Towards a Theory of Iranian American Life Writing

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. …