority of the West.

Spirituality originates in religious rituals of Muharram and Ramadan and how she felt

about them then. Asayesh explains these occasions to the readers. For example, she

describes Muharram as the Shi'ite's month of mourning when:

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[a] column of men appeared, walking in a cloud of dust that clung to their

black garments. With their hands, they beat their bared chests. Some beat

themselves on the back with lengths of chain swung rhythmically. They

chanted the name of Hossein, grandson of the prophet Mohammad, who was

murdered with his followers in the Arabian desert of Karbala on the tenth of

Muharram. (74)

Gelareh hated this celebration where people hurt themselves in the ritual of

flagellation; her resentment deepened when her mother told her off because she was

wearing a red shirt which might offend the mourners (74). She then starts to wonder:

"Why should something so trivial as the color of my shirt matter? I hated the rigidity

of my religion, its messages of shame and blame" (74). She also remembers the

reaction of her aunts when she and her sister questioned some Islamic teachings, like

the prohibition of eating pork (74):

[T]hey would strike their thigh in horror and bite the webbed flesh between

thumb and forefinger, first with their palm down, then with it facing upward –

the ritual gesture of repentance. "Astaghfor-allah!" they exclaimed. "I seek

God's forgiveness." I did not know then what the Arabic phrase meant. I did

not need to. The message of shocked reproof was clear. (75)

Another ritual that takes place in the month of Muharram is rowzehs: "gatherings

where the Koran and stories of martyrdom were chanted by mullahs in turbans and

flowing brown robes. Their audiences were separated by sex: men in one room with

the mullah, women in another close by so they could hear the chanting" (75). Gelareh

hated this ritual for two reasons. First, she felt that women are something shameful

that should be hidden: "I felt ashamed, as if being a woman is a sin" (76). She felt so

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because she noticed what women are expected to do when the mullah arrives,

"murmur[ing] 'Ya'allah' to announce his presence":

My mother's guests grabbed their veils as the mullah entered with his slow,

ponderous tread. Homajoon, murmuring a greeting, her head bowed deferentially

and covered by her white chador, showed him a chair in a place of honor. His

eyes avoided the females gathered around him, even children, guarding against

temptation and preserving his holy aura. (76)

The second reason why she hated this ritual is because of its gloomy atmosphere

as the women wailed and wept while the mullah chanted Koran: "As soon as the

crying and chanting began, we [Gelareh and Asfaneh] would escape into the garden. I

ran as far away from the house as I could, covering my ears with my hands, fighting a

nameless despair that seemed to flow darkly from the guest parlor" (76).

While she resented these rituals, she loved Ramadan: "I loved the aspects of my

religion that celebrated life…I was awed and inspired by the concept of fasting and by

the faithful way it was carried out all around me. I loved the special foods: the crisp,

syrupy saffron pastries made only at this time of year…" (75).

Although Gelareh's family celebrated these religious occasions, they are secular in

the sense that they "had it all –the pleasures of the West and the rootedness of the

East": "It was not one or the other. We may have attracted leers and averted gazes in

our mini-skirts, but no one kept us from wearing them…Each Muharram we held our

rowzehs. Each day, we unfolded our prayer rugs when the call to prayer summoned"

(80). However, grown-up Gelareh realizes that it was not so; it was an obsession with

the West: "As I grew older, I was disturbed in indefinable ways by the totality of

Iran's occupation with the West. The unquestioned belief in the superiority of

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Americans and Europeans was an insidious, disturbing thread wound through the

fabric of my childhood" (80). That brings us to the second principal that defines

Iranian way of thinking: the fact that Iranians gravitate toward the superiority of the

West. Sandra Mackey dates it back to the weakness of Iran when it received the

ideology of the West. Iran was weak due to the successive invasions of the Arabs, the

Turks, and the Mongols:

After all, the Arabs brought Islam and the Persians altered it. The Turks embraced

Ferdowsi. And the Mongols built a shrine to Imam Ali. But Westerners seemed

impervious to Iranian culture. They were simply too powerful and too sure in their

own culture to give way as previous invaders had to the civilization of the

Iranians…This contraposition of two different cultures, one possessing technology

and wielding great power and the other extolling spirituality and suffering from

impotence, created the atmosphere in which Iran's uneven relationship with the

West unfolded. (135-6)

The way Asayesh mentions some incidents that reflect Iranians' sense of

inferiority implies her bitterness and patriotism. For example, she mentions how at

restaurants and shops, Westerners were treated almost as kings, served on hand and

foot and "[i]n governmental offices Westerners were quickly ushered to the head of

the line…Many were less educated than some of the Iranians they disdained, yet they

were cloaked in subtle arrogance" (Asayesh 81). Asayesh proves her childhood self

guilty of this cultural disease as she recalls how she behaved around the British family

who came to rent their house, trying to impress them by speaking English, showing

them her collection of English stories: "To this day, I feel diminished by what passed

between me and that family, not so much by their aloof condescension as by my

eagerness to overcome it" (81). She also recalls how she has always dreamed about

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going to America: "[A]s much as anything, I wanted to go to America for the status of

it. I wanted to move up in the international pecking order. Like so many of the

Iranians I knew, I craved deliverance from my own sense of inferiority, both personal

and national" (83).

That is to say that Gelareh's past self has absorbed not only the Iranian culture but

also the Iranian trend of the time that being westernized means being superior which

in turn paved the way for her departure.

2. Gelareh's American Self (Post- Exile Self)

"Overnight I went from being an inferior, shunned being to that most envied of

creatures in Iran, a girl just back from America" exclaimed the twelve-year old

Gelareh who just returned from a two-year visit to America within which her parents

got their master's degrees at the University of North Carolina (62-64). Obviously, her

classmates did not know about her "painful" experience in those two years (64).

Gelareh and her family experienced the first stage of assimilation which is "culture

shock" as Hamid Naficy suggests (qtd. in Garrett 34). Karpinski adds that "First-

generation narrators are those literal migrants whose experience of displacement is

not only linguistic and cultural, but also geographic" (45).

Unlike Bahrampour and Moaveni, Asayesh did suffer from linguistic

displacement not only due to her limited English vocabulary as an eight-year-old

Iranian girl, but also due to her being unaccustomed to the cultural code of the

language. Asayesh describes her family's perplexity, struggling with the language:

That first year in Chapel Hill, my sister and I moved in a fog of

incomprehension. The people around us shared codes that we could not break.

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My family spent most of one afternoon around our Formica dining table,

trying in vain to puzzle out the meaning of the word "y'all". (It was years

later…that we realized it was a contraction of "you all."). (66)

She also recalls when her classmates gave her hard time for mispronouncing

some words: "I read the word 'bird', pronouncing it 'beard'. They wondered, out loud,

where I'd come from that I was so ignorant of this most basic fact of their lives, that

'ir' was pronounced 'er'" (66). However, by the end of their second year there "English

was the language in which my sister and I communicated best" (66). Besides, English

has become the language in which Gelareh wrote her journal: "I wrote my journal in

English. In that summer of 1974, we had been back from the United States for a little

over two years" (62). According to Simons, journal writing is "a prelude" to memoir

writing:

The journal may be the first place where the individual clearly communicates

to himself or herself needs and desires which are on the way to being

communicated to others but are blocked by a lack of power, clarity or

unspecified anxiety. This initial step in which one makes visible the inner self

to the self often reduces the fearsomeness of that which finds articulation in

writing and becomes an effective prelude or rehearsal to actual communication

with others. Having said it to myself and to my diary, I can now tell it to you.

(16)

Both Bahrampour's and Asayesh's first attempts at writing began when they

wrote their diary and journal, respectively, which in turn, paved the way for writing

their memoirs.

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As for her cultural displacement, Gelareh notices that they were "Othered" and

prejudiced on her first day at school in America when her father accompanied her:

I was both comforted and distressed by my father's presence. The other

children would see in a glance that my baba was different. His foreignness and

vulnerability were visible in his dark skin (I did not consider it dark until we

moved to America), in the uncertainty of his carriage, in his sweater and pants

that were indefinably different from what Americans wore. (63)

Asayesh is reflecting on the incident that her past self encountered. Ochs and

Capps state, "We come to know ourselves as we use narrative to apprehend

experiences and negative relationships with others" (21). Noticing how they have

been excluded as "Others", Asayesh comes to understand how different they are from

the way with which they were treated. She even notices the darkness of her father's

skin when she sees how "white" Americans are. Mostofi further explains the role of

the body in forming the identity:

For immigrants the body performs an important role in the construction of

identity as it is interpreted by the self and the other…This image of

"whiteness" has its roots in the "racialization" of many other immigrant ethnic

groups. Throughout the history of immigration to the United States, it can be

argued that "racialization" has been standard procedure in policies toward

various immigrant groups. (694)

She also recounts how she and her sister left such incidents unspoken: "After

all, I said nothing the day the Afghan boy down the street stumbled from the school

bus, crying, even after the sniggering blonde girl next to me mimicked his dark-eyed

mother when she ran after the bus, calling angrily, 'Why you hit my good boy?'"

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(Asayesh 64). According to Daphne Marlatt, writing about the suppressed incidents

between one and others in women's writing is important as they "lead to a beginning

realization of the whole cloth of ourselves in connection with so many others. These

realizations become 'real-other-i-zations'" (qtd. in Karpinski 18). Marlatt explains

further that "the many small real-other-i-zations can bring the unwritten,

unrecognized, ahistoric ground of a life into being as a recognizable power or agency"

(18). In other words, Gelareh's sense of inferiority has doubled during her visit to

America. She realizes that she is different and she knows what it means to be in a

country that is not her own.

As for her sense of geographical isolation and displacement, it is crystallized

when Gelareh and Asfaneh hated the idea of having no walls around their house in

America: "Asfaneh and I were outraged at the absence of walls –'What do you mean,

anybody can walk across our lawn?' Certainly walls would have kept out the

anonymous person who scrawled 'I hate you' in the gravel of our driveway" (62).

After her bad experience in America, going back to Iran is sheer bliss; she

appreciates her culture, reproaching her classmates for dreaming to leave a place

where they belong, wishing to fit into a distant culture: "My classmates didn't know

how grateful I was to be back in a place where I could belong" (65). She then loved

her school back in Iran: "I loved it more than anything else because it restored the

self-esteem annihilated in two years in America. I was home again… In that summer

of 1974, more than at any other time in my life, I belonged" (65-66)

Although her experience was a terrible one, Gelareh "dreamed of America.

[She] was nostalgic for the forests, for ice cream sandwiches, for Levi's –for the

places and the opportunities rather than people" (67). For Pas, the U.S is "'a five star

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hotel', a place of comfortable residence but not a location that fosters cultural and

linguistic belonging" (Pas 13). Although she has been estranged linguistically and

culturally, she was too mesmerized by its "opportunities" to think of the bad

experience. Looking back, Asayesh realizes how her past self was mistaken: "My life,

my culture, fit me like my skin. It was impossible then for me to comprehend a day

when I would be a stranger to myself as it is now, looking back over the years, to

comprehend my own innocence" (67).

Gelareh's Acculturation

David Wu explains that "the whitening of the American citizens does not

begin in the host country" (qtd. in Tahani-Bidmeshki 4). Gelareh's Americanization

actually began prior to her family's move to America in 1977. She wanted to come to

America to enjoy the privileges provided by such "superior culture":

When I left Iran for the second time, I said good-bye without a backward

glance. I was fifteen years old. I was going to Amrika, which meant that I no

longer needed to envy my classmate Marjan, who ordered her summer clothes

from the Spiegel catalogue, my cousin Reza, who was attending school in

England, or my friend Azadeh, who would be going to school in Switzerland

in the fall. (99)

Although Gelareh was ready to do whatever it takes to fit in the American

culture, joining high school American style "shocked [her] system": "Going to high

school in America felt like a violation of my childhood, an abrupt and painful loss of

innocence" (103). That is due to the fact that she compares what she experiences to

her school in Iran. Pas states, "When immigrant writers describe the U.S. they do so

comparatively, often using their native countries as contexts for understanding their

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new homes" (47). Using her school in Iran as reference, she was flabbergasted when

she saw how the students behave in the presence of the teachers: they never stand up

for the teachers; they chewed gum in class; they put their legs up on the desks

(Asayesh 102). She also considered the word "shit" a profane language (102). What

really blindsided her is the sight of a girl sitting on a boy's lap or a girl and boy,

"entwined next to their lockers, kissing deeply" (102).

Gelareh, mistakenly, thought that mastering the language will give her the key

to fit in, but she was oblivious to the fact that she needs to learn the culture as well:

It didn't matter that this second time in America I spoke English. If anything,

my extensive vocabulary contributed to making me an outcast. I didn't

understand about fitting in, I didn't know what it meant to be cool…As

teenagers, they had done and seen things I would not have done and seen in a

lifetime spent in Iran. I could not believe that in America children were

allowed to drive, let alone partake of all those other unspeakables –sex and

drugs and alcohol. (103)

What irritates Asayesh is that her family used to evade discussing the mishaps

they encountered in their first years in America: "To this day, we do not talk of those

first years in America. We do not acknowledge how they shaped us into what we are

today…the emotional disasters in our lives go largely unacknowledged, their

repercussions unclaimed" (103-4). Asayesh uses her memoir as an outlet for these

moments which had been suppressed for years. Simons believes that healing from bad

experience requires "re-experiencing" them: "Allowing painful or problematic events

to be staged again in the pages of our book may permit the long delayed catharsis to

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take place or lead us to the action which will lay to rest the bad karma of an

unfinished situation" (70).

Actually these very anecdotes have caused not only Gelareh, but also her

whole family to accelerate their acculturation because they have been left with a

difficult choice: "We were faced with an unspoken choice: to be alienated from the

world around us or from our innermost selves" (Asayesh 104). Looking back,

Asayesh realizes that they were forced, rather than given the choice: "Our

differentness was a taint that we carried. The consuming need to belong led us to

purge ourselves of that which once made us who we were –our accents, our awkward

clothes, our beliefs" (104).

The one incident that entails choosing her allegiance is her high school "prom"

when a boy asked her to be his date: "It was a family crisis of the quiet kind –no

shouting, just a pall hanging over the house compounded of my guilt and longing and

my parents' fear and dismay" (111). Despite the fact that her father gave her the

permission and her mother took her to buy a new dress, they were "grim" (111). As

for Gelareh, she was excited: "I felt trapped by who I was, what I was. I longed

fiercely, suddenly, miserably, to be free –free to belong in the world that was now

mine" (113). Asayesh entitled this chapter, The Break as she broke free from her

Iranian self: "I can still remember the moment when I let go of that girl from Iran"

(113). Consequently, her Iranian-ness falters due to her extreme assimilation:

My days as a college student overshadowed the Iranian side of my life –family

parties, letters from Mashad, Baba's failed attempt to get me to read books in

Farsi. In those years, being Iranian was an obstacle, a shackle, a guilt trip. My

relationship with my parents revolved around painful arguments over

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boyfriends and curfews…It took my parents' move to Canada to bring about a

truce. (118-119)

Looking back Asayesh notices her selfishness as she was indifferent to the

sacrifices of her parents. That is why she narrates apologetically how her parents lost

their professional and social status in America and had to move to Canada "where

immigrants were not a problem" (117). After failing seven times in "the medical

certification exams", her father's pride was broken: "The United States had no place

for him –not economically, as a new yet no longer young resident of psychiatry, and

not politically, as a would-be immigrant whose only chance of winning a green card

was to seek political asylum. This was something Baba refused to do, for it meant

turning his back on Iran" (116). As for her mother, her identity had been fragmented:

"Cut off from her career by visa restrictions, cut off from her sisters and brothers,

Homajoon's world narrowed down to her responsibilities as the mother of daughters

who were reluctant to be mothered" (117). "[I]mmigrant parents in both first- and

second-generation narratives make similar sacrifices, investing all their hopes in

children whose career as published autobiographers constitutes proof of successful

reterritorialization" explains Karpinski, pinpointing that parents' sacrifices are not in

vain (45).

However, what adds insult to Asayesh's injury is that her father could not go

back to Iran to restore his prestigious position. When the revolution broke out, her

father was exhilarated as he had always been against the Shah, and he wanted to go

back to Iran (Asayesh 106). Hearing that his colleagues who had worked against the

Shah were pushed aside or executed, "the light in Baba's eyes was replaced by

incalculable bitterness" (107). Asayesh explains that "as a high official in the Pahlavi

regime, Baba might be subject to reprisals from the new government" (107). In that

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case, Asayesh's family becomes refugees for the second time. Zolberg, Suhrke, and

Aguayo state that "Refugees are 'persons whose presence abroad is attributable to a

well-founded fear of violence, as might be established by impartial experts with

adequate information'" (qtd. in Reza 1). Acting reluctantly to her parents' trauma,

Gelareh proved to be too self-centered and detached to see the pain on her parents'

faces as if Iran and whatever concerns it had nothing to do with her. Asayesh

criticizes her past self and her sister's: "Sitting together in our cozy living room, we

watched the revolution unfold in stark television images and switched it off each night

with a click of the remote control" (107).

Nevertheless, her aunt's visit nourished her Iranian-ness provoking it to

surface: "By the summer of 1985, when I went home to Canada to greet the aunt and

uncle I had loved throughout childhood, I had discovered a need to belong to myself"

(120). When Gelareh saw some of their belongings in the bathroom, she reminisced

about the past: "A tube of Paveh toothpaste, the words written in English on one side,

Farsi on the other…I turn the word over in my mouth, tasting it, shaping it with my

tongue, summoning dim memories of a time when it was one of the innumerable

household phrases that defined the day-to-day rituals of my life" (115).

However, her meeting with her aunt was challenging; her aunt, Farah sensed

how Gelareh had lost her Iranian- ness and thus Gelareh felt guilty:

I feel overcome with claustrophobia. I feel as though my aunt's piercing eyes

are judging me, and the verdict is that I'm a wanderer from the one true path,

corrupted by my environment, that –most fearful thought of all –I am not

Iranian enough. That is my own inner fear, that here in the heat of American

life, my identity is wisping away from me. (122)

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Although Gelareh was aloof, her aunt tried to reach out for her. She calls Gelareh

by her nickname "Gel-gel-jan": "tugging at my heart with her use of the childhood

nickname" (123). Her aunt also tried to teach Gelareh the essence of the Iranian

culture, giving her some hidden messages. For example, she taught her the meaning of

"Seleh-y-Arham", "ties of the womb". Her aunt explains how sacred family ties are,

telling Gelareh that she came all the way to Canada "leaving behind her three

children" (123). Implicitly, her aunt is trying to tell her that she has to come to Iran to

visit her family and her roots. Besides, she has taught her about nazr: "you vow to

hold a feast for thirty or forty friends and relatives" (129). She told Gelareh about the

vows she had made for them: "For my father, when he sat for the Canadian medical

boards. For my mother, when she was in the hospital last year. For my sister and me

when we bought cars" (129-30). Gelareh felt ashamed that her aunt has always cared

about her while Gelareh was so determined to cut her ties with her family without

scruple (130). Finally, Gelareh's aunt tells her a story that also sends a hidden

message. She tells her about a man who lost four of his five children in the Iran-Iraq

war, so he moved from the city to the village afraid to lose his remaining son. Her

aunt told the man, "Whatever is God's will" (130-131). The moral lesson is that no

place is safer than another, so if Gelareh thinks Iran is not safe and unsettled, she has

to reconsider. Another thing that makes Gelareh guilty is her aunt's stories about the

war: "I do not wish to acknowledge that the United States, through its support of

Saddam Hussein, is waging war on Iran" (125). Her aunt stimulates Gelareh's

patriotism, driving her to recall her geography classes when "[she] used to feel envy

because the map of Europe was green and that of Iran, except for one verdant strip

along the Caspian Sea, yellow and brown" (126). She also recalled history classes

when "[she] felt a pang as the boundaries of Iran shrank, dwindling steadily from the

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zenith of the glory days" (126). She blames herself for not noticing things like that

anymore (127). In a way, aunt Farah's visit shakes her identity to its foundation. For

Simons, hearing other voices in our writing shows how these people are "influential":

"It is possible that we will hear voices other than our own echoed in what we have

written. Influential persons in our lives may have provided judgments, attitudes,

opinions, threats, that are again and again reflected in our own thinking and

consequently in our writing" (58).

For Gelareh, "Khaleh Farah's visit is shattering the myth, and with it the

foundation of my new life. She reminds me of the gulf between my two worlds and

that it must somehow be my task to bridge it" (125).

B. The Core Self and The Sense of Belonging

In 1990, when I obtained the green card that cemented my foothold in the West

and permitted travel to and from Iran, it was instinct that drove me to return. With

that first trip back, I began the long, slow road toward resurrecting a buried self.

And vowed I would never suffer that inner shriveling of an isolated core, the

immigrant's small death again. (Asayesh 106)

Two years after her marriage to an American man, surrounded only by American

friends, speaking only English, Gelareh, so detached from her innermost self decided

to go back to Iran: "Cut off from family and friends, I felt myself adrift. There were

no buffers between me and life's harsh realities, no cocoon of familiarity and routine

to shelter me…I discovered in myself a need to belong" (120). Revisiting Iran in

fourteen years helped Gelareh to hold on to her essence, her core self. Aware of the

instability in Iran, she did not take this step until she cemented her place in the West

once she had her green card. Helen Muggeridge and Gloria Doná explain that "the

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decision to return cannot be divorced from status in the host country…Refugees

waited until their status allowed them to return without risking jeopardizing their legal

position in the host country" (419-420). As for the small death of immigrants that is

experienced when they lose their inner self, Robert Kroetsch (1927-2011), a Canadian

poet, describes it as "the necessary death –the death, that is, out of one culture, with

the hope that it will lead to rebirth in another" (qtd. in Karpinski 152). However, for

Cixous, this death leads to rebirth, but not in another culture but in life narratives like

memoirs; she remarks that the small death of immigrants is "an inaugural scene, from

which writing sprouted" (152). Asayesh uses her memoir to speculate on the idea of

"re-birth" after returning back to Iran through several visits to restore what has long

been shut and silenced.

First Visit in 1990

"You can't journey to your origin without a translator of some sort by your

side" asserts Ariel Dorfman (qtd. in Bohórquez 97). That explains why Gelareh

decided to take her mother, not her American husband, to accompany her in her first

visit. Her mother acts as a cultural mediator as she represents a link between the past

and the present. She is the only member who has been to Iran of the Islamic Republic

(Asayesh 3). Having a translator implies that Gelareh "oscillate[s] between tourist and

native identities" (Darznik 57). She visits her country of origin, but at the same time,

she is visiting another Iran: "I [was] an Iranian girl. Now my country is a mystery to

me" (Asayesh 1). Like Moaveni, Asayesh describes her feeling, having to put on a

hejab before arriving to Iran: "The scarf draped around my head seems stifling,

unnatural" (8). She even did not recognize her family members at the airport: women

are in veils with no makeup, men are bearded (8). The whole atmosphere gives her a

sense of displacement: "the city seems bleak and ghostly, haunted by ten years of

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turmoil, hardship, and war. Here and there I see bright yellow signs identifying bomb

shelters. Revolutionary slogans cover every wall and overpass" (9). Here, she

experiences the sense of exile. For Timothy Amos, "for the exile 'places are lost-

destroyed, vacated, barred-but then there is some new place, and it is not the first,

never can be the first'" (Amos 4).

Losing her Iran, Gelareh decides to restore the things that define her Iran:

language, geography, spirituality and traditions, childhood places, food, celebrations

and people: "the cacophony of voices and honking horns around me, the dark mass of

the mountains in the distance, the familiar faces and very feel of air, speak to me of

home. Whatever this land is, whatever I may find here, it is still Iran, and it is a part of

me" (8).

As for the language, her life in America has deprived her of speaking Farsi,

her mother tongue; seeing words written in Farsi brings tear to her eyes: "I stand still

for several moments, mesmerized by the sight of computer screens displaying flight

information in Farsi…It has been too long since I last saw my innermost self reflected

in the world around me" (6). Joshua Fishman coined the term "beloved language" to

describe one's mother tongue and its effect:

[It is] the language that represents "the throbbing link to one's own formative

cognitive and effective experience of 'being at home'"…The impact of the

beloved language, which is never used merely for communication, is

historical, psychological and emotional. It is historical in a sense that it is both

a link to personal origins and a link among generations. The beloved language

is deeply personal and emotional as "we dream in it. In it we resist and accept

ourselves…It also satisfies a deeply-embedded social need, for it emphasizes

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"kinship with a slice of humanity" in a way that other modes of social

associations do not fulfill. (quoted in Garrett 62-63)

As for Iran's geography, Gelareh expresses how: "[Her] hunger for the desert

and mountains and sea was tangible, like a child's longing for her mother's embrace.

We are all a product of our physical geography; it is as if the contours of earth and

water and leaf that fill our eyes during childhood create a corresponding landscape of

the mind" (16).

As for Iran's spirituality, Gelareh senses it when her aunt Farah takes her to the

Shrine of Imam Reza to "offer her gratitude" for having Gelareh back in Iran (31).

Gelareh mourns losing this spirituality which is part of the Iranian identity: "Living in

America, with its lofty intellectualism, has robbed me of simple faith, that precious

legacy of growing up in a simple land. I realize the essential magic of belief, that its

transformative power lies not in what you believe but that you believe…I grieve for

my loss. I want my capacity for faith restored. I want to believe in miracles" (31).

Gelareh also encounters the traditions that define Iranians. One of these

traditions is the prohibition of wasting food. She recalls when she used to collect

leftover of bread or rice for the cows and rooster (21). Asayesh comments on this

tradition, explaining to the readers how it is beneficial: "In this house, in this country,

little is wasted. Partly out of scarcity, partly because of a religious abhorrence of

waste, Iranians are natural recyclers, endlessly inventive in prolonging the lives of

their cars and clothes and television sets. It was a skill that served my country well in

the long years of the war" (21). Another tradition is hospitality. Visiting a relative,

Haj Abdolkareem Ghassemi, Gelareh is overwhelmed by his family's warm welcome.

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His daughter keeps refilling their tea glasses and his wife "bustles back and forth from

the kitchen, bringing tray after tray of food" (51).

Gelareh also resolves to restore her memories of the places of her childhood:

Mashad and Gonabad, and she also visits places that have become part of the new

Iran: the cemetery of the war martyrs.

Visiting her aunt's house in Mashad, she feels that "time has stood still" (19).

She roams around, making sure that everything is still the same, the rooms, the trees,

the streets around the house (20). She recalls how this house appeared in recurrent

dreams when she was in America: "How many times, in dreams, did I arrive on this

doorstep, ringing the doorbell, watching a dark shape swim into view behind the

distorting glass, ready to grant me entrance?" (18).

As for Gonabad, time has changed it. Her grandfather's garden has turned into

ruin and the house is deserted (43). She looks at the ruin reflectively: "I travel

backward in time to the days when these rooms were peopled, the floors covered with

bright carpets, the kitchen wafting savory smells, and servants bustling across the

courtyard with their tea trays" (45). However, she makes up for her loss by taking part

in the saffron harvest in Gonabad. Asayesh provides cultural accounts of how the

town gets ready for the saffron harvest: "Schools open late this time of the year,

allowing Gonabad's children to work in the fields, picking the flowers before the sun's

heat wilts them" (49). Like Bahrampour who wove a row in a Persian carpet, Asayesh

picked saffron in the saffron harvest to install herself as a part of the Iranian culture:

"A sunburned woman with dry, chapped hands and a mustard yellow sweater shows

me how to pick the blossoms so that the stems remain whole, allowing for the longest

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stamens –an important factor, since saffron is sold by weight. Kneeling in the damp

grass…I pick, move crabwise, and pick again" (50).

Like Moaveni who wanted to be part of the history of modern Iran by taking

part in the election, Asayesh visited the cemetery, Behesht-e-Zahra, or Zahra's

Heaven where "the faces of young men killed in the war with Iraq are locked away

behind glass, along with fragments of lives now stilled: photographs, childhood

mementos, figurines from a wedding cake" (41).

Beside geography, traditions, and places, food is another artifact of culture.

Gelareh devours Iranian food not because she is hungry, but because she wants to

restore the taste: "I eat eagerly, taking in the old familiar taste" (10-11). Williams

states that "One common theme utilized by Iranian-American women to identify their

link to the homeland is the food native to Iran" (22). Gelareh tries to take in all the

sights, sounds and tastes that define Iran: "The taste of pomegranate juice, the sight of

sheep on a city street, the way a pail is made…these are the details that define our

lives. In forgetting them, I had forgotten my own face. Here in Mashad, little by little,

I am restoring the contours of my identity" (22).

During her visit, Gelareh encounters two celebrations that are part of the

Iranian identity: one belongs to her Iran and the other belongs to the new Iran. The

first is the celebration of Iran winning the championship in soccer: "Iranians' passion

for soccer has not diminished since my childhood" (9). However, they celebrated it

differently because it times with "the return of the first prisoners of war from Iraq, the

Azadegan, so the team captain "presents his trophy to the Azadegan and the 'martyrs'

killed in the eight-year war with Iraq" (9). The second celebration is "the anniversary

of the taking of the U.S. hostages. Here they call it the Eradication of the U.S. Den of

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Spies" (37). The ceremonies consist of chanting "Marg bar Amrika" "Death to

America" and burning the U.S. flag (38). Attending this celebration was shocking: "I

am overcome with a sense of unreality as if I have just participated in a game of

charades" (39). Muggeridge and Doná explain that: "For some returnees, the

encounter with reality still carried an element of imagination as they described the

visit as 'unreal', 'surreal', 'like a dream' and 'like a film'. Respondents were aware that

political, economic and social changes had taken place during their absence, but

firsthand experience of these changes was felt with some surprise" (420).

Regardless of the undesirable changes, for Gelareh Iran, above all, exists in its people:

I look at the faces around me in the car, each different and unique. I look at the

vibrant life on the streets around me, men and women and children. Sixty

million people, all carrying around their own thoughts and dreams. The image

in my mind labeled "Iran" built of ignorance and fear and facile suppositions,

begins to crumble. In its place, I start to assemble the pieces of a mosaic,

colorful and complex, that might more closely approximate the reality of my

country. (17-18)

In a way, her first visit to Iran helps her not only to restore her core self, but

also to correct a false image of the other Iran. The imposed veil and the harassment of

the komiteh are not what define the Iranian culture; people do. Muggeridge and Doná

argue that "the first visit 'back home' is important for refugees because it acts as a

catalyst for renewed engagements with host country and country of origin" (415).

Going back to America after her first visit to Iran, Gelareh re-experience a

sense of exile and she feels homesick. Surrounded by complete tranquility in

America, something she missed when she was in Iran, she reminisces about the family

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gatherings, something that used to play on her nerves when she was in Iran: "I am

unraveling. I have come back to my house, my job, and my husband, but my life

seems bleak to me. I ache for the blue sky over Gonabad. I think of my family

gathered around the sofreh and my heart contracts with longing. I miss the talk, the

squabbling, the laughter, the houses that were never empty" (Asayesh 57). She feels

estranged from her husband and her friends who do not speak her language and she

resents that they will never understand if she describes her trip to them: "I am filled

with a sense of unbelonging. My friends, my husband, seem alien to me, as if

fashioned from different clay" (58).

That is to say, her first visit shook her stability for failing to provide her with

the equilibrium she dreamed of. However, it was rewarding as it helped her realize

where she belongs and it helped her core self, which has long been suppressed in

America, to surface. At the same time, it made her realize that her American self is an

artificial veneer, describing it using a third person pronoun to distance that self: "[She]

is a false self constructed to hide the fractured chaos beneath. She is a casualty of my

trip to Iran" (57).

Unlike Moaveni and Bahrampour, whose first visit has brought balance to their

lives, Asayesh's entails frequent visits: "The first visit broke a barrier by closing one

chapter and unlocking a process of engagement with subsequent visits" (Muggeridge

and Doná 426).

C. Healing and Wholeness: Reconciliation

Asayesh, the memoirist, declares that her quest aims at reconciling her two

worlds: "I was sanguine about a future that would incorporate America without

shifting my center of gravity from Iran" (99). As Daniel Taylor expresses, "one

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cannot have a quest without knowing what one is looking for…The process of

questing –taking purposeful action –is a necessary part of discovering what the

character is questing for" (21-22). The "process" of questing that Gelarah embarks on

is reflected on her frequent visits between Iran and America to define both cultures

and see where these cultures meet. In other words, she needs to see the differences

and the similarities between them to bridge the gap created over time.

Second Visit in 1992

In her second visit, Gelareh needs no cultural translator as she feels she is

going "home"; she entitles this chapter "Homecoming: Iran" in comparison to her first

visit which is entitled, "The Return". This visit is divided between visiting the modern

Iran of the Islamic Republic and visiting the pre-Islamic Iran, Persia.

Her visit times with the ceremonies of the month of Muharram. This time, when she

sees the sineh-zans, the chest beaters who flagellate themselves, she does not get

offended, especially as her Western clothes symbolize a

physical reminder of my connection with another world…providing a

counterpoint to the ritual unfolding before my eyes…Now that I live faraway,

I can listen to the Arabic chant and appreciate its rhythms. I accept, with a

sense of inner yielding, that this passionate ritual, this pulsing vein of religious

zeal, is my birthright. It is part of who I am. (135)

Here, Gelareh begins to change her perspective which is a sign of healing. She

realizes that what the Western readers consider "primitive" is actually what makes her

native culture "peculiar" (135). Jung explains that:

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We always require an outside point to stand on to apply the lever of

criticism…How, for example, can we become conscious of national

peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation

from outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the

standpoint of another nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge

of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of

assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the

national bias and the national peculiarity. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections

246-7)

Understanding the West, Gelareh needs self-knowledge as well to create a link

between these two cultures and attain wholeness. According to Jung, "Self-knowledge

is of prime importance, because through it we approach that fundamental stratum or

core of human nature where the instincts dwell" (331). That is why Gelareh visits the

two Irans. She visits Ayatollah Khomeini's house in Jamaran, the mosque where he

preached and his tomb. She wants to re-live the history that she did not take part in.

Although she is against the forced veiling, she could see how his government is better

than the Shah's:

This government is more accountable than the Shah's. As much as I resent the

enforced hejab, it still reflects the beliefs of a majority of men and women in

my country. Even though censorship is common, I find reassuring the

openness with which people criticize the government at home and in public. I

love the new Iranian cinema, which has a vibrant originality that was missing

in the days when we counted the hours until the arrival of the latest James

Bond movie. Despite the obstacles to creative freedom that drive so many

Iranian artists to leave the country, it seems to me that the official rejection of

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Western imports has created room for authentically Iranian culture to blossom.

(Asayesh 146)

"We can hear the voice of the narrator shifting from the defensive feeling of

the moment to the more 'reasoned' feeling that comes with writing and with time" puts

Larson (37). Through the process of writing her memoir, Gelareh has acquired an

objective view about the Iran that she was trying to evade all the time in America.

However, her second visit helps her to see the positive side and thus minimize the

dark side of Iran which is recounted to her by her friend, Bijan who lives in Iran:

"Corruption and thuggery. Primitive executions. Crushing bureaucracy. Conspicuous

consumption among the supposed religious elite" (Asayesh 147). Gelareh sees it

differently:

In my near-constant attempt to define my country and its appeal, I find this

disorder poignant. There is an elusive quality that sets Iran apart from the

gleaming, efficient West in ways both repellent and appealing. It is the essence

of the Third World, of richness of culture and poverty of resources, of

deprivation and burgeoning growth. It is depressing, yet exciting, the

unruliness bordering on chaos that prevails here. (170-1)

Muggeridge and Doná clarify that for refugees who visit home, "negative

aspects of home such as chaos, nepotism, disorganization, inefficiency and corruption

had been thrown in the equation. Some spoke with resigned fondness of the chaos that

characterized the home country and yet, at the same time, it was anticipated as the

main difficulty on permanent return" (424). Gelareh admits that her view of Iran as a

refugee is different from that of a stayee: "I am the one who chooses to live across the

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sea, free to love a country that no longer cost me. And he [her friend Bijan] is the one

who stays, paying the price each day for what is wrong in Iran" (148).

As for the second part of her trip, her American husband accompanied her to

visit pre-Islamic Iran (155). Implicitly, Gelareh wants to teach the Americans that Iran

is not only the Islamic Republic, the 1979 Revolution and the hostage crisis; Iran has

great civilization. It is the same as Changez, in Mohsen Hamid's autobiographical

novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, reminds the Americans that Pakistanis are not:

the crazed and destitute radicals you see on your television channels but rather

saints and poets and –yes –conquering kings. We built the Royal Mosque and

the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built the Lahor Fort with its mighty

walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when

your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at

the edge of a continent. (102)

That is why Gelareh took her husband to Chehel Sotoon palace which dated

back to the seventeenth century; its murals depict "battle scenes, Nader Shah's

conquest of Delhi, and the royal delegations that visited when Iran was a dwindling

empire and Isfahan its capital" (158-9). They also visited the Tower of Silence, the

fire temple, explaining that before Islam, Persians were Zoroastrians worshipping fire

(159). She also took him to the ruins of Persepolis, "seat of the Achamaenid dynasty"

that was "burned down by Alexander the Great" (161). They also toured around

Pasargad where the grave of "Iran's first great emperor, Cyrus –who founded the

Persian Empire" is located (161).

After this visit, going back to America, Gelareh urges her husband to learn

Farsi, but it proves to be futile, so she decides to speak Farsi to her new-born baby girl

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instead (168). This visit has been successful as Gelareh changes her perspective

towards Iran. Besides, she bridges the cultures by taking her husband to Iran. Finally,

she tries to install her connection to Iran by speaking Farsi to her daughter.

Third Visit in 1994

In this visit, she took her nine-month-old daughter, Mina. Taking her to the

places of her own childhood: their house in Tehran, her aunts' house in Mashad, and

her grandfather's house in Gonabad, Gelareh wants Mina to "take in the sights and

sounds" that define the Iranian culture (180). She also bought a house in Mashad to

anchor herself in her country of origin (210). For Muggeridge and Doná, "purchasing

land and private property in the country of origin" is a way of "incorporating a safety

net in both cultures" (425). Once settled in homeland, Gelareh could settle anywhere

(430).

Therefore, going back to her home in America, carrying along the memories

she has created in Iran, she achieves her wholeness: "The sun dazzled my eyes. The

wind sang to me. The essence of my beginnings rose like sap, infusing my here-and-

now with the scents of my childhood Eden… I saw my past with my present. The

boundaries of space and time were erased. My life felt whole" (Asayesh x).

After her several visits to Iran, Asayesh comes to the conclusion that bi-

culturalism is a "see-saw", so she has to always go between Iran and America to keep

the balance, favoring none over the other (213). Looking back at her life, Asayesh

changes her perspective: "All my adult life I have created distance, and distance

brings me grief. Yet distance has also brought perspective. Distance has allowed me

to make peace with myself and my heritage. It has also allowed me to attempt to forge

a life that is true to both my cultures, both my selves" (214).

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Gelareh uses many strategies to reconcile her two cultures. Her first strategy is

infusing physical objects of the Iranian culture into her house in America. For

example, she asks her American friend, Paul to design a takht, a piece of furniture

"like the ones that sit under the trees in cafes and private homes in Iran, covered with

a Persian carpet" (195). Besides, she furnished her house with Persian rugs (189). She

also hung up photos of their trips to Iran (199). She cooks Iranian dishes, like sabzi-

polo, fish and tahdig, rice crisped in oil, yogurt and saffron (199). During American

holidays, she tucks a swatch of saffron into envelopes of greeting cards (191). She

also begins to celebrate Iranian pre-Islamic occasions, like Norooz and Charshanbeh-

soori, "festive Wednesday" (203). As an Iranian woman, she is good at storytelling;

that is why she turns a childhood story into a play in Farsi to be performed in the

weekly Farsi program. The story is about a wicked Div and a nice heroine, Nokhodi.

The Div does not want the spring to come to the desert, so Nokhodi fights with him:

"At the touch of her sword, the Div turns into smoke. Spring flowers bloom,

transforming the wasteland" (200). It is a traditional Iranian story that celebrates the

Persian New Year that takes place in the spring. In addition, Gelareh starts to pray.

Darznik opines that "religious devotion becomes one of the most tangible and

enduring proofs of her journey" (61). She also names her daughter after her aunt,

Mina, which is an Iranian name; she names her son, Max, which is an American

name. Fusing elements from both cultures promises that "aspects of both cultures are

preserved and at the same time modified to reflect an evolving cultural identity that is

neither purely ethnic nor purely American, but a blend of the two" (D. Hoffman 121).

As for her memoir, Like Bahrampour and Moaveni, Asayesh transliterates

Farsi words, phrases, titles into english to pinpoint "the co-existence of the two

cultures" into her life (Boehmer 230). Esmail Nooriala coined the term "Persik" to

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describe using "a Latin-based alphabet for transcribing Persian language" (qtd. in

Vahabzadeh 502). For Anna Wierzbicka, "words are a society's cultural artifacts, and

that they serve as transmitters of social attitudes and cultural values" (2-3). Using

some Farsi words, Gelareh transmits her culture to the readers, but at the same time

she provides translation to avoid "foreignizing" her text (Karpinski 43).

The title of her memoir indicates how she tries to bridge the two cultures:

"What is the common thread in our lives, other than memory, that filter composed of

our accumulated moments, which has me thinking, each time I see the sun set, of a

saffron sky?" (Asayesh 202). The title is written in English, but it brings memory of

the home country, Iran where saffron is a main spice in the Persian cuisine. Sky is a

symbol of Asayesh's life; her home is not in America or in Iran, but in both, in the sky

that connects both cultures. That is to say readers from both cultures will enjoy

reading her memoir as "[c]uriosity impels us to climb into somebody else's skin, to

see and feel both new and familiar things, as well as to discover others like ourselves,

to go to forbidden places with mysterious strangers" (Simons 23-24).

In the end, Gelareh Asayesh's memoir is a proof of how she has transformed

from a fragmented being into a whole person. She takes us into several journeys not

only back and forth between her two homes, but also between her past-self and

present-self. The wholeness is achieved once she realizes that she is a hyphenated

being, a third voice, created in the process of writing her memoir.

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CONCLUSION: WHOLENESS

To tell a tale that's left

To those forbidden passage home

It's in the telling

Not the tale

That the untold pieces get re-sewn

To pick them up

One

By

One

And then throw them in the air

Is this storyteller's mad hope

That one piece will make it there.

(Aphrodite Navab)

The previously mentioned Iranian-American poet Navab sums up the idea of

this dissertation in her poem "Tales Left Untold" as wholeness is proven to be

attained through writing the memoir: "in the telling/Not the tale". I have argued that

writing about all the things that have long been left untold and thus caused their

trauma, connecting the past to the present and reconciling their two worlds through

the process of writing, allowed the three memoirists to achieve a sense of completion.

However, I need to clarify that wholeness is not an end in the sense that it means the

stopping of something, but it is rather a goal and a target –a sense of completion

attained once they accept that they do not have to be one thing or another, they could

be both.

If I suggest that wholeness is a stop, it will suppose that identity is a static

thing which is not true. As culture and identity are interdependent and as culture itself

is both constrained and mobile as suggested by the historicist Stephen Greenblatt in

his essay "Culture", identity is mobile and fluid as well. Stephen Greenblatt opines

that culture is constrained in the sense that it is defined as "a set of cultural boundaries

for a given society" (226). At the same time, culture is mobile in the sense that when

culture is transmitted from one generation to another, it entails some mobility, not

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absolute mobility, but limited mobility due to what Greenblatt calls "exchange": "A

culture is a particular network of negotiations for the exchange of material goods,

ideas, and –through institutions like enslavement, adoption, or marriage –people"

(229). That is to say, those cultural limits cannot be evaluated without movement. As

previously mentioned, Jung believes that in order to understand one's culture, the

person needs to view his/her culture from the standpoint of another culture

(Memories, Dreams, Reflections 246-7). Therefore, since culture is mobile, identity is

fluid; it is a process that keeps negotiating with its boundaries. That is why wholeness

is not an end; it is an ending and a beginning as proposed by Freeman: "[I]t may be

seen as both an ending and a beginning: the former, in the sense of both the resolution

of a conflict and the culmination of a project, and the latter, in the sense of freeing

oneself from the stagnancy of repetition and thus opening the door to a new way of

life" (45-46).

In her poem "Allegiance with Wakefulness", the Iranian poet Saffarzadeh

expresses that writing or "reviewing" one's life helps one avoid the stagnancy of

having to define the self each time the exile person crosses borders between cultures:

This is the nature of the walk:

To go

To turn

To return

To view and to review

Going leads to the road

Staying joins stagnation. (quoted in Milani 174)

That is to say that the three memoirists tried to negotiate for their identity

through moving to and fro between cultures and between their different selves,

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attaining wholeness. Wholeness, here, is an end to their sense of alienation and

fragmentation, but it is the beginning of a better improved life that empowers them as

they acquire values from both cultures. Their native culture defines their true self, and

their host culture provides them with universal values that allow them to feel at home

anywhere, rather than feeling homeless everywhere; as put by Salman Rushdie, "the

myth of ontological unbelonging is replaced by another, larger myth of excess of

belongings: not that he belongs nowhere but that he belongs to too many places" (qtd.

in Ahmad 1462). Consequently, the concept of home changes for these memoirists.

According to Pico Iyer, a journalist and commentator on global culture, "home is

essentially a set of values you carry around with you, like a turtle or snail or whatever,

home has to be something that is part of you and can be equally a part of you

wherever you are" (qtd. in Garrett 91). It is also noticeable, the way these memoirists

have changed their perspectives towards their selves and their cultures. Traveling

stretches the mind as put by Ralph Crawshaw: "Travel has a way of stretching the

mind. The stretch comes not from travel's immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad

new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do

differently what we believed to be the right and only way" (qtd. in Andraş 159).

This point leads to another result: mobility leads these writers to develop from

being immigrant to "transmigrant". Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc describe

transmigration as a "process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous

multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and

settlement" (qtd. in Garrett 4). Consequently, they define transnational migrants as:

"people who are active participants in the social and cultural lives of the host country

while at the same time, they are engaged elsewhere in the sense that they maintain

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connections, build institutions, conduct transactions, and influence local and national

events in the countries from which they emigrated" (4).

Loh further suggests that these hybrids may construct a culture of their own:

"a new culture that is configured not according to distinctive identities and a

distinctive place but rather on indistinctiveness…and this new breed of culture

hybrids may then become global cosmopolitans, culturally skilful and incongruous

beings within a congruous world" (113-4).

The three memoirists successfully become "transmigrants" and "global

cosmopolitans" as their acculturation is eclectic. They also made sure to play the role

of cultural diplomats, reconciling two extreme poles through their memoirs. Cultural

diplomacy is defined by the website of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy as "the

exchange of ideas, information, values, systems, traditions, beliefs, and other aspects

of culture, with the intention of fostering mutual understanding" (qtd. in Šίp 1). For

Marla Harris, memoirs written by Iranian-American women do "diplomatic work,

explaining Iran to American readers" (145). Conversely, Gillian Whitlock criticizes

these memoirs, claiming they are not only written for the West, but rather "can be

used to buttress aggressive Western intervention in so-called primitive or

dysfunctional national communities" (qtd. in Harris 145). They are stigmatized as

"writing against the grains" (Hashim 545). Others, like Nawar Al-Hassan Golley,

however, claim that these women "write back" to the West (qtd. in Rautzhan 5). In

order to settle this empty argument, Larson reminds the readers that "The nature of

narrative is to set up expectations, then break or fulfill them" (151). In that sense, I

propose that through their memoirs, these Iranian-American memoirists use different

narrative techniques to convey their message. Once they are in America, they use

"pro-immigration stance", praising "the American Dream" which may satisfy the

173El-Rayis

American readers' expectations of "unequivocal expression of the immigrant cult of

gratitude" (Karpinski 47-8). However, they shock the American readers by illustrating

the racism of the Americans through the encounters these women have experienced

there. It is true that these women appreciate the opportunities provided by their host

country, but at the same time they criticize the fact that assimilation is forced. They

want to have a better America "without prejudice and discrimination, in which no

cultural theme linked to any racial or ethnic group has priority and in which American

culture is seen as the product of a complex intermingling of themes from every

minority ethnic and racial group" as put by Nathan Glazer (qtd. in Mostofi 698).

Mostofi then clarifies that instead of America being a "melting pot", "such

multicultural society is metaphorically described as a 'salad bowl' or the 'glorious

mosaic'" (698).

At the same time, they celebrate the Iranian cultural objects like traditions,

language, family ties and even the chaos and primitiveness of the country. However,

they criticize the imposition of hejab on women. They differ in their attitude towards

hejab: while Tara Bahrampour felt "free" by wearing hejab, Azadeh Moaveni and

Gelareh Asayesh felt estranged from their selves, yet all of them are against being

forced to wear it. In that sense, they are not writing for the West, but as Jung suggests

they are using it as "a stand point" to clearly view themselves (Memories, Dreams,

Reflections 246). Thus, they criticize both cultures, seeking the betterment of these

societies as Larson explains that "social and personal betterment are mutually

dependent" (163).

Another question that is brought to the surface is: if they are not writing for

the West, why do they write their memoirs in English? My argument is that it is true

they write in English, but they transliterate Farsi words, expressions, proverbs, food,

174El-Rayis

titles, and feelings into english. Manecke proposes that they "use the English language

in a completely different way than their English [or American] counterparts by

inserting expressions or sounds of their native tongue" (112). If they write for the

West, it means that they are traitors. Karpinski explains that a translator becomes

traitor as in the Italian proverb "traduttore, traditore" by "formulating an ethnic

identity that is acceptable to the target culture [when] the translator engages in

rewriting and manipulation through which the source culture is "homogenized and

domesticated, the polyphony of its existence obliterated, and a unified, monolithic

view of that culture is created as truly legitimate" (88-89).

These memoirists are not "traitors" as they, as argued before, used

domesticating and foreignizing techniques in their memoirs. Simply, they write in

English for two reasons:

A practical reason for using English is to reach American audiences (as well

as younger Iranian Americans who are not necessarily fluent in written

Persian), but a secondary reason is that writers identify Persian with

censorship; by using English, they express their protest against the way they

believe their native language has been co-opted by repressive government.

(Harris 159)

Nasrin Rahimieh, likewise, in her essay "The Quince-Orange Tree" (1992),

poses the question "what makes someone who writes in English an Iranian writer"

(40). Donné Raffat defends himself, saying that:

This story could have only happened in Iran, on Iranian soil, with Iranian

people…at the moment of writing, I was Iranian to my core and marrow; for

what I had, in lieu of the language, was the vision: more than that, the

experience of the vision. From nowhere else could that vision have come: this

175El-Rayis

was the country's gift to me. Not the language…but the vision. (quoted in

Harris 40)

Jasmine Darznik also asserts that:

[A] persistent feature of Iranian immigrant literature [is] the dominance of Iran

–its history as well as its contemporary culture and politics…In both

autobiography and fiction, the trend in Iranian American literature has been to

bypass "domestic" themes and instead act as translators to a culture –and,

increasingly, a religion –that both repels and fascinates western readers. (56)

That is to say that the content is Iranian, but the form is Western or, as Larson

specifies that "memoir is an American form" (xi). Henceforward, Iranian-American

memoirists attain wholeness through the writing of their memoir, and they reflect this

wholeness by "using a Western form to depict a very Iranian experience" (Naghibi

232-3). Deborah Schiffrin manifests that the form and content of a life narrative

reflect the person's identity: "The form of our stories (their textual structure), the

content of our stories (what we tell about), and our story-telling behavior (how we tell

our stories) are all sensitive indices not just of our personal selves, but also of our

social and cultural identities" (170). Therefore, I propose that since Iranian-American

women use a Western form to write about Iran, they accentuate their hyphenated

identity, their wholeness.

Apparently, these women misunderstood the hyphen between their two

identities when they thought that they are neither Iranian nor American, mistakenly

taking the hyphen as "a slash, signaling a distance, separation or exclusion"

(Karpinski 164). However, after going on the self-defining journey of writing their

memoirs, they come to the conclusion that the hyphen is rather "a hymen" or "a

marriage contract" as described by Derrida, "the hymen is first of all a sign of fusion,

176El-Rayis

the consummation of a marriage, the identification of two beings, the confusion

between the two" (qtd. in Karpinski 165). Derrida goes further, suggesting that

through memoir writing, "the hymen opens up the space of the 'yet unwritten page'";

this blank, "unwritten" page is the third voice that is produced in the liminality

between cultures –the voice of the memoirist (165).

In conclusion, Tara Bahrampour, Azadeh Moaveni and Gelareh Asayesh

successfully attain their wholeness, through writing their spellbinding memoirs. Each

one of them uses the memoir to have an overview of her life. They re-write their lives

with all the experiences they encountered, especially the painful ones and they re-

lived these experiences by describing how they felt then and how they feel writing

about them. While writing, they started to notice how their lives turn out to be better

than what they had imagined. They realized that being exposed to two worlds, even if

they are contesting ones, does not mean having no place to call home; however, it has

provided them with rich and privileged experiences that broadened their minds and

granted them a multicultural identity or rather a trans-cultural one that allows them to

cross borders without the risk of losing their equilibrium.

177El-Rayis

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