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Article Excerpt
Though the Iranian American memoirs published since 2003 are by no means the first autobiographical writings by members of this ethnic group, because they appeared after the September 11, 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center and in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the response to them demonstrates not only increased anxieties about Muslims in the public sphere, but a sharpening of the debate within the Iranian diaspora about the appropriate role of its members in the host country. These circumstances have resulted in a perception, especially on the part of scholars within the Iranian American community, of higher stakes in interpretation of these texts. One critic charges the memoirists with complicity in a US program for hegemony in the Islamic world, suggesting that works like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) promote a "selective memory" of historical events that encourages "collective amnesia" concerning US action abroad (Dabashi); another criticizes the clumsy attempt to translate Iranian culture into humorous terms comprehensible to Americans, in memoirs like Firoozeh Dumas's Funny in Farsi (2003), arguing that representing the vexed relationship between Iran and the US in terms of such banalities trivializes Iran's plight in the modern world (Mottahedeh). On the other hand, one second-generation Iranian American critic celebrates these memoirs as "unique forms of exil[ic] cultural production," seeing in their publication and popularity a positive development in articulating the vision of Iranian Americans who have embraced the term "diaspora" to describe their relationship to Iran, but for whom a recognizable identity in the US socio-cultural milieu is important, too (Malek 354).
All this suggests not only a contested understanding of the role of diasporic Iranians in the home and host cultures, but also a certain confusion over what the responsibilities of memoir are to truth--or, more to the point, whose conception of truth prevails. Should our understanding of the truth be assembled from the testimony of many, or is truth best expressed by the experience of the individual? More simply put, is the truth historical or anecdotal? Clearly, the matter is divided, especially within the Iranian diaspora, where if the lively debate sometimes veers towards personal attacks on the integrity of the rnemoirists, the impulse of critics to interrogate political motivations, to historicize, and to critically recognize this developing body of work still is important. Yet the restriction of the debate primarily to the diaspora has obscured other meaningful contexts for inquiry, particularly that of memoir itself--a genre to which even readers outside of the special circumstances of the Iranian diaspora bring complex expectations. (1)
Theorist Philippe Lejeune argues that because readers and authors of memoirs are bound by the "autobiographical pact," which compels authors to tell the truth as they know it, readers must assume, until proven otherwise (as in the "borderline and exceptional case... of fraud" [26]), that memoirs do uphold the relationship between the world inside the text and the world outside of the text as it is has been perceived by the author. Yet this means that the memoir cannot necessarily satisfy strict demands for either political correctness or historical accuracy. Lejeune also reminds us that while biographies and histories aim for "[a]ccuracy [which] involves information" we can only expect from the autobiographer or memoirist "fidelity [which involves] meaning" (23). More specifically, in the case of the Iranian American memoir, the genre does give us permission to assume that the "Iran" and "America" referenced in such works are places that actually exist, and which the reader may know through her own experience. At the same time, the reader must acknowledge that her sense of the truth or meaning of these places may diverge, in some cases dramatically, from that of the memoirist, and that in the contest between these two experiences of perception, neither historical accounts nor the personal experience of a reader can necessarily mediate or provide definitive answers.
Yet in any socio-literary context of autobiographical readership, the criteria for fidelity fluctuate, and are dependent to a great extent on the conventions of first-person and/or autobiographical narration in a given period. This paper seeks to alter critical understanding of the post-2003 memoirs by measuring some of these fluctuating criteria within a changed periodization of Iranian American life writing. In this schema, the tradition does not begin with the 2003 "memoir phenomenon" or with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that initiated massive Iranian immigration to the US, but in 1953, with Najmeh Najafi's Persia Is My Heart. I propose a second notable point of development in 1978 with the publication of Nahid Rachlin's autobiographical first novel Foreigner, and end by examining two post-2003 memoirs, Roya Hakakian's Journey From the Land of No (2004) and Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad (2005). Extending the interval of inquiry and situating these works within the American literary culture of their respective periods allows us to acknowledge the powerful influence that contemporary politics can have on the circumstances of production and readership. A meaningful theory of Iranian American life writing that takes the spate of memoirs published since 2003 as its occasion for articulation must also undertake an examination of the politics of genre in the host country. Critics hoping to understand these works must position them not only within diasporic debates, but also within the ongoing conversation about autobiographical genres in American letters, and the American dialogues about selfhood and ethnicity that have developed with this tradition.
Including these works by Najafi and Rachlin in our conception of Iranian American life writing allows us to see how their accounts, published under quite different--but no less urgent--political circumstances are indeed influenced by historical and literary contexts local to the place in which they are produced, but not quite in the way critics of the memoirs have thus far imagined. In their elucidation of the experience of exodus and alienation in the host and home countries, both the earlier works by Najafi and Rachlin and the recent memoirs demonstrate an affinity with contemporaneous autobiographical and/or first-person accounts by American writers that suggests ongoing concerns about what it means to be American2 Assuming that the reader successfully identifies with the narrator-protagonist, her ability to imaginatively share the experiences permits what Melanie Green calls "transportation," in which the reader "consciously or unconsciously push[es] real world facts aside and instead engage[s] the narrative world created by the author" (248), a process that is heightened when the reader has prior familiarity with the themes explored (250); this process is also heightened, I would add, in the case of first-person narration. Therefore, in an American context of readership, where the imagination of national identity is strongly connected to the theme of immigration, narratives of immigration and assimilation present not only the usual chance to identify with the narrator that any book might offer, but also permit the reader to "remember" these experiences through transportation and to reaffirm her national identity.
At each juncture considered here, the solidity of the American identity was tested. In the 1950s, the dominant preference for homogenous assimilation was being tempered by theories of cultural pluralism. In the 1970s, war and cultural revolution within American society created a sense of the individual's alienation from both self and country. And in the most recent rearticulation of Iranian American first-person narrative voice in the 1990s, the narrating American self exploits crises of personal trauma through the technologies of postmodern narration to claim a unique diasporic identity in a multicultural society. Thus we see that the special relationship that obtains between the first-person narrator and the reader of these accounts has long been a mediator of American identity, resolving crises of self being negotiated by the society on a broader scale.
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