Tales of exile and of home: Iranian diaspora in literature

Iranian fiction in English

Iranian woman walks through the snow at Azadi square in Tehran. Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters. Courtesy the Guardian.

by Sanaz Fotouhi for Tehran Bureau, The Guardian

When I was at university studying English literature, I took an interest in diasporic and migrant writings. Authors from India, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean all told the same kind of stories of exile and resettlement. Their books raised a shared set of concerns, reflecting homelessness, loss and attempts to reconstruct identity.

As someone who is part of the Iranian diaspora, my heart connected to these stories, but at the same time I felt something was missing. Yes, I sympathised with the writers and related to their experiences, but I could not identify with the cultural details.

I felt my voice, as an Iranian living away from my homeland, was missing. Back then, in the late 1990s, there were few Iranians writing in English about their experiences.

This changed one summer when browsing a dingy bookstore in Hong Kong, I came across Susan Pari’s The Fortune Catcher. I read the book in two days, weeping my way through it. Finally someone had depicted my very own Iranian experience in English. Now the world might understand our stories. Stumbling on this book was the beginning of a journey that has preoccupied my life.

Over the next several years, I dedicated myself to finding, reading, and researching the literature of the Iranian diaspora. Gradually, I came upon an emerging body of work. These books grew from a handful in the late 1990s to around 300 today.

Having read most of the books by Iranian writers in English, at least those that I could get my hands on, I see a body of work that paints a beautifully diverse picture of the Iranian diaspora, and makes a great contribution to the way Iranians are seen and see themselves.

Iran native eyes Schenectady café as venue for conversation

Dr. Mahmood Karimi Hakak, stands in front of 703 Union Street in Schenectady Wednesday, November 5, 2014.   Photographer: Peter R. Barber. Courtesy Gazette.

by Bethany Bump, Gazette Reporter

Fifteen years ago, Iranian officials raided Mahmood Karimi-Hakak’s sold-out production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and shut it down.

The Islamic regime in power at the time had been sending censors to observe Karimi-Hakak’s take on one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and they objected to a scene in which an actor made a pushing gesture toward an actress from 10 inches away. Men and women were forbidden from touching on stage, and from a certain angle an audience member might think the actors had touched, the officials told him. Karimi-Hakak increased the distance.

But on the fifth night of sold-out performances, officials raided the show, shouting violent threats and calling the women on stage whores. With hundreds of people in the audience, Karimi-Hakak urged the raiders to sit down with him on stage and discuss their concerns with the audience. If the audience believed them valid, he would happily shut down, he said.

“I said, ‘Look, theater is an art based on dialogue; therefore, stage is the most appropriate place for opposing forces to sit down and have a conversation,’ ” the Niskayuna resident and Siena College professor recalled 15 years later. “Of course, they did not do it, because they knew if there was a dialogue, they’d have no legs to stand on.”

Now, Karimi-Hakak has a new plan to foster dialogue, right here in Schenectady. He’s asking the city for approval to open a café at 703 Union St., a two-story building across from Union College, to host film screenings, poetry readings, arts and crafts exhibits and plain old conversation.

Café International would offer coffee, pastries, Persian teas and sweets. With some minimal renovations and city Planning Commission approval later this month, it could open by March, right in time for the Persian New Year.

“I want to gather people under the same roof for tea and conversation,” Karimi-Hakak said. “All kinds of people: academics, artists, students, people from all walks of life. As a theater artist, I sincerely believe that the only way to survival as human beings is to have conversations with one another to understand that we can live in this world together and we don’t have to think the same way to do it.”

The Republic of Imagination

Azar Nafisi’s latest is an ode to literary America, from Iran, with love

by Robert Fulford, National Post

In the fall of 1979, during the early days of Iran’s Islamic revolution, the 24-year-old Azar Nafisi was teaching her students at the University of Tehran the virtues of two American books, Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. At the same moment, in the courtyard below, Islamists were shouting, “Death to America!” and the nearby U.S. embassy was under siege by screaming, murderously passionate anti-Americans.

“The new regime,” as she remembers it, “was leading a bloody crusade against Western imperialism, against the rights of women and minorities, against cultural and individual freedom.” That was the program of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And she, through literature, was doing her best to teach the reverse.

“Suddenly a new regime had established itself, taking hold of my country, my religion, my traditions, and claiming that the way I looked, the way I acted — what I believed in and desired as a human being, as a woman, a writer and teacher — were all alien.”

Under pressure at the university, she continued her classes at home, meeting discreetly with a few students who weren’t worried about official dogma. Eventually Nafisi left Iran and ended up in Washington as an American citizen and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. Her experience with private teaching in Tehran led eventually to Reading Lolita in Tehran, published a decade ago, in which she described what free literature meant to women living sharply circumscribed lives. She imagined that with luck her book would sell 9,000 copies; it sold 1.5 million, in 32 languages. It outraged Iranian critics and made her famous.

Poetry of protest gives view into distant worlds

by Maya Weeks, Index on Censorship

A few weeks ago, 13,000 writers swarmed Seattle for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. In the seaport city known for its ideal reading (and writing) weather — and home to poet Maged Zaher – writers filled hotel rooms and bars. On official panels they debated the state of contemporary literature, and at offsite readings and parties, they celebrated the written word.

The song of the nightingale / Is not up for sale
Ziba Karbassi, Gravequake

On the other side of the hemisphere, Ziba Karbassi doesn’t need to attend a conference to know what contemporary literature looks like. Born in 1974 in Tabriz, Iran, this rising star of Persian poetry, who also writes in her first language of Azeri Turkish, has been living in exile in London since leaving her country in 1989. Karbassi has published eight books of poetry in Persian, and with Stephen Watts, she has translated much of her work into English.

Taken from an incident close to the author’s family in the 1980s, her poem “Death by Stoning” depicts a young pregnant woman taken to prison, tortured, and stoned to death:

I am not a scaffold to be toppled
not a felled tree to be sunk in the flood

I am only a bag of bones and skin
smashed about

The heavy consonants in the nouns and adjectives and the scattered form of the poem demonstrate the mother-to-be’s “anguished, loving, and crazed” state of mind. “Death by Stoning” shows how poetry can give us a view into worlds distant from — but not entirely unlike — our own. Poetry can also play a part in shaping our world.

The House on Iran Street

But streets do not just disappear, do they?

Image from Flickr via Kamyar Adl. Courtesy Guernica 

by Hooman Majd, Guernica

The Past

 

The streets still glimmer from the early freezing rain, and the traffic is heavier than usual. Shared taxicabs are packed with passengers, crammed into small cars, and they sweep by her without slowing down. She stands on the corner of the busy avenue, looking at the massive snowcapped mountain that dominates the view in the northern part of the city, and puts her arm out from under her black chador in the hope that a vacant cab, or at least a cab with room for one more body, will materialize. She holds the chador tightly under her chin with one fist and keeps her stare toward the mountain. Eventually a battered orange Paykan taxi, belching thick black soot from its exhaust, stops, and the driver gruffly asks her destination through his half-opened window. The two chador-clad women seated in the back of the cab, their faces barely visible, stare straight ahead, their bodies stiff as mannequins.

“Abbasabad-e-Einedoleh,” she says loudly, turning away from the mountain for a moment and glancing at the women. “Khiaboon-e Iran.” Iran Street. The taxi driver grunts and accelerates without a word, leaving her standing on her corner. She sticks out her arm again, unconsciously waving her hand slowly in an up and down motion, and turns her gaze back to the mountain. Presently another taxi stops and the unkempt driver shouts at her, demanding her destination.

“It’s your lucky day,” he says in response, a little more politely. “I’m going downtown anyway.” She climbs into the back of the car and sits next to another woman, also fully enveloped in a black chador.

Give Hostages to Fortune

Lying in bed, I replayed the scene from earlier that day and wished that I’d answered Sheila’s blows with punches of my own, wished that I’d defended Mrs. Azam.

by Mehdi Tavana Okasi, Guernica

 

Image from Wikimedia via Antoin Sevruguin. Courtesy Guernica.

In the late fall of 1979, a fortune-teller moved into our house, seeking shelter from an abusive daughter, distraught over the whereabouts of her only son. Her name was Mrs. Azam and she came from a small town along the Caspian shore. That year, at her daughter’s behest, Mrs. Azam had locked up her house in Sari and left Iran for Boston to care for her colicky grandson—her very first. Two months later, sixty-six Americans were taken hostage in Tehran. Once the students overran the embassy, Mrs. Azam could not return, as she had planned, at the end of November. Her son, a student at the University of Tehran, went missing and despite calls to friends in the capital, no one could reach him. Her husband was long deceased and Mrs. Azam had no other blood relatives. That Mrs. Azam could no longer abide in America, my mother said, opened a gulf between mother and daughter. Unreasonably, Sheila claimed that Mrs. Azam had always loved her brother more. She was indignant that Mrs. Azam could so readily leave her only grandson. Their arguments quickly escalated; Sheila turned violent. It was then that Mrs. Azam called my mother in tears; there were the greatest lakes, she said, of blue and purple on her back, and arms, and legs.

I first saw Mrs. Azam at one of my parents’ weekend parties when our apartment was filled with Iranians, the men in suit jackets, the women in dresses, heavily perfumed and coiffed, the children in khakis and Polos, their hair brushed into obedience. She was the first Iranian I remember meeting who was old, the same age as my maternal grandmother, the one I was forced to speak to on the phone every Persian New Year with my mother beside me, dictating my utterances of love and longing for family I did not know or miss. People Mrs. Azam’s age rarely visited from Iran back then. Their children weren’t yet established to finance their parents’ travel. Unlike so many of their friends, my parents had moved to Boston in the late sixties, and were settled long before tides of Iranians arrived in the initial years of the Revolution, disoriented to an uncertain future. Like my parents, Sheila had moved to the United States a decade earlier; she’d married an American musician and had a blond-haired blue-eyed child, which was a great mystery. As a U.S. citizen, Sheila was able to secure the proper visa and pay for Mrs. Azam’s travel, however reluctant Mrs. Azam had been to leave Iran in the first place.

The Iranian unconscious

Is psychoanalysis possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran? This is the question that Gohar Homayounpour poses to herself, and to us, at the beginning of “Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran”; a memoir of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain.

by Christopher de Bellaigue, TLS

Freudian psychoanalysis may have lost ground in the West, but not, according to Gohar Homayounpour, in Tehran, where “today’s sexuality is still Freud’s sexuality”. Over the past five years of ushering patients on to her couch in the Iranian capital, Homayounpour has analysed more than enough Oedipus complexes and incestuous dreams to inspire this short, perky, Persian-hued homage. Indeed, as she notes, Freud’s sexual theories have a distinctive strain in Tehran, where the collective fantasy is “anchored in an anxiety of disobedience that wishes for an absolute obedience. The sons, while desiring to rebel, know unconsciously that if they do so they might get killed, and so in a way they settle for the fear of castration”.

Is Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran the novel that Homayounpour, as she tells us, promised her own father? The diary he recommended she write instead? We are never quite sure, but whatever the precise blend of fact and fiction, as the book advances and an agreeably varied selection of Tehranis troop through – a combative francophone painter; a butch lorry driver who is scared of the dark; someone’s moll who informs her, “I have a very analyzable character” – it becomes clear that Homayounpour’s literary goal is less to map the Freudian unconscious of her patients, their repressed wishes and memories, than to shine a light on a subject that interests her even more. The book, as she writes in her introduction, is “a note to myself”.

The author takes an original approach to the ruling theocracy: ignore it 

Much of what Homayounpour has to say about her own story, as an Iranian exile who returns home from America to find that she feels like a stranger, is interesting and revealing. There are a few awkward notes, such as her repeated low bows to eminent Freudians (“as Julia Kristeva tells us so elegantly”) and an ill-advised detour into literary criticism. Mostly, though, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran uses the interaction between analyst and patient to administer a laudable corrective to received wisdom. The image of Iran nurtured by most of our media consists of an unspeakable government bent on destroying Israel and repressing ordinary Iranians. This is not to say that the image is without truth – only that it is incomplete to the point of travesty. Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran features no nukes and Homayounpour’s account of her patients’ neuroses concedes little to cultural specificities. Hers is an original approach to the ruling theocracy: to ignore it. One foreign friend to whom she showed an early draft wondered where the ayatollahs were. “How about you change your title to Going Crazy in Tehran?”

Home Is Where They Let You Live

by Jasmin Darznik, NYTimes

“WHERE is your home?” the consular officer asked me. 

I was 13 years old. My parents and I had left Iran eight years earlier, at the onset of the 1979 revolution. Since then, they had bought a house and a business — a small roadside motel in California. I had gone to school and learned to speak English. Then, on a summer trip to visit my mother’s Iranian relatives in Germany, I made the mistake of calling America my home. 

The trouble started when my mother handed me the visa forms. My father had stayed behind to run the motel, and even though my mother had learned enough English to get by, at moments like this, when it was just the two of us, I was still the translator and all-purpose intermediary between “us” and “them.” I took the clipboard and began filling in the papers. My parents and I were in the United States legally, but since we’d traveled outside the country, my mother’s business visa would need to be renewed. It was standard procedure — we wouldn’t have encountered any difficulties if, under the line asking where our home was, I hadn’t written “America.” 

“Are you sure about that?” the officer asked me, her pen pointed at my adolescent cursive. When I nodded, she retreated to a back room. A few minutes later, she returned to inform us that our applications had been denied. We would not be able to return to America, because we had expressed an intention to stay in the country permanently. 

Looking back, the certainty of my response astonishes me. The Iranian revolution and the vagaries of immigration law had dispersed my relatives all over the world. By the time I faced that consular officer, I had cousins in Wisconsin, Stockholm, Istanbul and all points in between. During our time in Germany, my mother stayed up long into the night, reminiscing with my aunts and uncles about Iran and speculating about the country’s future — and the possibility of returning there someday. 

But by that time, I had spent several years distancing myself from the country then known as “Eyeran.” I had seen enough footage of the hostage crisis. I had been called a “smelly A-rab” at school, watched my mother get stared down in grocery shops on account of her accent and witnessed the sharp looks my veiled grandmother drew in the streets. I had quickly learned not to be Iranian in ways that showed.  I plucked my eyebrows, bleached my hair with Sun-In and hitched up my skirts. My accent was pure Valley girl, heavy on the “likes.” By summer’s end, I was desperate to get back to California. A visa was the only thing standing between me and the only country I cared to claim. 

Forbidden Peace

Foroutan, Aida. Forbidden Peace, A Long Poem in English, Published by Alfabet Maxima, Stockholm, Sweden

2003. - 79 s. ; 15 x 21 cm. ISBN 91-974418-4-8

Forbidden Peace is the story of the struggles, thoughts and perspectives of a child growing up in a climate of war: a child who, in spite of his own wishes, ideals and natural human desires, has to give in to the status quo. Yet he never for a moment stops believing in life and survival – in fact it makes him all the more determined to create a better world.

Forbidden Peace is a long poem written in a particular time frame. It opens in the voice of a mature man who has become exhausted by his struggles yet who still tries to continue his life journey, reflecting and speaking of his old dreams and the present reality. The narrator revisits his childhood, referring his questions to a ‘Mother’, who is someone who represents secure growth, pride and many other meanings. He tries to fathom out the words, and in doing so the very presence of the words, and other words which scarcely have any meaning left today, is juxtaposed with ‘Mother’ and ‘World Mother’. Having endured war and come to believe in death, he is determined to experience life – even though the conditions of life and survival are very hostile. He takes himself to another part of the world, and faces problems of a very different nature. The child has now come of age, yet he still continues with the questions of his childhood, even though he knows that there are no more answers to his questions. There are many words in many languages, for common concepts which are abandoned and deserted – a problem for all who are émigrés and in exile – and many words for what he has experienced, which have made him a weaker creature, in spite of his own strong being, because of his ignorance of those languages. He cannot blame anyone. He can only blame himself, realising that he has struggled in vain to create a world full of love and freedom. The final chapter addresses the future, in which the narrator paints a picture of the ideal world of his cherished beliefs, where his true home lies, a world beyond convention, where peace is not forbidden.

 

“Forbidden Peace”