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Talking with a pioneer of Iranian American literature: an interview with Nahid Rachlin.

Article Excerpt
Nahid Rachlin came to the United States more than three decades ago as a young woman seeking a college education. Like many early Iranian immigrants, she arrived when US-Iran relations were positive and the United States was actively supporting Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and his policies. Rachlin married an American and later became a citizen, yet always dreamed of becoming a writer. In 1978, she published her first novel, Foreigner, to critical acclaim. Foreigner explores the contours of alienation/outsiderness, both in the US and in Iran. Since this publication, Rachlin has been productive as a writer and teacher, and she is an early pioneer of what critics call "Iranian immigrant literature." She has written novels, short stories, and a memoir called Persian Girls, which Christopher Merrill, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, named "one of the best four books of 2006" because of its revealing details about growing up female in Iran.

Rachlin now joins a cadre of women writers who are defining the contours of an emerging body of Iranian diaspora writing, such as Tara Bahrampour, Gina Barkhordar Nahai, Azar Nafisi, Azadeh Moaveni, and the France-based graphic memoirist, Marjane Satrapi. While Rachlin has written fiction, her most recent writing reflects an interest in the genre of memoir. Memoir may have particular resonance for Iranian and Iranian American women writers because it confers a kind of self-authorization that women in Iran historically have been denied because of a male-dominated literary tradition that discouraged women's voices and self-revelation. For American audiences and publishers, the popularity of the memoir could be linked to a kind of preoccupation with peering "under the veil" of Iranian women's lives. Some writers have been critical of this plethora of Iranian women's "tell-all" memoirs because they present problematic depictions of Iran and Iranian...

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