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Constructing Identity in Iranian-American Self-Narrative
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Shaped by the experiences of the Iranian Revolution, Iranian-American autobiographers use this chaotic past to tell their current stories in the United States. Wagenknecht analyzes a wide range of such writing and draws new conclusions about migration, exile, and life between different and often clashing cultures.
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Part I
Troubled Heritage: History and Religion in the Diasporic Reconstruction
Chapter 1
Explaining Departure: Narratives of Victimicy
In their endeavor to make sense of their lives and to bring their past and present into some sort of narrative coherence, Iranian diaspora subjects are faced particularly with one event that changed their lives abruptly and completely: the Iranian Revolution of 1979â81âand, in its wake, the autobiographersâ departures.
Anticipated by few foreign experts, this revolution had been a popular uprising against the then ruling Shah by a multitude of groups. Religious people, conservatives, socialists, Marxists, feminists, and the clergy alike joined forces for a limited time to oust the monarch. Considered a Western puppet, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was despised for his lavish spending and his imposing of Western values. While the country was growing richer, societyâs expectations grew faster and led to disenchantment with the Shahâs promises of social improvement; people from rural backgrounds flooded the cities in hope of a better life and formed a huge impoverished working class that saw nothing of the money that was made selling Iranâs oil reserves.
Before and during the revolution, royalists and those who were perceived to be sympathizing with the monarchy fled the country, along with cautious members of religious minorities who had enjoyed comparative freedom under the Shah and now feared persecution. These groups sometimes took vast amounts of assets with them, which enabled them to establish themselves abroad quickly. In the later days of the revolution, when the clergy under Khomeini started to gain more power, their once-allies and now political enemies started to opt for exile, adding a second wave to the already considerable number of Iranians in diaspora. This wave would continue throughout the IranâIraq war with young men dodging the draft and people migrating due to the bad economy well into the 1990s, when, under the more relaxed government of president Khamenei, it slowly abated.
No matter under what circumstances individual subjects came to be part of the Iranian diaspora in the United States, though: Leaving Iran is the one event that is key to their past and present. Life-changing, departure calls for an explanation, demands a central position in the subjectâs life narrative and the subjectâs positioning toward its politics. Of course, this plays out very differently for the first generation, who left Iran on their own account, and for the 1.5th and second generation, who did not have to make the momentous decision of leaving the home country. The first generation, then, has much more to come to terms with, has the burden of responsibility, which is why I will exemplarily analyze the narratives of Azar Nafisi, Nahid Rachlin, Farideh Goldin, Roya Hakakian, and Abbas Milani here. Autobiographers who had left earlier, like Mahmoud Sarram and Shahab Nahvi, seem not to experience the same guilt and focus much more on how they âmade itâ in the United States.
Not reading these self-narratives as ethnographic representations, I argue that it is the autobiographersâ very selection of themes that speaks for itself, as they comply with Jerome Brunerâs concept of âvictimicy:â âIf our Self-concept cannot be constructed by assembling and conceptualizing instances of our own agentive acts, then it can be constructed according to the same principle by attributing it to the agency of anotherâ (Bruner 1994:41, emphasis original). Iranian-American autobiographers cannot attribute their departure to their own volition, as the guilt of leaving oneâs home country in times of distress is considerable and can lead to questions of legitimacy regarding identity. Instead, I argue, they construct their narratives to show that their departure was forcedâby discrimination, misogynism, and oppressive traditionalism. As a result, the victimicy narrative becomes the sanctioned form of remembering departure in the Iranian diaspora and becomes a powerful definition of diasporic identity. What is more, such narratives of victimicy cater to neo-orientalist preconceptions of Iran as a fallen Oriental paradise, irrational and aggressive.
âThe stranger I had becomeââLosing Oneâs Identity in Revolutionary Iran
Strikingly, many autobiographers who lived through the revolution, the time leading up to it and the Islamic Republic afterward, narrate a loss of or forced change of identity, be it in a rather abstract way or even a feeling of losing their physical bodies. Representations of identities that become irrelevant or subjects that disappear are probably the most powerful tool of victimicy narratives. The authors are casting themselves as victims in order to come to terms with their departure from the home country and deflect their feelings of guilt, but also to evoke feelings of sympathy from their American readers.
Certainly one of the most vocal and outspokenâthough herself not uncriticizedâcritics of the Islamic Revolution (and the IRI) is Nafisi. She portrays the clergyâs rise to power as distinctly involving confiscation and theft of identity: âMy generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own countryâ (2004:76). As a result, the subject becomes past-less and its life and identity is no longer whole. Already in Iran, she is in exile and the act of emigration is only a fulfillment of what had already been done to her by the revolution and its leaders.
According to her, the gap in selfhood is filled by a new identity, which she describes as fictitious: âA stern ayatollah ( . . . ) had come to rule our land. He had come in the name of a past, a past that, he claimed, had been stolen from him. And he now wanted to re-create us in the image of that illusory pastâ (28). Nafisi rejects the mullahsâ interpretation of Iranâs past as shaped by Islam and refuses an Islamic identity as envisioned by the theocratic leaders. Arguing that the revolution has rendered her and others âirrelevantâ (150) and denies them individuality, she exemplifies this in the very beginning of her book by describing two pictures of her studentsâone veiled, one unveiled:
In the first there are seven women, standing against a white wall. They are, according to the law of the land, dressed in black robes and head scarves, covered except for the oval of their faces and their hands. In the second photograph the same group, in the same position, stands against the same wall. Only they have taken off their coverings. Splashes of color separate one from the next. Each has become distinct through the color and style of her clothes, the color and the length of her hair; not even the two who are still wearing their head scarves look the same. (4)
The âlaw of the land,â according to Nafisi, condemns women to lose their distinctive features, to lose their individuality. Looking all alike, they become a colorless and dark group. It is only in the privacy of their homes, where they are no longer victims of the clergyâs decrees, that they can exercise their personalities and become themselves.
While Nafisi is criticizing the theocratic regime, she also goes to great pains to âproveâ that her feelings are shared by pious Iranians, too. Her exhibits are, as everywhere in her novelistic memoir, her studentsâin this case, the two religious ones, Mahshid and Yassi, whose selves are shown to be turned inconsequential by the now-obligatory veil. Nafisi suggests that, having worn the headscarf already before the revolution, Mahshid may have been ostracized then, but that her sacrifice set her apart and gave her a voice and identity. However, with the revolution enforcing the garment, âher action became meaninglessâ (13), the veil ubiquitous, her identity as a voluntarily religious person invisible. Nafisi insinuates that the regime has taken away at least part of the relevance the headscarf had had for Mahshidâs self, making her religious self invisible and irrelevant instead of fostering it.
A little later, Nafisi writes about her student Yassi, whose religious family âfelt the Islamic Republic was a betrayal of Islam rather than its assertionâ (31). Yassi, too, is portrayed as being defined by the imposition of the veil following the revolution: âIt was like this veil that meant nothing to her anymore yet without which she would be lost. ( . . . ) She said she could not imagine a Yassi without a veilâ (32). Rather than obscuring just her hair, the veil seems to be obscuring Yassiâs personality and becomes the primary characteristic of her identity, even to herself. The rest of her self is, according to Nafisi, rendered irrelevant.
Nafisi stresses, though, that it is not the veil itself that she dislikesâindeed she mentions nostalgically her grandmotherâs chador (192)âbut the confiscation of her identity as an individual in favor of an Islamic ideal: âNo, ( . . . ) it was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become.â Not only is the transformation forceful, Nafisi describes Khomeini as âblindâ (165) and with that adds a layer of arbitrariness to the revolution. It is out of touch with the reality of normal, everyday Iranians and, as such, a fiction that has been forced into existence. Nafisi repeatedly underlines how she felt âfictionalâ during her time in the Islamic Republic. The author portrays herself as passive and victimized here; she feels âlightâ as her substance has been taken away from her, and her self has been âerasedâ (167). Her subjectivity seems to vanish, leaving only the pod of a woman as imagined by the theocracy.
The climax of Nafisiâs victimicy narrative is when she narrates how she starts to actively erase her self: âGradually, I pretended that when I wore the robe, my whole body disappeared: my arms, breasts, stomach and legs melted and disappeared and what was left was a piece of cloth the shape of my bodyâ (167f.). Marking a turn to inner exile, she presents herself as so completely dominated by the regime of the IRI that there is no other way but to fictionalize herself: âI decided to make my body invisible. The womanâs coarse hands were reverse X-rays that left only the surface intact and made the inside invisible. By the time she had finished inspecting me, I had become as light as the wind, a fleshless, boneless being.â Nafisi takes her narration of victimicy to the top by telling the reader how she, eventually, even questioned her own existence: âSometimes, almost unconsciously, I would withdraw my hands into my wide sleeves and start touching my legs or my stomach. ( . . . ) Do I exist?â (168).
Having reached the conclusion that she has been rendered irrelevant and thus has no agency within the Islamic Republic, Nafisi goes on to explain her reaction to the confiscation of her identities:
What do people who are made irrelevant do? They will sometimes escape, I mean physically, and if that is not possible, they will try to make a comeback, to become part of the game by assimilating the characteristics of their conquerors. Or they will escape inwardly and ( . . . ) turn their small corner into a sanctuary: the essential part of their life goes underground (169).
This self-victimization prepares for what follows in Nafisiâs memoir: her emigration to the United States and thus leaving Iran to the clergy. The logic of Nafisiâs narrative of victimicy is compelling: They took away my existence and identityâthatâs why I had to leave. Nafisi claims that the same holds true for many of her compatriots, both secular as well as religious. Narrating her story to a large extent through her studentsâ stories, however, she herself could be considered to be confiscating their lives and identities for her own politics.
But not only in Nafisiâs memoir do selves become irrelevant and even seem to disappear: Hakakian describes the attitude of the theocratic regime to its everyday subjects and their past as outright warfare: âTo cleanse the city of any lingering âdecadenceâ of the old monarchs, the imam declared the greatest jihad of all: the one against the âselfââ (2004:201). Similarly to Nafisi, Hakakian positions the revolution and its eventual leaders in direct opposition to individuality. She presents the situation as a Manichaean distinction between good and evilâthe Islamic revolutionaries being the enemy, of course: âA new line, invisible but terribly palpable, was drawn. On one side of it, they stood. On the other, we. ( . . . ) They began their speeches in the name of Allah. We began ours with good old God. They called themselves the âfaithful.â We called ourselves Iraniansâ (202). Hakakianâs âweâ here again insinuates that all ânormalâ Iranians, including the privately religious, have been subject to this new categorization. She fashions their individual identities to have been rendered void; all that matters now is the confrontation of ordinary Iranians against the thugs of the clergyâvictims and oppressors.
Like Nafisi, Hakakian seems to be of the opinion that ordinary Iranians have to shed the garments enforced by the revolution and the IRI in order to become individuals: âShe ( . . . ) stood up to take off her veil and scarf. I took off my scarf, too. And doing so, we peeled away the years to become âusâ againâ (217). In Hakakianâs construction, hidden beneath the layers of forced de-individualization are peopleâs ârealâ selves, which they can only exercise in the privacy of their homes.
These selves, however, are vulnerable: similarly to Nafisiâs game of making herself invisible, Hakakian narrates a distinct feeling of disappearing:
I felt lost, not in the city but inside my clothes. Under my uniform, I was a blur. Where had Roya gone? I stopped, opened the top buttons of my uniform, and peeked inside: Where am I? I saw only darkness, a cave that led to a pair of denim cuffs, faded blue suede shoes, and dirty asphalt. Somewhere under that musty blackness I was hidden. ( . . . ) I saw no sign of myself under the hardened shrouds. My body had atrophied (221).
Hakakianâs imagery is stark: not only does she feel lost and blurred, she does not see herself any more at all. Where she used to be, there is only blackness; her Islamic clothing is described as âshrouds.â Her whole being has vanished and her existence is only defined by her cerement of a veil. In the end, Hakakian has to acknowledge that not even her beloved Jewish studentsâ organization is the refuge she had thought it to be: âThe organization was not a bastion. It was a place where Jews gathered. It was a ghetto and therefore irrelevant. We were insignificant. ( . . . ) Deep in this day was a feeling of aging, not by growing, but by diminishingâ (ibid). The autobiographer portrays herselfâand, indeed, women with their veils and Jews that are restricted to âghettosââas irrelevant and disappearing in the hostile environment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Goldin constructs this environment as so hostile that she recognizes herself in the calf that her family sacrifices: âI felt as if my own body was being torn apart. ( . . . ) My mother made kabob for us, but I couldnât eat. It was cannibalism, eating my own flesh. My grandmother broke the legs with a hammer, took the hooves off, and made my favorite stew. My broken legs; I couldnât eatâ (2003:166). Again, a body is vanishing, yet this time in a much more violent fashion. Also, the ones shown to cause the body to disappear are not the revolutionary guards or the clergy, but the authorâs own family: For Goldin, what is wrong with her country are Iranâs traditional morals and values. Thus she depicts her own relatives as figuratively breaking her legs and taking away her freedom.
Goldin does not, like Nafisi and Hakakian, narrate her body becoming invisible, but she, too, constructs herself as disconnected from it. Like a stranger, she observes herself from the outside: âThis wasnât my life. I wasnât living inside my body. I watched myself from above, ( . . . ) an artificial smile on my lips, politely answering questions. Who was that woman? Was it really me?â (166). Goldin explains that, fighting to get outside a crowd that is both harassing her and shouting anti-American slogans, she understands that postrevolutionary Iran is changing her self: âBy breathing the hatred hanging in the air, by sharing the uneasiness surrounding me at the house and on the streets, I was being transformed into a person I didnât know and now didnât like.â She goes on to explain that this is the reason for her emigration: âI had to leave Iran soon in order to save myselfâ (183). So in Goldinâs construction, similarly to others, it is the forced change of her identity, the feeling of losing herself and being victimized that makes her leave.
The autobiographersâ approach of narrating tales of victimicy is understandable: The need to explain their departures from their home countryâin order to counter (their own) charges of disloyaltyâmakes them stress how Iran did not feel like home any more, but inauthentic, how they did not feel real and themselves, not even relevant any more. The resulting tales of being a stranger to oneself, of vanishing and dismembered bodies, of individual identities rendered irrelevant are instances of victimicy and mean to make migration the inevitable result. The guilt of having left is thus turned around and given entirely to those who made it impossible to stay after the revolution. What is more, such narratives of victimhood speak to American audiences and are meant to distance Iranian Americans from those who forced the diaspora abroad, thus creating a more positive image for the new ethnic group.
Jewish Victimicy Narratives
The Jewish Iranian group makes up for a considerable portion of the Iranian-American community (more than one-fifth in Bozorgmehr et al.âs 1991 study (137, table 5), whereas PAAIAâs 2011 poll reflects the lower percentage of 9 percent), as most Jews left Iran before the revolution or rather early on. As Shoshana Feher suggests, it might either have been this collective experience of âexodusâ that has led to their increased cohesion, or it might have been their ties to the American-Jewish community. At any rate, Jewish Iranian Americans in some respects form their own subgroup, but often construct their identities in similar ways.
For Jewish authors Goldin and Hakakian, the revolution is inextricably linked with a rise in anti-Semitic sentiments, about which they reflect extensively. Yet their approaches are diametrically opposed: Hakakian conceives of the situation in Shah-time Iran as a dream come true, only to be completely destroyed by the revolution. Jewish Iranians, in her narrative, are integrated in society, but then start to be victimized. Goldin, while also acknowledging the destructive force of the revolution in particular for the Jewish population, sees the grievances in Iranian society more as a result of beliefs and customs deeply engrained in societyâs texture. These conservative values and anti-Jewish sentiments are, in her construction, only rekindled by revolutionary religious fervor.
The differences in these two memoirs showcase the heterogeneity of the Iranian Jewish community at...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Introduction
- Part IÂ Â Troubled Heritage: History and Religion in the Diasporic Reconstruction
- Part IIÂ Â Language, Body, and the Iranian-American Self
- Part IIIÂ Â Culture Inherited/In Flux
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index