Critical Issues Archive: Jasmin Darznik

Writing Ourselves
into American Letters

A talk given at the Iranian Alliances Across Borders’ Fourth Annual International Conference on the Iranian Diaspora U.C. Berkeley, April 2009

by Jasmin Darznik

“But does the world really need another memoir by an Iranian American woman?” So I was asked recently by a fellow Iranian at a reading in San Francisco. By the time of this question, I’d spent the better part of a year researching and writing a book about my family’s life in Iran. This involved not just a protracted dive into my own memories, but hundreds of hours spent collecting oral histories and poring over Iranian histories, biographies, and memoirs. Did the world need my book? I was an idealist, I was an innocent. I couldn’t begin to imagine a more necessary book than my own.

OK, so I was, in the manner of many a first-time author, delusional about the importance of my own work. But even with my delusions, I wasn’t able to chirp so much as a word in my own defense. Why? Maybe because that question (Does the world really need another memoir by an Iranian American woman?”) not only contained echoes of a debate that’s been raging in the two communities I am most apt most call my own--the Iranian American community and the academic community--but also went right to the question of why I write and for whom.

In any case, although it comes too late for the person who first asked it, in considering what it means for Iranians to write themselves into American letters, this is the question I’d like to address.

The phenomenal success of Azar Nafisi’s 2002 memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, followed by a spate of recent bestsellers like Funny in Farsi, Lipstick Jihad, and Persepolis, marks a period of unprecedented interest in writing by women of the Iranian diaspora. In the post-9/11 period, Iranian immigrant women have emerged as important agents in framing how American readers see and interpret not only the history, politics, and culture of Iran but of the greater contemporary Middle East.

And yet this sudden visibility belies a much longer history of writing by Iranians in America. For thirty years women writers of the Iranian diaspora have been creating an ethnic literature engaged with immigration, exile, religious fundamentalism, and women’s rights. Originating with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the mass migration of Iranians to the West, the literature of the Iranian diaspora has in subsequent years been marked and molded by the Hostage Crisis, the first Gulf War, and, more recently, the events of 9/11 and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. This body of writing proves, often quite dramatically, the vexed relationship of Iranian immigrants to both Iran and America—and the challenge of claiming a literary voice over a period of sustained tensions between the Iranian and American governments.

But even if we take the longer view on Iranian American literature, in the years since the events of 9/11, Iranian immigrant writing has picked up a truly intriguing pace. In the last year in particular I have often felt I could not possibly read fast enough to keep up with all the books being published by women of the Iranian diaspora. But there has been a second, and no less intriguing, development. For years Iranians in America have been regarded as so minor a minority that their writing has lacked a critical geography--that is to say, a recognizable place in literary scholarship. Neither sufficiently Iranian for Iranian Studies nor adequately American for American literary studies, the presence of Iranian immigrant writers has barely registered in any field of literary scholarship.

After 9/11, however, Iranian women writers suddenly became visible to scholars across a broad range of disciplines—but in ways that are often no less troubling than those behind their former invisibility. To an increasing number of critics the proliferation of books by Iranian women in the West, particularly memoirs, constitutes a pernicious outcome of the U.S. government’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq: a restaging of Orientalist and imperialist ideologies by a cadre of “native informers.” In a way, there is nothing at all new about the charge. Ethnographies of foreign peoples (a class of writing into which immigrant life narratives might meaningfully be placed) have long been recognized as integral to the insidious, far-ranging phenomenon of “cultural imperialism.” It is, in other words, a story we know well in the history of English and American literature. What is interesting is that in this version of the story an all-out campaign has been launched against Iranian immigrant writers and that leading the campaign are U.S.- based Iranian academics who decry Iranian immigrant writers’ authority to speak, among other things, to the experience of “real” Iranians.

This crisis has reached a fever pitch around a single Iranian immigrant writer, Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. Following a June 2007 essay titled “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire,” Nafisi would be “outed” by a number of Iranian American scholars for her alleged links various neoconservative individuals and think tanks. Without becoming too embroiled in that particular controversy, I’d like to highlight what I see as a disturbing subtext to the Nafisi debacle. It seems we’ve entered an era in which any Iranian immigrant woman who writes of women’s struggles in Iran is regarded as complicit with the forces that would now invade her homeland. Over and over I’ve observed that when women in Iran write of women’s struggles they are regularly and lavishly lauded for their bravery; when Iranian immigrant writers write successful books on the same themes, they are dismissed out of hand as “traitors.”

While recent critiques have brought a much-needed attention to the politics of literary production and reception and the links between current military campaigns and a much longer history of Western imperialism in the Middle East, it is unfortunate that all too often these interventions fall in line with a long tradition that would deny women a place in Iranian letters. Moreover, to categorically dismiss Iranian immigrant writers as “native informers” suggests also that good Iranian immigrants keep quiet in times like these—a directive that works as a strange but fitting corollary to the idea that in the so-called “Age of Terror” patriotism precludes political dissent.

Moreover, most criticisms of Reading Lolita in Tehran have seemed only incidentally about the memoir itself; textual analysis has been muted, if not absent, in debates about the book. There is also a disturbing tendency to conflate the work of a great number of Iranian women writers, judging their books solely according to political import and commercial success, and all but abandoning text-based analysis as a meaningful mode of inquiry. Ironically, such undifferentiated readings only tend to re-inscribe the importance already conferred by commercial success. To read the recent, often quite virulent critiques of Azar Nafisi’s memoir, you might get the impression she is the only Iranian woman of import writing in the West.

To me the present crisis over Iranian immigrant writing expresses the fundamental quandary of how and where to situate any new immigrant literature. It also recalls debates about authenticity in other U.S. ethnic literatures, for example the debates that arose in the late 70s around Asian American literature. And yet the question of where and how to situate Iranian immigrant writing in the post-9/11 period poses challenges that seem to me quite a new and different than those faced by preceding immigrant literatures. In an essay on the state of scholarship about Arab American literature following 9/11, one critic would write of the fundamental inadequacies of a critical framework born of political crisis. I would argue that Iranian immigrant literature suffers from an even shakier and more embattled critical framework than even Arab American writing. And I use the phrase embattled quite purposefully. In the place of close textual analysis, we have instead accusations and insinuations, all served up in the very language of war.

So much for the backlash against Iranian American literature. What might we imagine as its corrective? As it turns out, controversies and crises have their uses. For one thing, they have sparked the most diverse collection of Iranian writing yet produced in America. In the last few years, literature of the Iranian diaspora swelled with new titles. These include several memoirs: Nahid Rachlin’s Persian Girls, Marina Hemat’s Prisoner of Tehran, Davar Ardalan’s My Name Is Iran, Camelia Entekhabi-fard’s Camelia, and Monir Farmanfarmaian and Zara Houshmand’s A Mirror Garden. While memoir remains the most popular genre in the Iranian diaspora, for the first time novels have begun to challenge the supremacy of the genre. The year’s list of novels by Iranian women writers included works by two veterans of Iranian American literature, Nahid Rachlin and Gina Nahai, but also novels by newcomers Yasmin Crowther, Nassim Assefi, Dalia Sofer, Anita Amirrezvani, and Porochista Khakpour, many of which have met with that rare confluence of critical and commercial success.

The last years have also brought the publication of two new anthologies of Iranian diasporic literature, Lila Azam Zanganeh’s My Sister Guard Your Veil, My Brother Guard Your Eyes and Persis Karim’s Let Me Tell You Where I Have Been. Karim’s book in particular serves as a rejoinder to those doubting the relevance of Iranian immigrant literature. One of its chief values is its juxtaposition of the blockbusters (there are excerpts from Lipstick Jihad, Funny in Farsi, and a host of other bestsellers) and writing by a new and emerging group of Iranian women writers in the West. In including poetry and short fiction, Karim manages also to offer a more complex cross-section of Iranian American literature than is suggested by the proliferation of Iranian memoirs in the last several years. It is, in short, an anthology that offers much that’s unexpected—and therefore also much that’s necessary.

Noteworthy, too, is the work of young Iranian American academics such as Babak Elahi and Amy Motlagh who are just now coming down the academic pipeline and producing phenomenally nuanced scholarship. They owe much to Persis Karim, the forerunner of the field, as, in fact, do I. In the last two years, Karim has, together with U.C. Irvine professor Nasrin Rahimieh, initiated panels on Iranian American writing at the annual conferences of both the Middle Eastern Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. In 2008, Professors Karim and Rahimieh also served as editors of the first all-Iranian American issue of the Journal of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, one of the most well-regarded forums for scholarship of ethnic American writing. Thanks to these contributions, Iranian American literature is no longer the poor cousin or distant relation of any literature, but has finally come to occupy a home of its own in the academy.

A final, no less important corrective to the backlash again Iranian writing, can found in the initiatives of Iranian American writers themselves. Last year, Persis Karim and New York City-based writer Manijeh Nasrabadi began the Association of Iranian American Writers as a forum to support and promote fiction and non-fiction writers, essayists, poets, journalists, and photojournalists through its website, readings, workshops, and monthly meetings. There are presently two active chapters of AIWA, one in New York and one here in Northern California, and plans to begin a third in Southern California. For the last year, I’ve had the great good fortune to be a member of the Northern California cohort, and what I have found in AIWA is a true kinship between emerging and established writers and an always-engaging forum for conversation. A recent Sunday morning found us in a spirited discussion of the role of politics in writing, but even in the thick of our debates, an uncommon generosity always reigns.

In summing up, I hope you’ll indulge me in a vision for where Iranian American literature may find itself yet: As the Iranian immigrant experience grows more complex and variegated, and Iranian immigrant literature registers those changes, literary scholarship, and the Iranian community’s own treatment of its writers, will hopefully undergo an evolution of its own. Perhaps there will be less talk of that odious monolith, “the Iranian memoir,” and accusations that Iranian immigrant writers are operating as “native informers.” Perhaps there will also be fewer intimations that Iranian diasporic literature is but the poor relation of “real” Iranian literature. We might entertain fewer doubts about the necessity of Iranian American writing, and more about the necessity of close, careful reading. It’s possible we will begin to think of Iranian immigrant literature as an American literature, one that sometimes participates and sometimes resists the political, ideological, and cultural divide between Middle East and the West, and, most ideally, a literature that eventually bears witness to the erasure of that divide.


Jasmin Darznik