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Article Excerpt
In her memoir To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America, Tara Bahrampour, an Iranian American journalist known for her writing in the popular press on Iran and Iranian Americans, describes what she calls "fake Farsi," an improvisational language game that she and her brother played as children. (1) To play the game, she pretends to "sound just like the Iranian TV broadcasters who string together unending chains of complicated words to announce the news." This game involves phonetic play within rules of grammar, a testing of possibilities within clearly understood boundaries. Bahrampour explains, "we make up Farsi-sounding sentences, keeping all the same pauses and inflections." She recalls reproducing "the formal pronunciation I've only heard from newscasters and from Iranians reciting poetry." She even offers a sample of fake Farsi in italics. After the real Persian phrase, "Salaam beenandegaan-e aziz [Hello, dear viewers]," and the date, Bahrampour launches into a long sentence of Persian-sounding gibberish: "Behdaayat-e mafianboolian, baad az forojamegaanha-ye khaghenaammat-e ..." and so on (57). The structure remains grammatically correct but the words make no sense. Young Tara strips the signifier from the signified, producing a language that is more somatic than semantic, more music than meaning. (2)
However, this verbal game does have its ideological signification as a performative reworking of a formal, rule-bound apparatus and a ritualized yet flexible performance of national identity: the national television news broadcast and the recitation of classical poetry, respectively. By copying the styles of these two modes to produce a language without content, Bahrampour enacts a performative parody of national identity. (3) The discourse of television news, broadcast across national space at a specific time of day, produces national identity horizontally as an imagined community across geographical locations. The formal recitation of poetry, steeped as it is in the work of Iran's great national poets Hafez and Sa'di, produces national identity vertically as an imagined community in time. As Roya Hakakian recalls in her own memoir, Journey from the Land of No: "to engage in the national pastime, declaiming poetry, especially in the presence of an elder pro like Father, was foolish" (69). On her lather's mantelpiece "would be a volume of Hafez's collected poetry, just as certainly as there was a flag in every schoolyard, equal tokens of patriotism" (70). As a performance of identity through play with language, fake Farsi simultaneously destabilizes signification and yet signifies the very forms and formalities of Iranian national identity.
In this sense, take Farsi is a kind of Persian blues. Like jam sessions derived from a fake book in which a musician deconstructs and reconstitutes an old standard, reworking the tonal meanings of popular songs, fake Farsi takes formal structures and reworks them into an improvisational reinvention of the original. This kind of rifting on language is an important part of literary constructions of ethnicity in the United States. (4) In Lost in Translation, for example, Eva Hoffman uses the term "riff" as a way of understanding the improvisation of a new self in a new language. Unlike the formal freedom associated with jazz, the blues rift is grounded in formulaic structures and stock phrases. (5) It is up to the blues player to rework and reinvent these standardized modes. Hoffman describes the "rift" as an "all-American form, the shape that language takes when it's not held down by codes of class, or rules of mannerliness, or a common repertory of inherited phrases" (218). In both American blues and Persian classical music, improvisation and composition are indistinguishable. Ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin has shown that "the creation of new phrases [in Iranian classical music performance] involves much more than the simple substitution of one formula for another, namely, the continuous negotiation of a network of choices in which the formulas themselves have a flexibility not usually associated with the term" (270). (6) I would like to link the musical definition of formulaic flexibility to its poetic and more generally linguistic possibilities. Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid All, for example, describes how in the ghazal form, the strict formal qualities of radif (the repeated word at the end of the quatrain), and the qafia (the repeated rhyme just before the radif) produce a structure in which the poet has "the freedom to engage in different themes, issues, and attitudes while keeping himself gratefully shackled" (x). Bahrampour's fake Farsi performs something similar when she vamps on the (more or less flexible) formulae of news broadcasts and poetry recitation to produce a language game similar to Hoffman's notion of the riff.
This metaphor of rifting offers an interesting way of understanding how Iranian American memoirists reimagine genres, forms, and identities by playing through rather than avoiding formulae. These are not radical deconstructions of genre, but subtle reshapings of standardized forms. This play with formula is something that can be found both in American creative forms like the blues and Iranian creative forms like modal music and poetry recitation. It is important to remember, as well, that Bahrampour's take Farsi comes from a defamiliarized relationship to language, a relationship at the heart of exilic experience. Only by speaking one's native tongue as if it were a foreign language can a game like fake Farsi be played. Thus, in losing a naturalized relationship to her mother tongue, the exile becomes aware of the foreignness of languages in general and, by extension, the arbitrary nature of any discourse, formula, or genre. (7)
In what follows, I discuss how two Iranian American memoirists--Azadeh Moaveni and Hakakian--reflect on the problems and the promise of imagining an identity caught between two or more languages. Such a reading situates these memoirs within a comparative ethnic American context in which the self is reimagined in a new language. The list of such memoirs and novels can be quite long, but we might note, especially, Hoffman's Lost in Translation, Gustavo Perez-Firmat's Life on the Hyphen, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Edward Said's Out of Place, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, especially her essay "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls' Lost Their Accents, just to name a few texts that explore the relationship between identity and language and intervene in the politics of translating the self. It is beyond the scope of this essay to present a thorough comparative study of multi-ethnic discourses of language and self. (8) However, the example of Hoffman's work, as I have discussed it above in relation to Bahrampour, should suggest some ways in which telling a life in a new language allows for performances of identity that question notions of the subject and challenge the boundaries of genre in the same way that a blues rift reworks a stock phrase.
In these and other memoirs by Iranian American women, reflection upon the self in language leads to inventive play with discourse. I focus on Iranian American women memoirists partly for reasons outlined by Amy Malek, who argues that autobiographical writing by Iranian men in exile tends to fall outside a strict definition of memoir (361)....
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