Laetitia Nanquette
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5 THE GLOBAL CIRCULATION OF AN 10 IRANIAN BESTSELLER 15 20 Laetitia Nanquette QA: MSK COLL: MM University of New South Wales, Australia 25 ..................Memoirs by Iranian women in the diaspora have long been the standard reading for western readers interested in Iran. However, The Book of Fate bestseller by Parinoush Saniee, a popular novel newly translated into English and circulation many other European languages, interpolates both the orientalist discourse 30 memoirs offer and the Iranian memoirs industry. The translation of this Iranian literature Iranian text with a feminist Islamic discourse inserts the book into a global literary field context that allows the perception of Iran to impact on western stereotypes. Assisted by its writer, literary agent, translator and publisher, it also has the 35 postcolonial agency, a ‘distributed agency’ to interpolate the dominant system of translation publishing and circulation. My methodology is a combination of close reading, postcolonial theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the literary ................. field, which I adapt to the Iranian and English-speaking context. I analyse 40 the publishing processes in Iran and in English-speaking countries, the book covers, the reception of major literary awards, commercial success, and critical reception (critics, media attention, reviews by general readers on websites such as Amazon and Goodreads). 45 50 ....................................................................................................... interventions, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2016.1191960 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 55 ............................interventions 2 What comes to mind to general readers if they are asked to name some texts of 60 Iranian literature? Perhaps works of classical Persian poetry or, more likely, memoirs written in English by writers of Iranian origin, such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Since the 2000s, women of Iranian origin have written many autobiographies directly in English and published 65 them in English-speaking countries. There is diversity among diasporic memoirs, but many are tailored to the interests of an Anglophone audience and play a role as cultural documents. They describe life in Iran both before the Islamic revolution and during its turbulent days, as well as the war with 70 Iraq and the process of adapting to a new western country. In recent years, however, a new kind of Iranian literature has made its appearance in English translation: contemporary bestsellers translated from the Persian. One significant example is The Book of Fate, translated in 75 1 1 Another example is 2013 (Saniee 2002; Saniee and Khalili 2013). Written by a woman, it Kimya Khatun, describes the life of a strong fictional woman, a religious but unconventional translated into English in 2012 character. Not only has it been successful in Iran in terms of sales, but it has (Ghods 2004; Ghods also become a cultural phenomenon within Iranian society. Although not 80 and Phillips 2012). endowed with the cultural prestige of literary prizes, it has been talked about in literary fora, including prestigious ones like Bokhara, and become part of a discourse on the state of Iranian society. It is also one of the Iranian bestsellers that has had the widest circulation and success globally. 85 Why is this book narrating the life journey of a woman married to a commu- nist activist significant? What does its circulation tell us about the movement of ideas and characters and about the book market globally? I will concentrate fi on translations into English, which are the most signi cant in a cultural world 90 where English is the hyper-central language (Heilbron 1999), but The Book of 2 The Book of Fate Fate has been translated into many other European and non-European has been translated languages.2 into German, Italian, Norwegian, The rules that govern literary exchanges in Iran and in English-speaking 95 Bulgarian, countries are quite different, and this difference leads to a displacement of Romanian, Polish, the Iranian text with familiar western discourses, especially with western fem- Finnish, Hungarian, inism, when it becomes globally distributed. The book’s global circulation is Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, Japanese, linked to several factors. First, this bestseller by an Iranian woman writer 100 Turkish and Spanish; builds on the familiarity constructed among the western readership on Iran translations are in by diasporic memoirs. Second, it benefits from an exhaustion of the stereo- preparation in Arabic, Kurdish and types depicted by diasporic memoirs, as its portrays a different Iranian Macedonian. After woman and engages in a global discourse on feminism, offering an alternative 105 some interest in a Islamic version of it as: ‘A movement to sever patriarchy from Islamic ideals translation from the Persian, the French and sacred texts and to give voice to an ethical and egalitarian vision of publisher Robert Islam can and does empower Muslim women from all walks of life to make Laffont eventually dignified choices’ (Mir-Hosseini 2006, 645). Third, it benefits from Iran’s published in 2015 a 110 THE GLOBAL CIRCULATION OF AN IRANIAN BESTSELLER ............................3 Laetitia Nanquette translation from the entering the global market due to the increasing professionalization of the English, with an Iranian literary field. 115 exotic veiled woman fi on the cover different Most signi cant, perhaps, the circulation of this bestseller demonstrates from the English and how a subaltern point of view on feminism, one based on the values of other editions. Islamic feminism and insisting on the idea that Islam is compatible with fem- inism, has the agency to interpolate, to use Bill Ashcroft’s term, dominant 120 systems of publication and circulation as well as the potential to transform western expectations of Muslim women. Ashcroft helpfully reminds us that Gayatri Spivak’s ‘phrase “the subaltern cannot speak” need not imply that the subaltern is silenced and has no voice whatsoever. Rather it suggests that 125 the voice of the subaltern does not exist in some space outside the dominant discourse’ (Ashcroft 2001,46).Inthiscase,theIranianwoman’s voice has to situate herself vis-à-vis the dominant discourse of feminism, and she ‘must insert that text into the western-dominated systems of publishing, distri- 130 bution and readership’ (48–49). The book’s distributed agency comes from a combination of writer, agent, translator and publisher that disrupts the genre of writing by and about a Muslim woman. Helped by its agents, this text by a subaltern writer gets an agency that other Iranian texts, 135 especially the ones written directly in European languages, might not achieve. In addition to this postcolonial framework, Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the fi literary eld is crucial to my understanding of the circulation of The Book of 140 Fate in the world of letters. Bourdieu (1996) shows that literary practices are constituted in a set of agents (authors, critics, publishers and so on) and of rules. These form a specific literary space, in which the battle for hegemony fl fi and authority is ongoing. Re ecting on the forces of the literary eld both 145 within Iran and in English-speaking countries will help to understand the dynamics of power at stake. Before studying The Book of Fate and its circulation, it is essential to situate the context of Iranian writings in English-speaking countries, which very 150 much equates to memoirs written in English. They are the primary reference and element of comparison to understand the circulation of texts from Iran in western countries. Indeed, Iranian diaspora memoirs have become a book industry in themselves, as evidenced by the hundreds of books published as 155 well as the critical discourse surrounding them, both for lay and academic readers. 160 Diasporic Iranian Memoirs: Tapping into an Anglo-American Imaginary With the exception of a couple of canonical works, Iranian texts translated from the Persian have never sold well; modern highbrow texts have had 165 ............................interventions 4 3 3 Exceptions of very little circulation. What English-speaking readers have been reading highbrow texts which about Iran in recent decades are memoirs by writers of Iranian origin, 170 were bestsellers in Iran are Savushun by mostly women, written in European languages, particularly in English (Grass- Simin Daneshvar ian 2013; Fotouhi 2015; Rahimieh and Karim 2008). A prominent example is (Daneshvar and Zand Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), which was a bestseller in the 1992) and poetry United States: it received enthusiastic reviews, sold almost a million copies, 175 collections by Forough Farrokhzad was a primary reading book in North American book clubs, and spent (Farrokhzad and seventy weeks on the New York Times bestseller list (Burwell 2014, 135). Wolpe 2007). The book also propelled Nafisi to prominence as a public figure. These kinds of memoirs primarily portray life in Iran before the Islamic revolution 180 and during the turmoil of the revolution, as well as adaptation to a new country (the United States, Canada, a Western European country, and more recently Australia). The narrators usually belong to the elite or the upper middle class, sometimes to religious minorities. They have endured difficult 185 times, been subjected to social downgrading, and are bitter about the new regime and an Iran that they no longer recognize. These texts,